There are just five commandments, and only two relate to content:īeyond this, Martin says, Reddit mostly just has a responsibility to adhere to the law. rules goes a long way toward explaining why Martin finds himself answering questions about offensive, alarming or morally repugnant subreddits on a fairly regular basis. While individual Reddit communities make their own rules - Martin repeated a quote he had given another reporter earlier today, that a forum moderators could ban all posts that start with "g" if they wanted to - Reddit, the platform, has very few. "We don't get in involved unless it has someting to do with rules," Martin explained. "All of them are completely run by users," he repeated. This is also true of the site's largest sections, which are featured on its frontpage by default. And anyone can create a subreddit, the person who creates it is sort of the default moderator, and they can add other moderators, who can then add other moderators," Martin said. "We have 10,000 active subreddits, and over 100,000 total. The site is a neutral platform, first and foremost, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin told BuzzFeed. And the man who oversees the site is probably not going to go away.
Creepy features like creepshots have drawn criticism for years, but they have survived even a recent visit from the President of the United states, who did a Q&A on the site in August. Reddit's creepiness problem is part of an ongoing identity crisis on the massive social site, a tension between the emerging voice of a united community, on one hand and the studied neutrality of a anything-goes online messageboard. This week, it's /r/creepshots, surreptitiously-taken, implicitly sexual photographs of anonymous women. Last year it was /r/jailbait, a forum where users posted borderline pornographic photos of teens a couple months ago it was /r/Photobucketplunder, where users posted private photos from compromised Photobucket accounts. We remain committed to protecting reddit as an open platform.Every three months, or maybe six, it happens: A new section of Reddit gets attention for being gross, immoral, or, most commonly, creepy. However, child pornography is a toxic and unique case for Internet communities, and we’re protecting reddit’s ability to operate by removing this threat. We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
We’re concerned about that too, and do not make this policy change lightly or without careful deliberation. We understand that this might make some of you worried about the slippery slope from banning one specific type of content to banning other types of content. In their blog post on the new ban, Reddit’s administrators tried to address this cultural conflict. That’s been a integral part of the site, and an important catalyst in Reddit’s pushback against the SOPA and PIPA piracy bills, a major victory for self-organizing internet activists. The community prefers to police itself and has a knee jerk reaction to anything it perceives as an attempt at censorship.
In large part that is because Reddit views itself as a bastion of free speech on the web. But it didn’t make any explicit changes to its guidelines. The national media caught wind of the story and Reddit quickly shut the forum down. But it is on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children watchlist of terms related to child pornography, and it turned up hundreds of pages on Facebook, dumbfounding Facebook executives.Ībout six months ago a similar controversy erupted on Reddit over a subreddit called “jailbait”. That’s hardly a suggestive title, like the subreddit “pre_teen girls” which sparked Reddit’s recent ban. On Facebook, for example, large communities existed around the obscure acronym “PTHC”. From Tumblr to Facebook, the problem of child pornography is one that requires continuous policing. It’s more of symbolic gesture than a real solution to the problem.