Reddit Are Cracking Down on Violence & Hate

Reddit / Facebook

Compared to other social media sites, Reddit is pretty chilled-out about restricting stuff and controlling what users post. Former CEO of the site Yishan Wong, who resigned in 2014, had intended Reddit be a open platform where "You choose what to post, you choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create.”

However, since Reddit's popularity has grown over the years - there's now almost 542 million monthly users - there have been controls and restrictions put in place, such as quarantining rooms and subreddits, to make the site less likely to offend.

Now, Reddit are stepping it up on removing hate and offensive content on their site. Earlier this week, Reddit admin landoflobsters released a post titled "Update on site-wide rules regarding violent content", which explained how they "will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise, we will also take action against content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals."

Reddit users quickly saw that subreddits surrounding white-supremists, Nazis, and other hate-groups had been banned, including r/Nazi and r/whitesarecriminals. However discussion rose in the comments debating why some subreddits are getting banned and others aren't, for example, r/watchpeopledie wasn't being banned, despite being reviewed.

The post continued in saying, "We understand that enforcing this policy may often require subjective judgment, so all of the usual caveats apply with regard to content that is newsworthy, artistic, educational, satirical, etc, as mentioned in the policy. Context is key."

While 'context is key', it makes me wonder in what context 'r/watchpeopledie' is acceptable...Reddit say that hunting and BDSM communities and news about violence and death will "not be impacted by this policy,", so it all seems like a bit of a confusing mish-mash about what's being banned and what isn't at this stage.

A Reddit spokesperson told Buzzfeed "we strive to be a welcoming, open platform for all by trusting our users to maintain an environment that cultivates genuine conversation"

Source