Reddit has cracked down on boards dedicated to Nazi, white supremacist, and generally extremist ideologies, after updating its policies to ban content “that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people”.

Subreddits banned and removed include r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, r/far_right, r/DylannRoofInnocent and r/whitesarecriminals.

In addition to that, the news aggregation and discussion site is also clamping down on content that “glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals”.

Though these updated policies may sound straightforward, the new policy also says that there are exceptions to the rule. These exceptions can be if the content is educational, newsworthy, artistic, satire, or documentary. Most of these exceptions are all well and good, but it needs to be clearer how content displaying violence against an individual, group, or animal could be deemed artistic or satire.

“In particular, we found that the policy regarding ‘inciting’ violence was too vague, and so we have made an effort to adjust it to be more clear and comprehensive,” said Reddit administrator landofblasters. “This applies to all content on Reddit, including memes, CSS/community styling, flair, subreddit names, and usernames.

“We understand that enforcing this policy may often require subjective judgment, so all of the usual caveats apply with regard to content that is newsworthy, artistic, educational, satirical, etc, as mentioned in the policy. Context is key.”

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