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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Journal of data mining and digital humanities Vol. NLP4DH
Main Authors:	Nakajima Wickham, Elissa, Öhman, Emily
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	INRIA 30.05.2022 Nicolas Turenne
Subjects:	[info.info-cl]computer science [cs]/computation and language [cs.cl] [shs.droit]humanities and social sciences/law [shs.info]humanities and social sciences/library and information sciences Computation and Language Computer Science Humanities and Social Sciences Law Library and information sciences
ISSN:	2416-5999, 2416-5999
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	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.
ISSN:	2416-5999 2416-5999
DOI:	10.46298/jdmdh.9226