At Reddit, we can only achieve our mission of bringing community, belonging, and empowerment to the world if our platform is safe and welcoming for everyone. In line with this, we wanted to share how we’re working to achieve that goal.
Safety on Reddit
Content moderation
Content moderation on Reddit happens through a layered, community-driven approach. This approach is akin to a democracy, where everyone has the ability to vote and self-organize, follow a set of common rules, establish community-specific norms, and ultimately share some responsibility for how the platform works.
Our policies and teams
The first layer of safety on Reddit is our dedicated internal Safety teams, who develop, enhance, and enforce our Content Policy at scale. Our Content Policy sets rules that all users and moderators must follow, and prohibits things like content manipulation (e.g., disinformation and malicious deepfakes), incitement of violence, hateful content, non-consensual intimate media, harassment, doxxing, the sale of controlled goods, fraudulent services, and more. We are constantly investing in efforts to identify and address new platform issues, and working to make our policies as clear as possible.
Reddit’s Safety teams use a combination of automated tooling and human review to detect and remove violating content, and are continually iterating on new tools and policies to improve our capabilities.
These teams also work to ensure any products we release are safe-by-design and address important Trust & Safety issues as they arise throughout the company.
Moderators
The next layer of our safety efforts is moderators. Moderators are users who choose to create and govern their own communities on Reddit. They keep their communities on topic (so there are no dogs in r/Cats, for example) and help uphold our Content Policy. Our internal Safety teams work with moderators by removing violating content at scale and empowering them through even better automated mod tooling.
Moderators also adhere to our Moderator Code of Conduct. It sets out rules and expectations for moderators, and enables us to quickly address issues at the moderator level. We have a dedicated Community team that helps enforce the Code of Conduct. This team also listens to moderators, supports them, and advocates for our users throughout the company.
Users
The last layer of healthy communities on Reddit is our users. Everyone’s upvotes and downvotes help to ensure quality content rises to the top, while misleading or low-quality content is less visible. In 2023, independent research confirmed the effectiveness of this democratic approach, demonstrating that on Reddit, fact-checked, true news articles received more upvotes and engagement than posts with news determined to be false. Users can also report potentially violating content to our Safety teams for further review.
Brands
We want Reddit to be a safe and useful place for brands to connect with their relevant audiences. You can read more about how we ensure a brand safe environment on Reddit here. We also have policies for advertisers to ensure ads on Reddit are high quality, honest and useful for our users.
Expanding our mod tooling
We’re focused on supporting moderators, including by continuously iterating on new tools and policies. In particular, we work to leverage our internal safety models that help us detect bad actors, spam, ban evasion, etc. to create new, easy-to-use mod tooling. That way, mods are benefitting from the same tools that we use. Just in the last year, we’ve launched:
Harassment filter - an AI-powered mod tool that automatically filters posts and comments that are likely to be considered harassing.
Ban evasion filter - this tool automatically filters posts and comments from users that are likely to be evading a subreddit-level ban from moderators.
Mature content filter - we want our users to have a safe and predictable experience on the platform, meaning any mature content is intentionally accessed. This tool automatically identifies and filters media that is likely to be mature.
Contributor Quality Score (CQS) - the CQS helps moderators detect potential spammers and suspicious users. It is an expansion of Automoderator (an existing tool that moderators can customize to take automated moderation actions).
Safety guide - we released a new safety page for our mod tools, with a safety product guide to help moderators navigate when and how to use the variety of tools available.
With the tools above and others (such as Automoderator), as well as our internal admin-level tooling, an overwhelming majority of enforcement on our platform is automated – meaning content is often removed before users see it.
Enhancing our internal tools and partnerships
Our Safety teams are always working to enhance the tools we use to proactively detect and remove violating content and accounts, including via machine learning and artificial intelligence. For example, our automated safety tooling can flag some of the most serious violating content at the point of upload – meaning we often remove this content before anyone ever sees it. We are also currently testing a tool that can automatically detect and flag for review violating AI-generated content, including non-consensual intimate media (NCIM). In 2022, we brought on a team focused on developing native machine learning content moderation models to accelerate these efforts.
We also partner with external organizations to enhance moderation and safety on our platform. For example:
We are partnered with the nonprofit SWGfl to implement their StopNCII tool, a hashing database that helps platforms find and remove NCIM. As part of this partnership, we scan 100% of live traffic for matches against known NCIM and remove accurate matches.
We are a part of industry efforts to fight other dangerous and illegal content. For example, Reddit participates in Tech Against Terrorism’s TCAP alert system, giving us automated alerts for any terrorist content found on Reddit.
Reddit is also an active partner in safety-focused industry groups, including being a founding board member of the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership, a first-of-its-kind partnership committed to developing industry best practices, verified through internal and independent third-party assessments, to ensure consumer trust and safety when using digital services.
Measuring & reporting safety
We believe transparency is critical to fostering trust with our users. We regularly share information about how we keep our platform safe directly with our community in r/RedditSecurity, and highlight how we moderate content and handle global government and law enforcement requests in our biannual Transparency Reports. For even more resources about Reddit’s policies and safety efforts, see our Transparency Center.
We’re constantly working to evolve our tooling and empower moderators to better govern their communities with the support of our Safety teams. We want to keep communicating with you about what we’re doing and why, so watch this space for more updates from us about our safety efforts.