Elissa Nakajima Wickham ; Emily Öhman - Hate speech, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Changing Policies of Reddit

jdmdh:9226 - Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities, May 30, 2022, NLP4DH - https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.9226
Hate speech, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Changing Policies of RedditArticle

Authors: Elissa Nakajima Wickham 1; Emily Öhman ORCID1

  • 1 School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University

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.


Volume: NLP4DH
Published on: May 30, 2022
Accepted on: April 15, 2022
Submitted on: March 18, 2022
Keywords: [SHS.INFO]Humanities and Social Sciences/Library and information sciences,[INFO.INFO-CL]Computer Science [cs]/Computation and Language [cs.CL],[SHS.DROIT]Humanities and Social Sciences/Law

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