Reddit takes measures against “hate content”
The large social network Reddit has recently eliminated 7000 communities (subreddits). The reason for this was publishing content that incites hatred, more known as hate content. This responds to the new Reddit policy against the explicit hate content, announced late June.
This way, the hate posts were down by 18% on the website when compared with two weeks ago, so stated by the company.
“Reddit´s new content policy came into effect in late-June after hundreds of moderators on the platform wrote an open letter accusing Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and other company leaders of allowing “the site to fester with hate in the name of ´free speech´”
Forbes
A hate context in social media
This measure comes after a non-official group that supported the American president Donald Trump, became banned for violating the platform’s rules. Is important to point out, that all this happens a few weeks after the Black Live Matter protests and after Facebook and Twitter took measures with QAnon-related accounts for conspiracy and violent content.
In case you don’t know, QAnon is a conspiracy theory that thousands of Trump’s followers have joined. According to this hypothesis, Trump is leading a secret fight against “Satan-followers’ pedophiles in the government, business and the media”.
Facebook had previously announced the deletion of 790 groups, 100 pages and 1500 ads connected to QAnon. It has also restricted more than 10 000 Instagram accounts, after eliminating a numerous QAnon group of nearly 200 000 members.
Meanwhile, Twitter has banned 7000 not connected QAnon accounts and took measures against another 150 000.
In the last time, online hate content have become a great concern for the big tech companies. This has derived in actions to counteract these manifestations.
The pressure has increased as the presidential elections of USA in November get closer. In Reddit, the moderators have a lot of work to do when it comes to deleting wrong information and hate content.
“Reddit said preliminary research shows that almost half (48%) of offending content is targeted at race or nationality; 16% is focused on class or political affiliation; 12% on sexuality; 10% on gender; 6% on religion and 1% on ability”.
The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)
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