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When the report button isn't enough
Practical routes for taking harm you have met on Reddit to the people and bodies who can act on it, with plain-language guides and fill-in templates that never leave your browser.
Safety first. If someone is in immediate danger, stop reading and call your emergency number now: 999 in the UK, 112 across the EU, 911 in the US.
Reddit Watch documents what has gone wrong on the platform and how the company has responded. This toolkit is the practical companion to that archive. It collects the routes available to an ordinary person who has run into harm on Reddit and found that the in-app report button did not solve it: harassment that continues after a report, illegal content that stays up, personal information that will not come down, or a crime that deserves a proper record.
Each guide covers one route. It explains who the route is for, what it can realistically achieve, what it cannot do, the order in which to take the steps, and where to find the official source for every claim. Where a letter or notice is useful, the guide includes a template you can fill in on the page and copy. The guides are written for people without legal training, and they are kept short enough to use while you are upset or in a hurry.
Start with the kind of harm. Content that is illegal where you live, such as threats, criminal harassment or sexual images shared without consent, can go to the platform as a formal legal notice, to the police, or both. Content that is merely unpleasant or against Reddit's own rules usually has fewer options, and the platform's own tools are often the main one. Problems involving your own personal data, such as a post that exposes your address or a profile built from your information, point towards data-protection rights. Anything involving sexual images of children belongs with the specialist hotlines and the police, and nowhere else.
Then consider where you live. Readers in the European Union have access to the notice-and-action system created by the Digital Services Act and to the data-protection rights in the GDPR. Readers in the United Kingdom have the Online Safety Act regime overseen by Ofcom, plus UK data-protection law and the UK police and hotline system. Readers in the United States have a different landscape, with fewer platform-specific statutory routes and more reliance on law enforcement, the courts, and the reporting channels run by child-protection organisations. Many readers can use more than one route at the same time, and the guides say when that makes sense.
Expectations matter, because the most common source of disappointment is picking a route that was never built to do what you wanted. A regulator such as Ofcom oversees whether platforms run adequate systems and processes. It does not adjudicate individual complaints or order a single post removed on your behalf, although what you tell it can inform its wider work. A formal notice under the Digital Services Act is different: it obliges a hosting provider to process the notice and to tell you its decision and the reasons for it, but it does not guarantee that the content will come down.
A data-subject request, whether for access or for erasure, is about your own personal data. It is a strong tool when the material concerns you, and a weak one when you are trying to remove content about someone else or content that does not identify anyone. Police reports create an official record and may trigger an investigation, but the police decide whether and how to act, and online cases can be slow. Hotlines such as NCMEC in the United States and the Internet Watch Foundation in the United Kingdom exist to get child sexual abuse material removed and passed to law enforcement. Court processes, including the identification of anonymous posters, are expensive and slow, which is why the toolkit includes an explainer rather than a template for them.
Before you report anything, and especially before you ask for something to be removed, record what you need while it is still there. Note the full address of each page or comment, the exact usernames involved, the date and time you saw it, and a short description of what it showed. Where it is safe and lawful to do so, save an archived copy of the page and keep a dated log of every report you make and every reply you receive. A simple list kept in a document on your own device is usually more useful to an investigator than a pile of unlabelled images.
There is one firm exception. Never download, screenshot, save or forward sexual imagery of children, even to show it to someone who can help. Copying it can be a serious offence and it spreads the harm. Report the address of the page to the hotline or the police and let them handle the material. The same caution applies, in a lesser way, to intimate images of adults shared without consent: describe and link rather than circulate.
Escalating a complaint can mean returning again and again to something distressing. Take breaks, ask a friend you trust to help with the paperwork, and consider contacting a support service for victims of online abuse in your country. You do not have to finish everything in one sitting, and several routes accept a report even if you only have part of the picture.
Reddit Watch is a documentation project, not a law firm. The guides summarise public sources and show their date of last checking, but laws, forms and contact points change, and your situation may differ from the typical case. If the stakes are high, speak to a qualified lawyer or an advice charity. The templates run entirely in your browser: we do not store or transmit anything you type into them, and there is no account to create.
To see why the report button so often falls short, read the report-abuse enforcement gaps theme, and see what Reddit itself publishes in its transparency reports. If you know of a documented problem that belongs in the archive, or a route this toolkit is missing, send us a submission.