One of the biggest challenges faced by social media platforms is monitoring the content posted by millions of users. Reddit is one of the busiest sites, which encourages free speech, but not at the cost of promoting hatred, racism, and violence. But Reddit's stringent policies did not stop a group of the political community from promoting hate with every post and upvote. It had to end.
Reddit took a strong stand against Pro-Trump r/The_Donald forum for violating its new content policies centered around hate speech. Reddit has taken down the controversial subreddit channel r/The_Donald along with 2,000 other subreddit groups and users for promoting hate.
Visiting the pro-Trump subreddit page says it has been banned for violating rules 1, 2, and 8. According to Reddit's content policy, here's what these rules mean:
Rule 1: Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
Rule 2: Abide by community rules. Post authentic content into communities where you have a personal interest, and do not cheat or engage in content manipulation (including spamming, vote manipulation, ban evasion, or subscriber fraud) or otherwise interfere with or disrupt Reddit communities.
Rule 8: Don't break the site or do anything that interferes with normal use of Reddit.
When dialogues fail, ban follows
CEO Steve Huffman revealed that the company had tried to talk it out with r/The_Donald users over the years, but it didn't garner any positive results. They continued to violate Reddit's rules, promoted hate and antagonized Reddit and other communities.
"It was becoming clear that the company's values and the way discourse was playing out on the platform was one of the main things we wanted to fix in our content policy update," Huffman was quoted as saying.
Reddit got new rules
In addition to cleaning out thousands of communities, Reddit also has new rules. It includes limiting ways Reddit users promote content that mocks people with disabilities, racism, supports rape, or speaks of denying voting rights to people of color.
