Hate speech, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Changing Policies of Reddit

The gist The paper examines how shifts in Reddit's content policies and user attitudes reflect broader societal upheavals and evolving regulatory philosophies concerning hate speech.

Context of Policy Changes

The study focuses on five updates to Reddit Content Policy made by admins between 2015 and 2020, using topic modeling to analyze the discourse of general Reddit users in reaction to these changes. These updates cover a spectrum from initial ambivalence toward hate speech in 2015, introducing concepts like Quarantining a community in 2015b, clarifying rules on violent content in 2017, and finally declaring a stance against hate speech in the 2020 update. The initial posts showed ambivalence around the concept of hate speech and focused more on offensive content.

User Discourse Evolution

Topic modeling reveals a clear shift in user discourse across the policy updates. For the 2015 AMA, salient topics revolved around the need for more transparency around bans and rules, rules around brigading subreddits, and separating valid criticism from real threat. By contrast, the 2020 update's most salient topics express a collective desire of Redditors to create safety for marginalized groups, with specific talk around racism and to a lesser extent sexism. A new prevalent topic in 2020 was Chinese propaganda on the platform, often specifically regarding the subreddit r/Sino.

Philosophical Divide

The analysis highlights a tension between American and European philosophies regarding hate speech. Reddit's 2015 policy update mirrored sentiments of the US Supreme Court on hate speech, referring to the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate’. The EU, conversely, takes an opposite approach, viewing violent language as a threat to democratic freedom as a whole. The 2020 policy update reflects the European philosophy of compromise rather than the American philosophy of unregulated discussion.

Societal Reflection and Norm Socialization

The evolution of Reddit's content policy is evidence of the third process of socialization where norms are diffused, as seen in the EU's concentrated effort to socialize American tech platforms to its own conception of human rights and hate speech. The shift towards protecting marginalized groups by 2020 reflects a change in user consensus, as users came to conclude that by 2020, as shown by the topics brought up by Reddit users, they too had come to the same conclusion. This suggests that standards of hate speech removal on platforms have been accepted by a good portion of users as normal.

Future Directions

The research suggests future work could involve sentiment analysis to analyze the sentiments attached to each topic and using these sentiments as covariates in structural topic modeling. This could further explore the relationship between user attitudes and policy changes on other social media platforms both within and outside the scope of the EU. The paper ultimately concludes that hate speech removal is now standard practice in the minds of moderators and policymakers as well as users.

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Hate speech, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Changing Policies of Reddit. Elissa Nakajima Wickham Waseda University elissa@akane.waseda.jp Emily Öhman Waseda University ohman@waseda.jp ORC-iD: 0000-0003-1363-7361

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I. Introduction The peculiarities of online hate speech as compared to traditional, offline, hate speech has made it necessary to rapidly develop and implement laws regulating offensive speech online (Brown, 2018) The characteristics of online communities means that it is much easier for fringe ideals to gain foothold and members of such communities to spend their online lives in echo chambers of hate (Shaw, 2011), often targeting a specific group of people based on some real or perceived characteristic such as race, sex, sexuality, religion, and political beliefs The EU’s 2016 Code on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online (Code) introduced voluntary legislation that saw Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft commit to regulating hateful speech or speech that incites violence on their platforms By 2020 each platform had stringent guidelines and flagging systems to remove reports of hate speech (Aswad, 2016) Anu Bradford (2019) would attribute this shift in practices to what she defined as “The Brussels Effect”, or the regulatory power of the EU in certain markets to change standards of certain markets through their institutional capacity, willingness to create stringent rules, the relative market size of Europe, and the multilateral organization focusing on inelastic targets and non-divisible processes; meaning that their regulations had target aspects of the market that do not change, unlike capital or profit, and aspects that cannot be easily divided into separate processes to confront different standards of production In terms of the digital economy Bradford (2019) identified two aspects where the Brussels Effect was in full force, specifically, the areas of data protection and hate speech. She was able to identify both the de facto and de jure aspect of the Brussels Effect in terms of data protection, as the EU had passed the 2016 binding legislation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that forced a change in tech companies practices around the collection of user data The de facto and de jure aspect of the Brussels Effect on hate speech remained unexplored, as the EU had not passed any binding legislation around hate speech regulation in the digital economy and only had the voluntary Code in effect at the time of writing her book although currently, the binding version of the Code, The Digital Services Act (DSA) has been adopted and is in the process of being fully implemented at a later date

