Reddit bans almost 7,000 hateful subreddit pages since June crackdown

Reddit has reported an 18% fall in users posting hateful content after a recent crackdown but said it still has “more work to do”.

The online discussion platform has removed almost 7,000 subreddits since starting a policy explicitly banning hate speech at the end of June.

It came after a wave of non-official Trump-supporting groups were banned for breaking rules and mere weeks after Black Lives Matter protests.

Online hate speech has become a growing concern in recent years leading to calls for tech giants to act faster on the matter.

Reddit found hateful posts dropped by 18% on the site compared to the two weeks prior to the ban.

Writing on the company’s security discussion board, a member of the safety team said: “While I would love that number to be 100%, I’m encouraged by the progress.”

The company said preliminary research shows that almost half (48%) of offending content is targeted at race or nationality, while 16% focused on class or political affiliation, 12% on sexuality, 10% on gender, 6% on religion and 1% on ability.

However, Reddit said it has more work to do on refining the numbers and hoped to share more data in the future.

Before Reddit’s tougher stance began, it had around 40,000 potentially hateful pieces of content each day, making up 0.2% of content on the entire platform.

These posts, comments, and messages garnered 6.47 million views, the equivalent to 0.16% of total daily views – some of which is removed by bots before anyone gets a chance to see it.

It is not clear what these numbers look like now, after the new rules were enforced.

“We have more work to do on both our understanding of hate on the platform and eliminating its presence,” a Reddit safety staffer said.

“We will continue to improve transparency around our efforts to tackle these issues, so please consider this the continuation of the conversation, not the end.”