Reddit announces 18% reduction in hateful content, bans 7,000 subreddits for violation

Social media platform Reddit has announced that it has successfully reduced hateful content on its site by 18 percent by banning as many as 7,000 subreddits. As per a Reddit update, the site has banned subreddits that indulged in hate speech and harassment. The company also informed of taking action against several individual accounts that were found to be repeat offenders.

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Tackling hateful content

The news comes in the form of an update from Reddit on how it is tackling hateful content on its site after launching a massive campaign against the same back in June. As per the Reddit security team, they would like that number to be ‘100 percent’.

The security team further added that Reddit bans subreddits that have names and descriptions that are inherently ‘hateful’ and ones that contain a large fraction of hateful comments.

The social media site has vowed to ban hate speech and continually introduce new policies and enforce them. Reddit has also delved into large scale research into understanding how hate speech spreads across the site and the best ways to tackle them.

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The Reddit security team also provided some shocking statistics on how prevalent hate speech was on their site before the company rolled out its new content policy. They stated that before the policy was rollout out, there were 40 thousand potential hateful posts on the site each day, which amounts to 0.2 percent of all content posted on the site in a day. Reddit also revealed that approximately more than 6 million people saw hateful pieces of content on Reddit.

About 48 percent of all hate content on Reddit is directed at a person’s ethnicity and nationality as per statistics, this is followed by political views, one’s sexuality/gender, and religion respectively. As per Reddit, these statistics are preliminary and the company aims to offer more concrete statistics in the future.

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