Reddit Harassment Crackdown after CEO Falls Victim to Attacks

A new harassment crackdown is being launched reddit, aimed at stymying the rising toxicity – or “draining the swamp,” if you will – with CEO Steve Huffman announcing that the site’s hierarchy will stop turning a blind eye to festering toxicity and start actually enforcing its content policy to ban or suspend the most egregious offenders.

This more aggressive stance against harassment has been triggered by Huffman, who admits that his reddit inbox is full of abusive messages.

“Personal message harassment is the most cut and dry,” Huffman told Reuters. “Right now we are in an interesting position where my inbox is full of them, it’s easy to start with me.”

“The fact I was saying that combating harassment was important and then letting that openly happen to me, the CEO, there’s a disconnect there,” he added.

Last week, Huffman was found to be editing user comments in pro-donald Trump subreddit r/the_donald which directed abuse at him. After being caught, Huffman admitted culpability and apologised for “play[ing] such games.”

Previously, reddit had tried to empower its moderators to uphold the site’s community behaviour policies, but the rise of subreddits such as r/the_donald and the recently banned r/pizzagate has seen a proliferation of racist and misogynistic abuse on the site, and such content is no longer confined to the subreddits that bore it, Huffman says.

Regarding moderators enforcing reddit’s rules, Huffman admitted, “we haven’t found that to be particularly effective. We might see flashes of success, but things kind of revert.”

“We don’t want to be censoring political beliefs, but then they do misbehave,” he said. “That’s why we have worked so closely with the r/The_Donald community. We tell them: don’t force us to ban you.” Instead, reddit will hide r/the_donald from the frontpage.

Huffman has now outlined the core of reddit’s new policy in a new post on r/announcements:

• We have identified hundreds of the most toxic users and are taking action against them, ranging from warnings to timeouts to permanent bans. Posts stickied on r/the_donald will no longer appear in r/all. r/all is not our frontpage, but is a popular listing that our most engaged users frequent, including myself. The sticky feature was designed for moderators to make announcements or highlight specific posts. It was not meant to circumvent organic voting, which r/the_donald does to slingshot posts into r/all, often in a manner that is antagonistic to the rest of the community.
• We will continue taking on the most troublesome users, and going forward, if we do not see the situation improve, we will continue to take privileges from communities whose users continually cross the line—up to an outright ban.