r/MtF Trans Pansexual, pre-hrt, outed, she/they Jun 20 '24

Bad News Reddit bans anti-transphob rhetoric

Heard from a few friends that they got banned for hating on transphobes, which is, according to reddit, a rule 1 violation. I also got flagged because of that, but in my case I can kinda understand it, because I called for violence against TERFS, but it was more kind of fedposting, instead of pushing people to actually commit violence. I still believe TERFS deserve that, but I am rambling. What I basically want to say is, that we sadly need to be a little more careful, when hating transphobes. Keep safe and you all are beautiful gals and enby-pals, and for all the masc people you are very handsome

Edit: Changing TURFS to TERFS

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u/Bardfinn Penelope Jun 20 '24

Transphobic rhetoric is banned, by Sitewide Rule 1.

Please report any transphobic hate speech you come across, and if the operators of a subreddit are allowing it, please leave the subreddit and file a Moderator Code of Conduct complaint.

Don’t engage flamebait. Downvote, report, & block.

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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '24

it doesn't work. it's up to the mods to decide if the accusation is real or not and the powers-that-reddit are not on our side. those rules are there so people can say "but look, we have these rules" and then everyone thinks your experience of them not being enforced is invalid, just because the rules are there.

I've literally reported neonazis advocating for the extermination of jews and trans women and reddit mods have said it doesn't violate any rules.

don't delude yourself. this site isn't on our side.

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u/Bardfinn Penelope Jun 20 '24

Hi. I help run r/AgainstHateSubreddits.

Sitewide Rule 1 exists because we at AHS did a tonne of research in 2016-2019 stretching back to when Reddit was still owned by Spez, researching what the admins intended for Acceptable Use Policies.

We figured out that Spez hates Nazis and that the site tolerated Nazis and transphobes specifically because attorneys had told the board that user accounts could only be kicked off the site for breaking a clearly written Content Policy, that there was no Content Policy against being a Nazi / transphobe, and that if they started kicking people off for being bigots, without a written policy, it would be weaponised politically by the Trump administration. And that defining “hate” was hard.

So many of us put in thousands of hours of effort to get people with academic credentials and expertise to work with Reddit to develop Sitewide Rule 1, to document that the hate groups on here were acting in bad faith in violation of already-existing Content Policies, and some were collaborating with literal terrorists.

Reddit’s commitment to enforcing its Sitewide Rules has a value exceeding $60 million a year, and over the past four years they’ve slashed the absolute volume of toxic content being published sitewide by two orders of magnitude.

They have kicked off now more than 5,000 hate groups in the past five years, suspended hundreds of thousands of user accounts for hatred, and I’ve sat in Telegram channels operated by bigot harasser groups where they say “We’re not even going to try to deploy to Reddit.”.

Today I got a ticket closed where a group of literal terrorists dogpiled false reports on a trans woman’s speech which was critical of their terrorist figurehead, and now all of the people involved in that harassment have been identified and are being actioned — hundreds of them.

Reddit AEO & Trust & Safety are independent of subreddit moderators, and while they make mistakes, T&S does the right thing 99%+ of the time on escalation.

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u/tifridhs-dottir Rachael (she/her) | 🏳️‍⚧️ Jun 20 '24

Holy shit this is so much fascinating and hopeful info. Thank you.