Reddit will start suspending users who consistently upvote rule-breaking content

Reddit is cracking down on users who help boost policy-breaking content on its platform.

In an annual transparency report published by Reddit yesterday, the platform’s CEO, Steve Huffman, highlighted its efforts to remove content that violates its community guidelines.

In addition to relating statistics on its efforts – it took down 200,000 pieces of offending content and removed 56,000 accounts in 2019 – Huffman also detailed a new and substantial shift in its ‘quarantine’ policy.

CEO Steve Huffamn said that Reddit will begin punishing users who promote rule-breaking content by upvoting it on the platform. Suspensions 

According to the CEO, Reddit will now impugn users who are found to frequently promote offending content by upvoting (Reddits version of a ‘like’ on Instagram or Facebook). 

‘Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension,’ wrote in the report.

‘We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.’

The move will be a harsher turn compared to Reddit’s prior policies which focused mostly on moderators and subreddits as a whole – a decision that Huffman says didn’t quite meet the mark on its missions to curb undesirable content. 

‘When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes,’ writes Huffman.

‘While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community.’

As noted by Gizmodo, the move likely isn’t just about attempting to prune out fringe content on the platform – some of which was rooted in fascist and Nazi ideology – it is also about courting more advertisers. 

Part of the impetus for its new policy on upvoting content is making it easier to court advertisers to the platform. The less unwanted content appears on Reddit, the more likely advertisers are to promote their products (stock)

Subreddits subject to the platform’s quarantine policy are not just partially blockaded from other users on Reddit, they’re also prevented from featuring paid advertisements. 

That means by removing users who consistently upvote unwanted content, Reddit will likely have an easier time monetizing content that exists on its platform and less chance that an ad will appear next to hate speech.

For Reddit in particular, the ability to deter those users is particularly important since upvotes often dictate what’s on the front page of Reddit and end up representing the rest of its platform.