In July, newly appointed Reddit CEO Steve Huffman tried striking a balance between maintaining the community site's free-speech aspirations and toning down "offensive" content by "reclassifying" its most controversial "subreddit" communities. Certain subreddits that didn't necessarily break the site's content policy, particularly ones that revolved around racism, would be placed behind a consent and e-mail verification gate, removed from public search results, and disconnected from the site's ad sales.
On Wednesday, that general stance remained in place, only now with a new content policy that subreddits can be banned for violating. As a result, Huffman took to the official Announcements subreddit to share that updated policy while confirming that a slew of subreddits, particularly ones with racists slurs, had been banned as a result.
Huffman confirmed in a follow-up comment that subreddits such as "CoonTown" had been banned because they "exist[ed] solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else." That phrase does not currently exist in Reddit's content policy page, but other similarly broad conditions do, including only offering "some guidelines" for what's not acceptable and a warning that "looking for loopholes is a waste of time."
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