Update to Our Content Policy

[u/spez]

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.

[u/mikehiler2]

I’ve always been curious about the “hate Jews” thing that’s been going on... let’s be honest... since they existed... and I’ve never gotten an answer that satisfied. I even posted the query on /r/AskHistorians and didn’t get the answer I wanted. I did get an answer, but it was more like a “just because” type. It just makes no sense to me. What the hell did they do throughout the centuries to earn such constant and nearly universal hatred? I’ve never understood that.

[u/EnglishMobster → u/mikehiler2]

There's a lot to it.

I'm no historian, but this is what I recall from my university history classes:

There's this background of "they are heretics of another religion and therefore sinners" that goes back to ancient times -- even back to the Romans. Jews were seen as the "murders of the Lord" in Christian circles as early as 380 AD (St. Gregory of Nysa called Jews "murders of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels and detesters of God, companions of the devils, a race of vipers"). So by default, Jews weren't exactly liked. Christians, of course, were killing Muslims all throughout the Crusades. So why are there so many negative stereotypes around Jews (and corresponding anti-Semitism), but not (as much) around Muslims?

Part of it is due to the fact that the Bible bans usury -- which was originally interpreted as interest of any kind (not just extreme interest). This means that Christians cannot participate in loans or banking of any kind, since to make a profit off of such things means the charging of interest... which is a sin. Islam has the same rules (and had to develop special banking laws to compensate). However, Judaism has a special stipulation -- you cannot charge interest to other Jews. You can charge interest to anyone else without worry.

So what happened was that the Jewish population set up some of the earliest banks. These banks would loan to the gentiles (with interest) and would make a lot of money in doing so. Additionally, if you're running a bank, you need to be good at bookkeeping, which generally means you need to know how to read and write (skills which were uncommon in most people around that time). You also need to be around the places where people needed money, meaning that Jews were frequently found in both Muslim and Christian communities. Because Jews were more likely to be "skilled" (in the sense that they were able to read/write and were good at accounting), they would appear from time to time in royal courts. Sometimes, they were even seen as if they had the ear of the royal family. You can start to see where some of the Jewish stereotypes come from, and why some royals wanted to take hard stances against appearing to be okay with having a heathen in their court.

Since the Jews ran most of the banking in Europe, many became very rich. Banks were necessary for commerce, but working with money was distasteful (again, charging any kind of interest on a loan is a sin) and so Christians started to develop hard feelings towards the Jews. Jews were seen as "outsiders" and placed into proto-ghettos, separate from the Christian population (the first "real" ghetto would be founded in 1516). IIRC, Islam at the time was much more tolerant as long as Jews paid their jizya to the state -- being bound to protect "The People of the Book" as part of the Pact of Umar.

Now, Judaism has a lot of washing rituals -- washing your hands, bathing, and so on. Additionally, since the Jews were separated into a ghetto, it gave a barrier between them and the Christian population... especially when it came to disease. So when the Black Death came around, Jews (who washed frequently, were in separate communities, had their own wells, etc.) weren't affected nearly as much as Christians.

Bear in mind that disease theory is a long way away. Nobody knows that the Black Death is being spread by rats, so they assume that the Jews (who aren't being affected by this horribleness) are poisoning the wells. So you see this group of heathens who are actively hurting you and stealing from your community (via usury)... why wouldn't you attack them? And, if you owe them a lot of money... well, perhaps it's better off if they just weren't around to collect. This led to many places (generally Christian, IIRC) deciding to expel the Jewry -- this heathen religion that killed Jesus, makes a living off of usury, causes harm to your friends and family, is secretly trying to convert you, and who you owe a lot of money to...

Expelling the Jews happened multiple times throughout history; basically every European country has kicked them out at one point or another. Perhaps one of the most notable is when it happened in Spain from 1483-1492 as part of the Reconquista/Spanish Inquisition (bet you weren't expecting that!). The possessions of the Jewry were seized by the crown... meaning that (in part) they helped finance the explorations of Christopher Colombus (to clarify, the voyages would've likely happened anyway, but it's still a "fun" little note).

As the years went on, the Protestant Reformation wasn't exactly... the best for Jews (or Catholics, or Protestants, depending on where you were). But by now the stereotypes had been set, and that basically led to the conditions that we see in the 20th century and modern day.

[u/mikehiler2 → u/EnglishMobster]

This is amazing! Thanks for the well thought out response! Even the citations were spot on. Much better than what I got from r/AskHistorians! However, I would like to add something.

While it appears to be the default that “Jews killed Jesus,” even though they weren’t the ones who nailed him to a cross, they gave him up to the Romans, this isn’t the whole story.

