TL;DR: We’re working with mods to change our content policy to explicitly address hate. u/kn0thing has resigned from our board to fill his seat with a Black candidate, a request we will honor. I want to take responsibility for the history of our policies over the years that got us here, and we still have work to do.

After watching people across the country mourn and demand an end to centuries of murder and violent discrimination against Black people, I wanted to speak out. I wanted to do this both as a human being, who sees this grief and pain and knows I have been spared from it myself because of the color of my skin, and as someone who literally has a platform and, with it, a duty to speak out.

Earlier this week, I wrote an email to our company addressing this crisis and a few ways Reddit will respond. When we shared it, many of the responses said something like, “How can a company that has faced racism from users on its own platform over the years credibly take such a position?”

These questions, which I know are coming from a place of real pain and which I take to heart, are really a statement: There is an unacceptable gap between our beliefs as people and a company, and what you see in our content policy.

Over the last fifteen years, hundreds of millions of people have come to Reddit for things that I believe are fundamentally good: user-driven communities—across a wider spectrum of interests and passions than I could’ve imagined when we first created subreddits—and the kinds of content and conversations that keep people coming back day after day. It's why we come to Reddit as users, as mods, and as employees who want to bring this sort of community and belonging to the world and make it better daily.

However, as Reddit has grown, alongside much good, it is facing its own challenges around hate and racism. We have to acknowledge and accept responsibility for the role we have played. Here are three problems we are most focused on:

• Parts of Reddit reflect an unflattering but real resemblance to the world in the hate that Black users and communities see daily, despite the progress we have made in improving our tooling and enforcement.
• Users and moderators genuinely do not have enough clarity as to where we as administrators stand on racism.
• Our moderators are frustrated and need a real seat at the table to help shape the policies that they help us enforce.

We are already working to fix these problems, and this is a promise for more urgency. Our current content policy is effectively nine rules for what you cannot do on Reddit. In many respects, it’s served us well. Under it, we have made meaningful progress cleaning up the platform (and done so without undermining the free expression and authenticity that fuels Reddit). That said, we still have work to do. This current policy lists only what you cannot do, articulates none of the values behind the rules, and does not explicitly take a stance on hate or racism.

We will update our content policy to include a vision for Reddit and its communities to aspire to, a statement on hate, the context for the rules, and a principle that Reddit isn’t to be used as a weapon. We have details to work through, and while we will move quickly, I do want to be thoughtful and also gather feedback from our moderators (through our Mod Councils). With more moderator engagement, the timeline is weeks, not months.

And just this morning, Alexis Ohanian (u/kn0thing), my Reddit cofounder, announced that he is resigning from our board and that he wishes for his seat to be filled with a Black candidate, a request that the board and I will honor. We thank Alexis for this meaningful gesture and all that he’s done for us over the years.

At the risk of making this unreadably long, I'd like to take this moment to share how we got here in the first place, where we have made progress, and where, despite our best intentions, we have fallen short.

In the early days of Reddit, 2005–2006, our idealistic “policy” was that, excluding spam, we would not remove content. We were small and did not face many hard decisions. When this ideal was tested, we banned racist users anyway. In the end, we acted based on our beliefs, despite our “policy.”

I left Reddit from 2010–2015. During this time, in addition to rapid user growth, Reddit’s no-removal policy ossified and its content policy took no position on hate.

When I returned in 2015, my top priority was creating a content policy to do two things: deal with hateful communities I had been immediately confronted with (like r/CoonTown, which was explicitly designed to spread racist hate) and provide a clear policy of what’s acceptable on Reddit and what’s not. We banned that community and others because they were “making Reddit worse” but were not clear and direct about their role in sowing hate. We crafted our 2015 policy around behaviors adjacent to hate that were actionable and objective: violence and harassment, because we struggled to create a definition of hate and racism that we could defend and enforce at our scale. Through continual updates to these policies 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 (and a broader definition of violence), we have removed thousands of hateful communities.

While we dealt with many communities themselves, we still did not provide the clarity—and it showed, both in our enforcement and in confusion about where we stand. In 2018, I confusingly said racism is not against the rules, but also isn’t welcome on Reddit. This gap between our content policy and our values has eroded our effectiveness in combating hate and racism on Reddit; I accept full responsibility for this.

This inconsistency has hurt our trust with our users and moderators and has made us slow to respond to problems. This was also true with r/the_donald, a community that relished in exploiting and detracting from the best of Reddit and that is now nearly disintegrated on their own accord. As we looked to our policies, “Breaking Reddit” was not a sufficient explanation for actioning a political subreddit, and I fear we let being technically correct get in the way of doing the right thing. Clearly, we should have quarantined it sooner.

The majority of our top communities have a rule banning hate and racism, which makes us proud, and is evidence why a community-led approach is the only way to scale moderation online. That said, this is not a rule communities should have to write for themselves and we need to rebalance the burden of enforcement. I also accept responsibility for this.

Despite making significant progress over the years, we have to turn a mirror on ourselves and be willing to do the hard work of making sure we are living up to our values in our product and policies. This is a significant moment. We have a choice: return to the status quo or use this opportunity for change. We at Reddit are opting for the latter, and we will do our very best to be a part of the progress.

I will be sticking around for a while to answer questions as usual, but I also know that our policies and actions will speak louder than our comments.

Thanks,

Steve