What happened
On October 25, 2017, Reddit formally expanded its content policy on violence, broadening a previous prohibition on merely 'inciting' violence to ban 'any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people,' as well as against animals. The revised rules were posted to Reddit's Help pages and communicated to the site's volunteer moderators, clarifying the standards moderators were expected to enforce across thousands of communities.
The updated policy was applied immediately, with Reddit banning several subreddits including r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, and r/Far_Right. The crackdown was widely read as an effort to curb hate groups and racist ideology on the platform, continuing the trajectory set by the post-Charlottesville bans earlier that year. By codifying a clearer and more expansive standard, Reddit moved away from its historically hands-off, free-speech-maximalist posture toward more active content governance — a shift that would continue through later waves of bans targeting harassment, hate, and extremist organizing.