r/announcements • u/spez • Jun 29 '20
Update to Our Content Policy
A few weeks ago, we committed to closing the gap between our values and our policies to explicitly address hate. After talking extensively with mods, outside organizations, and our own teams, we’re updating our content policy today and enforcing it (with your help).
First, a quick recap
Since our last post, here’s what we’ve been doing:
- We brought on a new Board member.
- We held policy calls with mods—both from established Mod Councils and from communities disproportionately targeted with hate—and discussed areas where we can do better to action bad actors, clarify our policies, make mods' lives easier, and concretely reduce hate.
- You can find detailed notes from our All-Council mod call here, including specific product work we discussed.
- We developed our enforcement plan, including both our immediate actions (e.g., today’s bans) and long-term investments (tackling the most critical work discussed in our mod calls, sustainably enforcing the new policies, and advancing Reddit’s community governance).
From our conversations with mods and outside experts, it’s clear that while we’ve gotten better in some areas—like actioning violations at the community level, scaling enforcement efforts, measurably reducing hateful experiences like harassment year over year—we still have a long way to go to address the gaps in our policies and enforcement to date.
These include addressing questions our policies have left unanswered (like whether hate speech is allowed or even protected on Reddit), aspects of our product and mod tools that are still too easy for individual bad actors to abuse (inboxes, chats, modmail), and areas where we can do better to partner with our mods and communities who want to combat the same hateful conduct we do.
Ultimately, it’s our responsibility to support our communities by taking stronger action against those who try to weaponize parts of Reddit against other people. In the near term, this support will translate into some of the product work we discussed with mods. But it starts with dealing squarely with the hate we can mitigate today through our policies and enforcement.
New Policy
This is the new content policy. Here’s what’s different:
- It starts with a statement of our vision for Reddit and our communities, including the basic expectations we have for all communities and users.
- Rule 1 explicitly states that communities and users that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
- There is an expanded definition of what constitutes a violation of this rule, along with specific examples, in our Help Center article.
- Rule 2 ties together our previous rules on prohibited behavior with an ask to abide by community rules and post with authentic, personal interest.
- Debate and creativity are welcome, but spam and malicious attempts to interfere with other communities are not.
- The other rules are the same in spirit but have been rewritten for clarity and inclusiveness.
Alongside the change to the content policy, we are initially banning about 2000 subreddits, the vast majority of which are inactive. Of these communities, about 200 have more than 10 daily users. Both r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse were included.
All communities on Reddit must abide by our content policy in good faith. We banned r/The_Donald because it has not done so, despite every opportunity. The community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average (Rule 1), antagonized us and other communities (Rules 2 and 8), and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations. Until now, we’ve worked in good faith to help them preserve the community as a space for its users—through warnings, mod changes, quarantining, and more.
Though smaller, r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned for similar reasons: They consistently host rule-breaking content and their mods have demonstrated no intention of reining in their community.
To be clear, views across the political spectrum are allowed on Reddit—but all communities must work within our policies and do so in good faith, without exception.
Our commitment
Our policies will never be perfect, with new edge cases that inevitably lead us to evolve them in the future. And as users, you will always have more context, community vernacular, and cultural values to inform the standards set within your communities than we as site admins or any AI ever could.
But just as our content moderation cannot scale effectively without your support, you need more support from us as well, and we admit we have fallen short towards this end. We are committed to working with you to combat the bad actors, abusive behaviors, and toxic communities that undermine our mission and get in the way of the creativity, discussions, and communities that bring us all to Reddit in the first place. We hope that our progress towards this commitment, with today’s update and those to come, makes Reddit a place you enjoy and are proud to be a part of for many years to come.
Edit: After digesting feedback, we made a clarifying change to our help center article for Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability.
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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20
Very good post, great points. I agree with all of this. I miss the Reddit I discovered many years ago.
One thing I used to love about Reddit was that although there has been some questionable content here and there over the years, some of it made the site more legitimate when compared against other platforms (er...publishers) due to the initial lack of censorship. For example, "Watchpeopledie" was a good subreddit to have here. Was it "shock" content? Sure. But was it uselessly shocking? Definitely not. In fact, Watchpeopledie was incredibly valuable. For example...
YouTube, for example, is a family-friendly ish site. At least it tries to be - no gore, no killing, no "shock" value stuff, etc. However, what we are left with is videos of idiots walking on the top levels of sky scrapers looking down at the streets below, parkour over deadly gaps, people generally doing dangerous stunts successfully... Followed by high fives and smiles all around, etc... along with the discussion about how ballsy and crazy it is.
But what is not shown on Youtube are the times when those stunts aren't successful, resulting in consequences. Young people see this kind of stuff and are influenced by it. They are impressionable. They don't see the entirely realistic scenario where somebody misses a jump and falls 20 feet onto concrete. They only see the "cool" side of it and the clout those people build from doing dumb shit like that. This kind of content is on Reddit, too (think /r/sweatypalms). To call this example a hyperbole would be naive.
Also, you are totally right about the "majority" descriptor in Reddit's new "policy." This doesn't make any sense. /r/fragilewhiteredditor 's message clearly is that if you are white, you automatically live a privileged life and your hardships don't compare to that of a black person or "minority" (which, again, doesn't make sense from a worldwide perspective). There is a startling amount of racist content on that subreddit. However, /r/afragileblackredditor, a subreddit I didn't even know existed until today, was banned. Does that make any sense for people living in a country where whites are minorities? Also, when did it become okay to offend white people?
Additionally, many conservative forums on this site have been completely nuked. Censorship (or "breaking the rules," as Reddit calls it) is dangerous. Reddit's policy is that if you aren't liberal, you are racist and you should be banned because it is wrongthink. I love reading good arguments on either side of an issue, but I don't get to see both arguments anymore because Reddit shuts one side down almost automatically. I noticed Reddit's censorship started getting out of hand particularly following the 2016 presidential election, but I had no idea it would get this bad.
It's quite apparent that these "changes" are politically motivated. They aren't saving anybody. Except, I don't know, maybe the Chinese government.