- Date
- 2017-10-25
- Trigger
- Pressure following the August 2017 Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally and the killing of Heather Heyer, plus vague existing rules that admins said were 'too vague' to enforce against violence-glorifying communities.
- Policy change
- Reddit rewrote its rules to prohibit any content that 'encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people,' applying the standard to subreddit names, styling, flair, and usernames as well as posts.
- Communities removed
- ~10+ communities
What happened
On October 25, 2017, Reddit announced a revamped policy against violent content and immediately began purging Nazi, white-supremacist, and other violence-glorifying communities. The change followed the August 2017 Charlottesville rally, after which Reddit had already banned r/Physical_Removal for advocating violence against political opponents. Admins said the previous rules had been too vague and expanded the ban to cover not just posts but subreddit names, CSS, flair, and usernames. A cluster of explicitly Nazi and white-nationalist subreddits disappeared in the days that followed. The wave marked Reddit's pivot from a harassment- and doxxing-centric enforcement posture toward an explicit anti-violence standard.