Reddit reports 18% drop in hateful content after banning nearly 7,000 subreddits

Earlier this year in June Reddit pushed a huge campaign to remove hateful content from its site and started blocking all communities that engaged in hate speech and harassment. The platform has shared an update on its progress so far and says that it has banned nearly 7,000 subreddits, these include repeat offenders, and that has resulted in an 18% drop in hateful content being posted on the site.

Reddit user u/worstnerd, who is a part of the platform’s Safety team said that while they would like the number to be 100%, they are encouraged to by the progress.

These changes and the subsequent progress are results of the new policies Reddit introduced that explicitly ban hate speech. The promise is to enforce them rigorously on the site.

Reddit has been extensively criticised for tolerating racist and misogynist content with its executives defending it in support of free speech. This meant tolerating communities that shared stolen nude photos, videos of domestic violence and even those who promoted ideologies like white nationalism.

Reddit has also said, going forward, it is going to be studying the spread of hate speech on the site more closely.

Just before Reddit started banning subreddits in June, the platform said that approximately 40,000 potentially hateful pieces of content were shared every day making up around 0.2% of the daily content.

These pieces (posts, comments and messages) garnered almost 6.47 million views, which is roughly around 0.16% of total daily views. This view percentage is smaller since moderation bots remove some content before anyone gets to see it. Reddit, however, has not mentioned how these figures have changed post the ban wave.

According to Reddit, 48% of all the hateful content on the site targeted users’ ethnicity or nationality, 16% attacked class or political affiliation, 12% targeted sexuality, 10% gender, 6% religion and 1% targeted ability. There is also an elusive 7% that targeted nothing clearly but was hateful and abusive nonetheless.

Reddit called these figures preliminary and said that it will be sharing more detailed data in the future and added that collecting such information is very challenging at scale.

“Additionally, people are weirdly creative about how to be mean to each other. They evolve their language to make it challenging for outsiders (and models) to understand,” wrote u/worstnerd.