Reddit Cares

Reddit Cares is the platform's mental-health safety feature: when a user reports a post or comment using the option indicating that someone may be considering suicide or serious self-harm, Reddit confidentially sends the reported user a private message from an official account connecting them with crisis-support resources, such as a text-based counselling line. The intent is to put help in front of a person who may be in distress.

The feature matters partly because it has been widely weaponised as a form of harassment. Sending a target an unsolicited, insincere "concern" message is used to imply that the person is mentally unstable or to suggest, by dark insinuation, that they should harm themselves, all without using overtly abusive language that ordinary filters would catch. Notable waves of automated abuse have prompted speculation that bots were driving mass messaging across communities. Reddit's help documentation both explains the legitimate purpose of the system and provides a route to report misuse, and users can block the sending account. Reddit Cares is a clear example of how a safety tool can be repurposed into procedural harassment, a recurring challenge for platform policy.