REDDIT, the online discussion forum known for its freewheeling ethos, is enacting an anti-harassment policy while still trying to keep its roots as a place for free expression.
Reddit said in a blog post Thursday that it is “unhappy with harassing behaviour” on the site and its survey data shows that users are too. It has been reviewing its community guidelines for the past six months.
“We’ve seen many conversations devolve into attacks against individuals,” the San Francisco company wrote in a blog post, adding that it is also seeing more and different types of harassment than in the past. For example, some users are harassing people across platforms and posting links on Reddit to private information on other sites, it said.
Reddit’s interim CEO is Ellen Pao, who this year lost a high-profile gender-discrimination lawsuit against a prominent venture capital firm. That case highlighted issues of gender imbalance and working conditions for women in Silicon Valley.
Reddit said in its blog post that it defines harassment as “systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone,” making them fear for their safety or conclude that the social-networking and news site is not a safe place to express ideas.
Users being harassed can report the message or post via email. Reddit said it will handle each situation separately, and responses could include banning users.
Earlier this year, Reddit said it would remove photos, videos and links with explicit content if the person in the image hasn’t given permission for it to be posted.
That change came about six months after hackers obtained nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities and posted them to social media sites, including Reddit and Twitter.
In March, Reddit came under fire from users who complained that stories critical of Pao and her husband had been taken down from the site’s subsections.
Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher ran a hedge fund, Fletcher International, that is now bankrupt. It owes millions in unpaid legal bills and tax liens and the bankruptcy trustee described it as a Ponzi scheme.
Fletcher still owns several apartments in the storeyed Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side while his defunct fund owes more than $US140 million ($A173.3 million) in court judgments.
“‘Buddy’ Fletcher, who is married to the CEO of Reddit, is currently accused of running a big [P]onzi scheme worth millions of dollars — why haven’t you heard of it?” one user posted.
“Because it is being deleted off most subs,” the user, lukeyflukey, wrote, quickly gained nearly 2,000 comments. Many were from users scratching their heads over the “disappointing” deletions. They took issue with the changing reasons given for taking down the news stories.
One user called the deletions “a f—ing embarrassment.”
“Wow all the posts from when this first hit the front page are just gone,” wrote a Reddit user. “They aren’t [deleted], they’re just gone. Not a single trace of any of them left. The f— reddit?”
One Reddit user posted five examples of Fletcher posts being removed and cried foul.
Lawyers for Pao’s former employer, Kleiner Perkins, which she unsuccessfully sued for gender discrimination, had alleged that the $US16 million ($A19.8 million) suit was partly motivated by Fletcher’s financial woes.
The move by Kleiner plus the controversial deletions from Reddit were “like jet fuel for conspiracy theorists”, the New York Post wrote.
Originally published as Reddit cracks down on harassment
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