At the behest of interim CEO Ellen Pao, Reddit administrators began deleting abusive or harassing threads as part of the site’s new anti-harassment policy and it’s not going over very well.
Site administrators announced Wednesday they would remove five subreddits, including one centered on body shaming, that were deemed harassing and didn’t mesh with the company’s new community rules.
Today we are announcing a change in community management on reddit. Our goal is to enable as many people as possible to have authentic conversations and share ideas and content on an open platform. We want as little involvement as possible in managing these interactions but will be involved when needed to protect privacy and free expression, and to prevent harassment.
It is not easy to balance these values, especially as the Internet evolves. We are learning and hopefully improving as we move forward. We want to be open about our involvement: We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action.
We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
Today we are removing five subreddits that break our reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals. If a subreddit has been banned for harassment, you will see that in the ban notice. The only banned subreddit with more than 5,000 subscribers is r/fatpeoplehate.
Users decried the move as totalitarian…
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