Does My Cat Need To Be Registered To Get Vaccination Reddit

"Happy" Wednesday anybody

As u/spez mentioned in his announcement post terminal week, COVID has been hard on all of us. It will likely go down as one of the most defining periods of our generation. Many of us have lost loved ones to the virus. It has caused confusion, fear, frustration, and served to further divide us. It is my job to oversee the enforcement of our policies on the platform. I've never professed to be perfect at this. Our policies, and how we enforce them, evolve with fourth dimension. Nosotros base these evolutions on two things: user trends and data. Last year, after nosotros rolled out the largest policy change in Reddit'southward history, I shared a post on the prevalence of hateful content on the platform. Today, many of our users are telling us that they are confused and fifty-fifty frustrated with our treatment of COVID deprival content on the platform, so information technology seemed like the right fourth dimension for us to share some data around the topic.

Analysis of Covid Denial

We sought to reply the following questions:

How often is this content submitted?
What is the customs reception?
Where are the concentration centers for this content?

Below is a chart of all of the COVID-related content that has been posted on the platform since January 1, 2020. We are using common keywords and known COVID focused communities to mensurate this. The volume has been relatively flat since mid terminal year, just since July (coinciding with the increased prevalence of the Delta variant), we accept seen a sizable increment.

r/redditsecurity - COVID denialism and policy clarifications

COVID Content Submissions

The trend is even more notable when we await at COVID-related content reported to us past users. Since August, we see approximately 2.5k reports/day vs an average of effectually 500 reports/solar day a year ago. This is approximately 2.v% of all COVID related content.

r/redditsecurity - COVID denialism and policy clarifications

Reports on COVID Content

While this data lone does not tell us that COVID denial content on the platform is increasing, it is certainly an indicator. To help brand this story more clear, nosotros looked into potential networks of denial communities. There are some well known subreddits dedicated to discussing and challenging the policy response to COVID, and we used this equally a basis to identify other similar subreddits. I'll refer to these equally "loftier signal subs."

Last yr, we saw that less than 1% of COVID content came from these high indicate subs, today we run into that it's over iii%. COVID content in these communities is around 3x more than likely to be reported than in other communities (this is fairly consistent over the terminal twelvemonth). Together with data above we can infer that at that place has been an increase in COVID deprival content on the platform, and that increment has been more than pronounced since July. While the increase is suboptimal, it is noteworthy that the big majority of the content is exterior of these COVID denial subreddits. It's also hard to put an exact number on the increment or the overall volume.

An important role of our moderation structure is the community members themselves. How are users responding to COVID-related posts? How much visibility practice they have? Is there a difference in the response in these loftier bespeak subs than the rest of Reddit?

High Signal Subs

Content positively received - 48% on posts, 43% on comments
Median exposure - 119 viewers on posts, 100 viewers on comments
Median vote count - 21 on posts, 5 on comments

All Other Subs

Content positively received - 27% on posts, 41% on comments
Median exposure - 24 viewers on posts, 100 viewers on comments
Median vote count - 10 on posts, 6 on comments

This tells us that in these loftier signal subs, there is generally less of the critical feedback mechanism than we would await to encounter in other non-denial based subreddits, which leads to content in these communities being more visible than the typical COVID post in other subreddits.

Interference Assay

In addition to this, we accept besides been investigating the claims around targeted interference by some of these subreddits. While nosotros want to be a place where people tin explore unpopular views, it is never acceptable to interfere with other communities. Claims of "brigading" are common and often hard to quantify. Nonetheless, in this example, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more than mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that accept been discussing COVID restrictions). This beliefs continued even after a alert was issued from our team to the Mods. r/NoNewNormal is the only subreddit in our list of loftier betoken subs where nosotros have identified this behavior and it is one of the largest sources of customs interference we surfaced as part of this work (we will exist investigating a few other unrelated subreddits as well).

Assay into Activeness

We are taking several actions:

Ban r/NoNewNormal immediately for breaking our rules confronting brigading
Quarantine 54 boosted COVID denial subreddits under Dominion 1
Build a new reporting feature for moderators to allow them to better provide the states signal when they run into community interference. It will accept us a few days to get this built, and nosotros will subsequently evaluate the usefulness of this feature.

Clarifying our Policies

Nosotros also hear the feedback that our policies are not clear effectually our handling of health misinformation. To accost this, we wanted to provide a summary of our current approach to misinformation/disinformation in our Content Policy.

Our approach is broken out into (1) how we deal with health misinformation (falsifiable health related information that is disseminated regardless of intent), (2) health disinformation (falsifiable health information that is disseminated with an intent to mislead), (iii) problematic subreddits that pose misinformation risks, and (4) problematic users who invade other subreddits to "debate" topics unrelated to the wants/needs of that community.

Health Misinformation. We accept long interpreted our rule against posting content that "encourages" physical harm, in this help eye article, as covering wellness misinformation, meaning falsifiable wellness data that encourages or poses a significant take a chance of physical harm to the reader. For example, a post pushing a verifiably fake "cure" for cancer that would actually result in harm to people would violate our policies.
Health Disinformation. Our dominion confronting impersonation, every bit described in this help middle commodity, extends to "manipulated content presented to mislead." Nosotros have interpreted this rule as covering health disinformation, meaning falsifiable health information that has been manipulated and presented to mislead. This includes falsified medical information and faked WHO/CDC advice.
Problematic subreddits. We have long applied quarantine to communities that warrant additional scrutiny. The purpose of quarantining a customs is to prevent its content from being accidentally viewed or viewed without appropriate context.
Customs Interference. Also relevant to the discussion of the activities of problematic subreddits, Dominion two forbids users or communities from "adulterous" or engaging in "content manipulation" or otherwise interfering with or disrupting Reddit communities. We accept interpreted this rule as forbidding communities from manipulating the platform, creating inauthentic conversations, and picking fights with other communities. We typically enforce Dominion 2 through our anti-brigading efforts, although it is still an example of bad behavior that has led to bans of a variety of subreddits.

As I mentioned at the showtime, we never claim to exist perfect at these things but our goal is to constantly evolve. These prevalence studies are helpful for evolving our thinking. We also demand to evolve how we communicate our policy and enforcement decisions. As always, I will stick around to answer your questions and will likewise be joined by u/traceroo our GC and head of policy.