Hate speech, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Changing Policies of Reddit
This study addresses the problem of understanding how online platform policies evolve in response to societal changes, which is relevant for researchers and policymakers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The paper analyzes changes in Reddit's content policies and user attitudes by examining comments on five admin posts about policy updates, using topic modeling to track discourse shifts around hate speech and content limitations. It finds a clear shift linked to societal upheaval and new regulations, contributing to hate speech moderation discussions.
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.