Reddit Users Banned in Spades for Hate Speech
Reddit's authorities have started banning users who promote hate speech. Since the change of content rules, 7 thousand accounts that violated the new rules have been removed.
Since June 29, Reddit moderators have a lot of work to do when it comes to controlling posts and threads on the forum. It was then that the update of the rules concerning the content published by forum users came into force. During these less than two months, 7,000 users who did not follow the new rules were banned, which resulted in a 17% reduction in negative content (via Engadget). People who propagated racism and "pro-Trump" slogans were particularly affected.
Before the new directives entered in force, the website's authorities reported 406,000 harmful posts and comments per day (0.2% of all available content). Almost 6.5 million users encountered this kind of content every day, which was a cause for concern for the spread of hate speech about problems of race, origin, political affiliation and sexuality.
A representative of Reddit's administration talked about difficulties in dealing with the toxicity of forum users on the webiste:
"Defining hate at scale is fraught with challenges. Sometimes hate can be very overt, other times it can be more subtle. People are weirdly creative about how to be mean to each other.".
The actions of administrators certainly deserve praise, but it takes many more months to assess their effectiveness. The statistics show that the amendment to the rules has a real impact on the improvement of the word culture on Reddit over the last few weeks.
