Reddit's Harassment-Enforcement Gaps: What Reddit and Moderators Have Said (2015–2022)

On 14 May 2015 Reddit, then led by interim CEO Ellen Pao, announced an anti-harassment policy and a way to report harassment to the company. The BBC reported that users who believed they were being bullied would be able to email Reddit and report it, and Slate reported that users could report problematic private messages, posts and comments through Reddit's internal messaging system or at [email protected]. The policy defined harassment as 'systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone' in a way that would make a reasonable person conclude that Reddit was not a safe platform, or fear for their safety. Slate observed that the announcement said nothing about how Reddit would approach or deal with the submissions, and that a Reddit representative, asked how complaints would be evaluated, referred the writer back to the announcement.

On 30 September 2019 Reddit rewrote that rule and, in doing so, described the gap in its own words. In a post to r/announcements, a Reddit administrator said the old policy required behaviour to be 'continued' and/or 'systematic' and set 'a high bar of users fearing for their real-world safety to qualify, which we think is an incorrect calibration.' The post continued: 'All these things meant that too often, instances of harassment and bullying, even egregious ones, were left unactioned.' It added: 'Where previously, we required the harassment victim to make the report to us directly, we'll now be investigating reports from bystanders as well.' The post said machine-learning tools would help sort and prioritise reports, and that response times had 'improved significantly since the start of the year.' The Verge described the change as broadening the definition of threats, harassment and bullying, and noted that it appeared to have resulted in several subreddits being banned, including r/Braincels. Mashable remarked that it was 'pretty incredible' that Reddit had not already been looking into third-party reports of harassment. The Verge also recorded a user's objection that false anti-harassment reports could be used by trolls to drive somebody offline.

Moderators described years of requests that, in their accounts, went unanswered. In a June 2020 Atlantic report on an open letter to CEO Steve Huffman urging Reddit to take racism more seriously, a moderator of r/blackladies said her subreddit was heavily brigaded by another subreddit: 'We sent countless messages to the admins asking for help, over and over again.' Her team then wrote an open letter titled 'We have a racist user problem and Reddit won't take action,' signed by dozens of subreddits. 'We heard nothing,' she said. A Reddit spokesperson told the Atlantic that the company was aware of that letter but declined to comment on it, citing the fact that the company was under different leadership at the time. The Los Angeles Times reported in July 2020 that r/BlackFathers, which a Black People Twitter moderator described to the paper as built as 'one big racist joke,' had been quarantined in 2015 but was not banned until weeks before the article. Asked about prolonged inaction on such subreddits, Reddit pointed to a statement by Huffman.

A January 2022 TIME investigation, drawing on 19 moderators of non-English and international communities, described a similar pattern, including an automated reply telling a r/Portugal moderator that the reported content did not violate Reddit's policy. TIME added that when that moderator then wrote to Reddit's administrators an admin did write back, 'a rare occurrence in itself,' saying: 'I think some things may be getting lost in the translations here but am happy to take another look.' The investigation, the moderators' accounts, Reddit's replies and the March 2022 ban of r/Chodi are covered in the separate entry 'TIME Investigation: Reddit's Failure to Police Non-English Hate Speech' and are not retold here.

The record is uneven. The clearest evidence is Reddit's own 2019 admission. The 2020 and 2022 accounts rest on what moderators told reporters, and none of the sources reviewed for this entry gives a count of reports received, ignored or actioned, so the size of the gap cannot be stated. On the tooling side, The Register reported in March 2024 that Reddit was rolling out an optional Harassment Filter, powered by a large language model, that sends posts and comments likely to be considered harassing into a 'potential harassment' tag in the moderation queue for moderators to review.