'Reddit Cares' Turned Against Users: A Self-Harm Safety Report Used as a Harassment Tool (2022–2025)

Reddit announced its self-harm reporting tool on 4 March 2020, in partnership with the Crisis Text Line. According to The Verge, starting 10 March, if a Reddit user flagged another user as potentially at risk, that user would receive a private message with suicide prevention resources and a recommendation to text CHAT to 741741. CNET reported that anyone on Reddit could flag a fellow user they thought might be struggling with self-harm or suicide. Reddit's help page describes the mechanism: a user reports the specific post or comment and selects 'Someone is considering suicide or serious self-harm,' after which Reddit says it will 'reach out (confidentially)' with resources. Reddit's own staff call the messages 'Reddit Cares Resources.'

User reports of abuse date back to at least February 2022, when users and moderators were describing the report as a harassment tool in r/ModSupport, the subreddit where moderators and administrators talk. On 1 February 2022 a user posted there that two such reports had reached their queue and 'it's just used to troll'; the thread title claimed the report was '99.99999% used to troll users.' On 6 February another user wrote: 'I get one of those reddit cares messages every so often. I never talk about wanting to commit suicide.' A Reddit administrator replied on 7 February that recipients 'can just reply STOP to the message and never see one again or they can block the account we use to send which is always /u/RedditCareResources.' One moderator replying in that thread wrote that, 'save for purportedly rate-limiting the notification,' Reddit had 'taken no action to rectify the problem,' and that reports of abuse were 'never replied to with an indication that they've been addressed.' On 29 March a moderator of r/SquaredCircle posted a guide for users in that community: block the sending account, or use the 'report the abuse' button in the message, while noting that 'not all messages get responses currently.' Know Your Meme describes the practice as reporting users one is arguing with so that Reddit sends them hotline links, and says it has been interpreted as harassment akin to telling someone they need mental health services or should harm themselves without directly using abusive language.

On 15 May 2024 moderators reported a sitewide surge. In a r/ModSupport thread, one user wrote that it was 'getting spammed sitewide' and suspected a bot reporting users at random; others described receiving the message after ordinary comments on unrelated topics. A Reddit administrator replied that teams were 'taking a deeper look at these reports on the backend to see if there may be a group that is misusing these features at scale,' and added that no action should be taken against a user who received the resources alone, directing anyone whose account had been caught in the spam filters to appeal. Later that day Reddit posted 'An update on recent misuse of Reddit Cares Resources.' It said the company had been 'made aware of a significant uptick in the amount of Reddit Cares Resources that were incorrectly sent to users,' apologised, and said: 'These resources should not be exploited, and we take abuse of this feature very seriously.' Reddit said it had 'identified the group that was spamming these resources maliciously to users,' that the team had been working for months to reduce such misuse but 'today's incident signaled that there was still a gap present,' and that it had suspended the group's accounts and was implementing fixes.

By 31 July 2025 the format had changed; the thread does not say when. On 31 July a moderator wrote in r/ModSupport that users falsely report moderators as suicidal or self-harming, and that the message had been updated so that the report-abuse route they had used before 'can no longer be done.' A Reddit administrator replied that 'when we made the decision to move this over to notifications we also took the time to strengthen restrictions and rate limits on how this report type is used,' that 'if you don't turn off the notifications from this account, you'll never receive more than one notification in a week every 28 days' (the wording as posted is unclear, and this entry does not restate it as a rule), and that further rate limits existed that could not be described publicly 'so we don't give bad actors any ideas.' The administrator also said blocking the account does not stop notifications, and that Reddit was turning off notifications for users who had previously blocked the account or replied STOP. Other users in the thread said they wanted the ability to report abuse of the message restored.

Coverage of the abuse itself is mostly users' own reports and Reddit's acknowledgement in its May 2024 post. The sources for this entry are Reddit's own moderator-support threads and statements, two news reports (The Verge and CNET) that cover only the 2020 launch, and a Know Your Meme entry; searches run for this entry did not turn up a news or academic article on the abuse that could be fetched and cited. None of the sources counts how many messages were sent or how many were misuse, so the scale outside the May 2024 surge is not established. What the record does show is a safety feature that Reddit itself said was misused, that led Reddit to suspend a group and to add rate limits, and whose abuse-reporting path some moderators said they could no longer use after the 2025 change.