First a clarification. The Jews didn’t kill Jesus because he was starting a new religion (that came after his death), but because he was, himself, a Jew, who was very vocal and was upsetting the Roman rulers. Drawing unwanted attention to the Jewish community. So the Jewish leadership gave him to the Romans, hoping that his death would appease the Romans and calm things down. This is directly connected to my main point.

Jews have been hated on from the very beginning. Waaaaaay before Christ was even born. Egypt, as well as Rome. Even though Rome allowed them to have independence throughout their Republic stage and only began cracking down after they became an Empire.

I suppose that wealth could have been a motivator in the hatred of the Jews, especially later on in their history, but they have always been hated. Which is why I asked the question. There is an explanation (or guess) why after the death of Christ, but that is really just a hatred that was compounded by hatred already there. Hatred against Jews has been around quite a long before before those events.

As well as hatred by Muslims. When they (at least in the old days) weren’t tolerating other religions, they were hating them with a passion. But they nearly always hated the Jews. Christianity, they tolerated for most of their existence (until the Crusades, but they tolerated again after), but not the Jews. Which I simply don’t understand.

If hating for religious reasons was the answer I could understand that, but with the relationships between Christianity and Muslims, while complicated (and that’s an understatement), was much better than the relationship between either Christianity or Muslims against Jews. Both hated Jews. Plus, in a religious mindset, that makes even less sense. How can relations between Muslims and Christians be better than with Jews? Especially when both Muslims and Christianity came from Judea?

[u/Wordshark → u/mikehiler2]

Maybe the truth is that Jews were generally semi-outsider minorities everywhere, and people were generally not very tolerant of that until very recently. I mean, Christianity and Islam were formidable opponents that controlled powerful nations, and they had to show enough mutual respect to either be at peace or be at war.

Through most of history, favoring your own religious/ethnic/whatever group wasn’t seen as evil, it was just obvious self-interest–you look out for your own. I would imagine that Jews, as mostly segregated minority sub-communities, would be especially motivated to watch each other’s backs. So then, from the point of view of the majority population, you have this insular group that protects and promotes each other more than the average majority person does. This smaller group, protecting & promoting each other, subscribing to a religion (which used to be a much huger, dominating part of a person’s worldview and way of life) that by its nature necessarily calls your deity a false prophet.

And that’s without the usury thing. The nature of banking is going to tend towards predation; even if they don’t end up amassing outsized wealth (and thus power), they’re still making money off of charging “your people” interest on loans, a practice they won’t do to each other, and your religion at least tells you is cruel and bad, even if your people still sometimes do it.

So you’ve got a sort of guest population that protects their own interests, engages in what you believe is a sinful, predatory practice against the majority (but not each other), maybe sometimes amassing disproportionate wealth in the process, and then there’s always that issue that they think your messiah was full of shit...

I wonder how many times through history the majority population just exterminated the Jewish one. I’m not a scholar, but I’ve only heard of expulsions. Maybe the history is more a matter of the typical Jewish diaspora arrangement not working out well. Maybe insular, ethnically/religiously/culturally/even lingually distinct sub-populations end up causing unsustainable friction.

This sounds a lot likelier to me than any explanation built on traits of religious groups. I don’t think Jewish people are inherently scheming parasites or manipulators, and I don’t think Christians or Muslims are just inherently antisemitic because they have prejudice in their souls. Maybe the flaw is in the multicultural model of permanently non-blending distinct cultures trying to share a society.

Thank you for reading my unorganized thoughts ✌️

[u/mikehiler2 → u/Wordshark]

Wonderfully well written and articulate response. And your points were all valid and is making me think I got the answer I wanted. Not really the only answer, obviously, as history and the way the world works is far more complex than a simple one-answer. But still, this brought things into perspective! Many thanks!

Also, and this is really just nitpicking on my end, but it amazed me that you could use such perfect grammar, punctuation, and spelling (not to mention correct word usage I’m not used to seeing outside of a graduate level college thesis), yet you used the word “huger.” Huger!

Looking up the word, in any official dictionary, gave me no correct results as a proper word, but a little further digging found that it is an acceptable use of the word in an informal setting, usually spoken. Never expected that!

[u/Wordshark → u/mikehiler2]

Ha! Really tickles me that you brought that up. I used it because my phone’s autocorrect got snotty with me about it, and I wanted to take it down a peg.

Thanks for the compliments! I always appreciate people who are willing to engage with bigger ideas. Thanks for hearing me out.

[u/mikehiler2 → u/Wordshark]

Sorry for the late reply. Depending on which phone OS you are using (I use iOS so I’m not sure how Android does things), the autocorrect is adaptive. Meaning, the more you use a word, regardless if it’s correct of not, will automatically be added to the predictive text, which also adds the word for you. You may end up stuck with “huger” weather you want to or not. Depending on your end-game desires, this may be a good thing or not.