Reddit says it’s ramping up its fight against hate speech. Since rolling out its new content policies on June 29th, the platform has banned nearly 7,000 subreddits for hateful content. While the company admits it has more work to do, it says it’s encouraged by an 18 percent drop in users posting hateful content.
“While I would love that number to be 100 percent, I’m encouraged by the progress,” writes Reddit user u/worstnerd, a member of the company’s Safety team.
The progress is part of a sea change at Reddit after the site introduced new policies that explicitly ban hate speech and promised to enforce them rigorously. Reddit has long been criticized for tolerating racist and misogynistic content, with the site’s executives defending its position as upholding free speech. In the past, that has meant tolerating communities that shared stolen nude photos, or videos of domestic violence, or promoted ideologies like white nationalism.
As part of its new stance, Reddit says it will be studying the spread of hate speech on the site more closely. Prior to the “ban wave” that began in June, the company says approximately 40,000 potentially hateful pieces of content were shared each day, making up around 0.2 percent of all content. These posts, comments, and messages accumulated some 6.47 million views or around 0.16 percent of total daily views. The company did not say how these figures had changed as a result of the ban wave.
While Reddit now claims it’s committed to cleaning things up, it’s also reminding everyone how difficult that can be.
“Defining hate at scale is fraught with challenges. Sometimes hate can be very overt, other times it can be more subtle,” the company wrote in a report. In other words, “people are weirdly creative about how to be mean to each other.”
Of course, hateful content isn’t the only thing preventing Reddit from being a safe space. It also has the challenge of hackers, like those who recently defaced dozens of Reddit communities with pro-Trump messages.
