Reddit tightens rules around abuse and offensive content

Reddit is introducing stricter rules against online harassment and offensive content. The new rules make it easy to report and close abusive posts and subreddits. Reddit immediately shut down some subforums.

The new rules came into effect last night. According to Reddit, it is necessary to draw up new policies because the company has too often not acted on objectionable content due to the old policy. The social network says it relies primarily on users of the site for content moderation, who must indicate when content is objectionable. The new rules are said to have been introduced following community feedback.

The new policy includes a new definition of the word ‘harassment’. According to Reddit, that was always a systematic and ongoing process where people would feel threatened in their real lives as well. However, the new definition also includes online harassment, for example by constantly harassing someone, by stalking someone on the website or by inducing others to do so. According to Reddit, these are “acts that discourage a reasonable person from using Reddit.” The company also makes it easier to report abuse to Reddit itself. Until now, only a victim could indicate this himself. Now other users in a community can do that too. This should lower the threshold for reporting abuse.

In addition, Reddit will use machine learning to learn which content is or is not offensive. It is trained on the basis of human input. The automated system is not supposed to look for offensive content itself. Reddit prefers that such content be prioritized by the moderators; AI can help with that. The company also states that algorithms never on their own will ban or take users, subreddits or posts offline. There is still a human employee involved.

With the new policy, Reddit wants to deliberately set less rigidly defined rules for exactly what it means by abuse. A lot of trolls on the website always made sure they were operating exactly within those rules, which made it difficult to act against them. The new rules apply to individual users as well as entire communities. To back it up, Reddit has immediately banned the controversial subreddit /r/Braincels. Some other smaller subreddits have also been banned.