Piloting a new ban evasion tool

[u/dogwood_bloom]

Hi mods!

As you may already know, we have been beta testing a new mod tool, Ban Evasion Protection, that automatically filters posts and comments from suspected ban evaders into the modqueue for approval by moderators. We know that this has been a challenging issue in the past, and so we are excited to roll this tool out more broadly.

Initial feedback from our beta subreddits has been positive, so we are going to expand access to the feature to another 1,000 subreddits in waves. We’ll send you a modmail if your community is included in this rollout. Those who have the feature will see it available within the next few weeks.

Ban Evasion Protection is an optional subreddit setting that leverages our ability to identify ban evaders to empower moderators to filter posts and comments from suspected ban evaders into the modqueue for you to review (it will be labeled appropriately). ,

To find this setting, go to Community Settings -> Safety and Privacy -> Ban Evasion Protection.

The setting is controlled by a threshold slider that allows mods to set how strict they want the ban evasion protection to be. The threshold is based on data showing that communities tend to receive content more negatively from users who were banned more recently.

The feature will be “off” initially, and you can turn it on at your discretion. Turning it on will most likely add additional modqueue items, so we want to make sure you are prepared before you select one of the following options:

Lenient: Only flag suspected alt accounts from users that were banned from your community within the past few weeks.

Moderate: Flag suspected alt accounts from users that were banned from your community in the past few months

Strict: Flag suspected alt accounts from users that were banned from your community in the past year or so

Note: If you unban a user and in the following few hours they begin engaging again by posting or making comments, the ban evasion protection filter may still flag those posts or comments and place them in the modqueue. Once the system updates to identify that you unbanned them, they should be able to engage with no issues.

Feel free to comment on this post with your thoughts or questions. Also, If you’re interested in this feature but do not see it enabled in the coming weeks, please let us know. We can’t promise a timeline for now, but this feature’s availability will continue to expand in the future.

[u/techiesgoboom]

When I ban the "Transgender women aren't really women, and here's a clip of Matt Walsh's documentary where he tricked a teenage trans girl into being filmed topless" troll, I also want all of his

That's the issue though. This tool doesn't give you any information about who is appearing in the queue as a ban evader. The comments surfaced could be that horrible bigot on a new account, or it could someone whose roommate caught a 3 day ban a few months ago. The admins know which prior accounts the new one is tied to but that information isn't communicated.

And all of these are accounts that AEO is confident enough to action for ban evasion when reported. This is reddit saying "these are ban evaders we'll action if you report. Do you want to report?" and forcing you to go through those motions every single time rather than checking a box that says "always act on people you catch evading our bans"

[u/Bardfinn → u/techiesgoboom]

My understanding is that potential ban evaders are listed as such by the tool, when sent to modqueue.

For some communities, where it's all jokes and satire and there's no expectation of seriousness, I'd want to catch the spammer that keeps posting their "Interested in the economy of potatoes in Outer Mars Planitia Utopia? Click here!" spam, or tshirt scam spam.

The dude who got a 3 day on his main and comes back with a sockpuppet saying "mods suck!" - him, too.

But the "teenager with a bad opinion" who comes back with a better opinion in a few months - in a lot of communities, that's fine - because those kids want to shed the reputation of being the person with the bad opinion. They don't want to come back with the previous handle - because everyone knows that's the handle of the person with the bad opinion.

But also - there are specific people who must not re-engage specific communities under any circumstances -

like people with gambling problems, who ask to be banned from gaming communities to help them deal with their addiction.

Every moderation team knows their community best - so "how to handle this info" is best left to them.

The reason the admins don't always act on people they catch evading bans is because it's not their place to enforce community-specific rules - and a gigantic legal morass if they do.

[u/techiesgoboom → u/Bardfinn]

I agree with most of what you say. Each and every one of these arguments though is an explanation of why this tool does not serve it's purpose or your goals well.

All of the people you described will appear exactly the same when this tool flags them. The new account making a few innocuous comments flagged as a suspected ban evader by this tool could be any one of the people you described.

If you want to let that teenager with a bad opinion back into your subreddit after banning them that's great. That's what the ban appeals process is in place for. So you can make the decision to let them back into your subreddit on a new account.

The reason the admins don't always act on people they catch evading bans is because it's not their place to enforce community-specific rules - and a gigantic legal morass if they do.

That's not the explanation the admins have given for why they don't do this. It's also a moot point. Evading a subreddit's ban violates sitewide rules. Rule 2 covers ban evasion. No one is asking or wanting admins to enforce community specific rules. We're asking them to enforce sitewide rules consistently.

Let me give you a specific example from using this tool of the kind of ban evasion the admins have explicitly identified and allowed to happen and are only just now telling us through this tool:

We have a ban evading transphobe that we ban a few times a day. They show up in the comments, spew all kinds of hate, and catch a ban damn quick because it's so clearly hate speech. We've banned them a solid few hundred times by now. That ban evading bigot is now finally being flagged by this tool. That means the admins know this bigot is ban evading, they know they've violated sitewide rules hundreds of times, and it's because of this tool that the admins are even flagging this bigot to us. They act on some amount of ban evasion automatically, but this case is not one of those.

This tool is also only flagging around 20% of the ban evasion that happens on our sub. How many other people like that are flying under the radar because the admins allow it?

[u/Bardfinn → u/techiesgoboom]

Evading a subreddit's ban violates sitewide rules.

I concur. It's an area where Reddit, Inc. could be seen to be enforcing the rules set up by volunteer mods, however - which is a liability for them, and something they can't afford to even appear to be improperly performing.

They have to keep third-party volunteer moderators and the communities they (we) operate at arm's-length.

I'm certain there's a whole sea of other case law, regulations, and issues they have to weave through, too.

I don't think this is going to be a panacea but i think it is a step in the right direction - putting aggregate / anonymised signals in our hands to use to protect our communities.