Reddit announced a change on their site that will prevent harassment on the site, but also protect free expression and sharing of ideas on the platform. The company will ban subreddits (organized groups of different areas of interest on Reddit) that allow to be used as platforms to harass individuals. They explicitly say they’re banning behaviour, not ideas.
The company went ahead and explained what they meant about harassment:
“When we are using the word “harass”, we’re not talking about “being annoying” or vote manipulation or anything. We’re talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day. When you’ve had to talk to as many victims of it as we have, you’d understand that a brigade from one sub-reddit to another is miles away from the harassment we don’t want being generated on our site.”
The company announced that they were removing subreddits that break their rules based on this “harassment” definitions. Users will be able to see the ban notice of a particular subreddit. The only banned reddit, which has more than 5,000 subscribers is the r/fatpeoplehate. This is the actual ban notice of this subreddit.
Users on the subreddit can report harassment by sending emails at [email protected]. The Reddit team meanwhile are in the process of managing issues in the reddit community and will continuously add incremental changes over time to the platform.