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Although the Code has been criticized by several scholars (see e.g. Aswad, 2016; Portaru, 2017; Alkiviadou, 2019) for both the privatization of hate speech making multinational private companies the arbiters of what constitutes legal and illegal hate speech and vague outcome reports (Portaru, 2017 - for the outcome report itself see Jourova, 2016) it has clearly facilitated change in how social media platforms deal with the datafication of hate (see e.g. Aswad, 2016; Laaksonen et al., 2020) As there is no universally accepted definition of hate speech (Nemes, 2010; Laaksonen, 2020) the private actors have little choice but to come up with their own definitions leading to vastly different policies on different social media platforms (Alkiviadou, 2019) Nonetheless, it is undeniable that the Code has greatly affected the content policies of all major social media platforms

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The change in Reddit Content policy represents a shift in practices from Reddit as a company, and this change necessitates the question of if general Reddit users have shifted their philosophy surrounding hate speech in line with the company For this reason, this paper utilizes topic modeling of comments made by general Reddit users on Reddit admins’ posts informing them of Content Policy updates to determine the general topics brought up in reaction to changing standards of what can and cannot be posted on the website This is done in order to determine if and how the general philosophy of Reddit users has shifted on the topics on censorship and freedom of speech We will first explain the context of the five content policy updates used for the analysis in this paper before presenting the data and methods used to conduct this analysis We will then explore the results before commenting on the change in the general lexicon of Reddit users and what it means for the future of social media platforms and further regulations of violent speech online

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For a more comprehensive investigation of the reddit data we here qualitatively outline the content of each Reddit update utilized in this paper. The Content Policy updates utilized in this paper begin in 2015, and end in 2020 The first update was made by the Reddit admin u/spez1 in 2015 entitled “Let’s Talk Content. AMA2 ” in r/announcements3 (Reddit - [u/spez], 2015a) This is the first time Reddit admins post about content restrictions on the website An excerpt from this post reads: As Reddit has grown, we've seen additional examples of how unfettered free speech can make Reddit a less enjoyable place to visit and can even cause people harm outside of Reddit. Earlier this year, Reddit took a stand and banned non-consensual pornography This was largely accepted by the community and the world is a better place as a result (Google and Twitter have followed suit) Part of the reason this went over so well was because there was a very clear line of what was unacceptable Part of the reason this went over so well was because there was a very clear line of what was unacceptable Reddit - [u/spez], 2015a

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3 Communities on Reddit are known as subreddits and are denoted with an r/ preceding the community name.

1. Enhanced Policy Alignment via Topic Modeling: Improve AI systems to automatically map user discourse against evolving content policies by utilizing structural topic modeling (STM) on comments reacting to policy updates, such as those in 2015, 2018, and 2020. This allows the system to determine if and how the general philosophy of Reddit users has shifted on the topics on censorship and freedom of speech.

2. Proactive Hate Speech Moderation: Develop moderation tools that can predict policy friction by analyzing user comments using topic models to identify emerging concerns, such as those related to inciting violence against a particular group or specific identity-based hate (e.g., racism, sexism). This enables platforms to address issues before they become widespread violations.

3. Contextual Nuance in Enforcement: Implement systems that understand the philosophical divide between US and EU approaches, recognizing that The freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate’” is viewed differently than the EU's approach, which views violent language as a threat to democratic freedom as a whole." This allows for context-aware application of rules based on whether the platform operates under an American or European normative framework.

4. Brigading and Manipulation Detection: Improve detection algorithms for coordinated harassment by focusing on topics identified in the data, such as brigading subreddits and related terms like harass, enabling systems to identify when users are engaged in practices where members of a specific Reddit community are encouraged to upvote specific, often offensive, content outside of the community itself.

5. Monitoring Evolving Extremist Narratives: Build systems capable of tracking the lifecycle of extremist ideologies by monitoring topics like Chinese propaganda on the platform or discussions around specific political subreddits (e.g., r/Sino). This helps in anticipating how narratives will evolve and where policy interventions are needed, as seen in the shift from discussing holocaust denial to broader concerns.

This paper examines the shift in focus on content policies and user attitudes on the social media platform Reddit. We do this by focusing on comments from general Reddit users from five posts made by admins (moderators) on updates to Reddit Content Policy. All five concern the nature of what kind of content is allowed to be posted on Reddit, and which measures will be taken against content that violates these policies. We use topic modeling to probe how the general discourse for Redditors has changed around limitations on content, and later, limitations on hate speech, or speech that incites violence against a particular group. We show that there is a clear shift in both the contents and the user attitudes that can be linked to contemporary societal upheaval as well as newly passed laws and regulations, and contribute to the wider discussion on hate speech moderation.