Reddit Bans Communities That Promote Hate

Reddit the popular American news aggregator is acting on hateful content that is being shared through its forums. It announced that subreddits (forums on Reddit) and users promoting hate based on identity and vulnerability will be banned.

The Policymaking

With Black Lives Matter protests ramping up, several Reddit forums went dark temporarily, protesting the company’s ignorance towards hurtful racial content being shared on the site. Reddit came up with policy changes in response to this.

Reddit’s new policy begins with a first rule that requires users to “consider the human.” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said that the company’s goal is to bring a sense of belonging to everybody in the world. Users should feel encouraged to come forward and share their views. Mitigating hateful content is a progressive step in that direction.

Major Changes

Back in June, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian stepped down from the company's board and urged that he should be replaced by a black candidate.

The company has since named Michael Seibel, the CEO of Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, as the first black board member in Reddit's history.

For social networks, announcing new policies is the easy part, but enforcing them is the bigger challenge. Reddit said its enforcement will include "asking you nicely to knock it off," temporarily or permanently suspending accounts, adding restrictions to communities, and removing content.

Taking Action on High Profile Communities

Source: npr

Acting on this new policy, Reddit banned about 2000 subreddits, including "The_Donald," a popular community supportive of President Donald Trump, where users often shared racist, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and conspiracy content.

This forum was created in June 2015, as a place for following the news related to Donald Trump during his presidential run. But it quickly changed its form. From a straightforward political community, it became an authoritarian space full of memes and inside-jokes, and anti-liberal ideologists. 
It became one of the most powerful and influential websites in America.

It gained political spotlight too when Trump's official Twitter account frequently started tweeting memes and videos that originally circulated on the subreddit. However, Trump’s campaign covered it up saying he found them only after other twitter users circulated them.

Reddit issued several warnings and changed the forum’s moderators. In 2019, it even "quarantined" the forum, meaning people visiting the subreddit would see a warning message before accessing it and the forum's posts would not appear in search. Moderators of r/The_Donald created a backup website outside of Reddit in response to this.

Ultimately this June 29th , Reddit banned The Donald on the grounds of frequent rule-breaking and for antagonizing other communities. Reddit said that the forum has failed to meet their “most basic expectations”.

Other Social Media Platforms

Many social media platforms are also taking a stronger stance against controversial content, especially posted by Trump and his apparent supporters.

Twitter has increasingly been flagging Trump's tweets. Snapchat said it would no longer promote Trump's account on its platform. Twitch also announced that it would suspend an account belonging to the Trump campaign.

Written by: Saija Bhumireddy

Edited by: Anusha Vajha