In case you missed the billboards, blog posts, and AMAs, we’re doing our best to encourage people on and off Reddit to vote this year. Along with our Up the Vote campaign and ongoing security and safety work to guard against shenanigans, we’ve also been evolving how we handle another important aspect of the election process: political ads.
Political ads have been a relatively quiet part of Reddit for many years. Last year, in thinking through what the right balance was between unfettered political ads and prohibiting them altogether for 2020 (both approaches that other platforms have taken), we decided on a policy we felt was the best approach for Reddit: no misinformation, human review of the ads and where they link, a subreddit listing all political ads (r/RedditPoliticalAds), and a requirement to keep comments on for 24 hours.
Since debuting this policy earlier this year, the last condition (requiring comments to remain on) has enabled redditors to discuss political ads—providing more context in the comments and even offering counterarguments—but so far it’s only been lightly used. As we get closer to November, however, the prominence of and discussion around political ads will increase, and, with it, the need for a clear moderation system for these comments.
As I mentioned a couple months back, unmoderated spaces on Reddit are an area we want to improve, from Modmail to PM’s, and political ads pose a unique challenge.
If the OP of a political ad (i.e., a campaign) moderates the comments, it’s problematic: they might remove dissenting perspectives. And if we (the admins) moderate the comments of a political ad, it’s even more problematic, putting us in the position of either moderating too much or too little, with inevitable accusations of bias either way.
The problem, we realized, is similar to what we see in r/announcements: lots of people commenting on a highly visible post outside the context of a community. It’s fair to say that r/announcements isn’t really a community; it lacks the culture, cohesion, and moderation that benefit most other subreddits, and as a result, the quality of conversation has deteriorated as the audience has grown.
Ultimately, conversations really only happen in the context of a community, and neither r/announcements nor political ads with comments on provide this. We believe we can foster better discussion on both with a different approach.
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).
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.
This is the new content policy. Here’s what’s different:
TL;DR: We’re working with mods to change our content policy to explicitly address hate. u/kn0thing has resigned from our board to fill his seat with a Black candidate, a request we will honor. I want to take responsibility for the history of our policies over the years that got us here, and we still have work to do.
After watching people across the country mourn and demand an end to centuries of murder and violent discrimination against Black people, I wanted to speak out. I wanted to do this both as a human being, who sees this grief and pain and knows I have been spared from it myself because of the color of my skin, and as someone who literally has a platform and, with it, a duty to speak out.
Earlier this week, I wrote an email to our company addressing this crisis and a few ways Reddit will respond. When we shared it, many of the responses said something like, “How can a company that has faced racism from users on its own platform over the years credibly take such a position?”
These questions, which I know are coming from a place of real pain and which I take to heart, are really a statement: There is an unacceptable gap between our beliefs as people and a company, and what you see in our content policy.
Over the last fifteen years, hundreds of millions of people have come to Reddit for things that I believe are fundamentally good: user-driven communities—across a wider spectrum of interests and passions than I could’ve imagined when we first created subreddits—and the kinds of content and conversations that keep people coming back day after day. It's why we come to Reddit as users, as mods, and as employees who want to bring this sort of community and belonging to the world and make it better daily.
However, as Reddit has grown, alongside much good, it is facing its own challenges around hate and racism. We have to acknowledge and accept responsibility for the role we have played. Here are three problems we are most focused on:
Parts of Reddit reflect an unflattering but real resemblance to the world in the hate that Black users and communities see daily, despite the progress we have made in improving our tooling and enforcement.
Users and moderators genuinely do not have enough clarity as to where we as administrators stand on racism.
Our moderators are frustrated and need a real seat at the table to help shape the policies that they help us enforce.
We are already working to fix these problems, and this is a promise for more urgency. Our current content policy is effectively nine rules for what you cannot do on Reddit. In many respects, it’s served us well. Under it, we have made meaningful progress cleaning up the platform (and done so without undermining the free expression and authenticity that fuels Reddit). That said, we still have work to do. This current policy lists only what you cannot do, articulates none of the values behind the rules, and does not explicitly take a stance on hate or racism.
We will update our content policy to include a vision for Reddit and its communities to aspire to, a statement on hate, the context for the rules, and a principle that Reddit isn’t to be used as a weapon. We have details to work through, and while we will move quickly, I do want to be thoughtful and also gather feedback from our moderators (through our Mod Councils). With more moderator engagement, the timeline is weeks, not months.
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