Popular news aggregation Reddit has released data outlining the immediate results of its new policy changes against hate on its platform. The site has already banned nearly 7,000 subreddits (forums dedicated to a specific topic within the website) in the first two months, since the new policies were put in place. While this is still a small sample of the data so far, the results seem promising.
Founded in 2005, Reddit has remained popular as the self-proclaimed, 'front page of the internet.' Today the site has nearly 350-million accounts and has a valuation of $3 billion. Over time, it has since become a platform for lightning fast news, activism, philanthropy, and community traditions, such as its own secret Santa exchange. However, the site has also had its fair share of controversy the past decade, especially pertaining to hate and abuse amongst community members. In January of 2019, Reddit created a subreddit titled r/redditsecurity, a running log of security measures taken to ensure the safety of Reddit. A couple of months ago, Admin u/worstnerd revealed that the violence, protests, and demands for change around the country led the site to take a look in the mirror and assess its own future as a social platform. The post promised an update to Reddit's content policy as well as expanded security reports that the same Admin has kept its word on.
The most recent post on r/redditsecurity elaborates on Reddit's updated content policy by explaining the new measures in place, complete with graphs of data outlining the number of bans and toxic comments since implementation on June 29. The criteria targeted subreddits with names or descriptions that were inherently hateful, subs that contained a large fraction of hateful content, or any subs that positively engaged in hateful content (meaning the subreddit itself might not contain a lot of hateful posts, but promoted it whenever it did exist). This has led to nearly 7,000 banned subreddits so far. The recent post admits that Reddit does not have complete knowledge on the long-term impact these bans will have on the site as a whole, but it had begun to quantify and scale its effects on Redditor behavior.
r/redditsecurity has recently been very transparent about new policies and moderation measures to combat abuse and hate on its platform. While this subreddit has expressed optimism from the results thus far, it has made it very clear to Redditors that this is still a preliminary study, and its ability to understand hate and abuse at scale is ever-evolving and not without challenges. For one, people are oddly creative at how they make fun of one another on Reddit. Additionally, due to the fact that so many community members are from countries all over the globe, some insults or jabs do not even resonate with people of other cultures. This is difficult for AutoModerators as well (bot systems built into Reddit to automatically enforce rules defined by human moderators) as they can sometimes struggle to spot hate speech that doesn't match the programmed keywords. That being said, Reddit has reported an 18-percent reduction in hateful content posts, in comparison to the two weeks prior to the wave of bans.
Another important data set pointed out by r/redditsecurity is an 8-percent report rate by members of Reddit, meaning a very low number of people are actually reporting hate or abuse on the site. Other Redditors in the comments have pointed out that this is partially due the reporting process in which reporting to a Moderator takes five clicks and reporting to an Administrator takes at least eight clicks if not more. u/worstnerd responded and agreed that improving the reporting flow was one of its top priorities to reduce 'paperwork' for members reporting violations. While Reddit may be a little late to the transparency game, compared to other social media platforms, it's reassuring to see the site taking increased measures to tackle these issues. Reddit's #1 rule after all is to create a community free of harassment, bullying and violence. With the new ban policies effectively in place, it's safe to say Reddit is on the right track.
Source: r/redditsecurity/Reddit
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