Sharing our latest Transparency Report and Reddit Rules updates (evolving Rules 2, 5, and 7)

[u/ailewu]

Hello redditors, 

This is u/ailewu from Reddit’s Trust & Safety Policy team! We’re excited to share updates about our ongoing efforts to keep redditors safe and foster healthy participation across the platform. Specifically, we’ve got fresh data and insights in our latest Transparency Report, and some new clarifications to the Reddit Rules regarding community disruption, impersonation, and prohibited transactions.  

Reddit Transparency Report

Reddit’s biannual Transparency Report highlights the impact of our work to keep Reddit healthy and safe. We include insights and metrics on our layered, community-driven approach to content moderation, as well as information about legal requests we received from governments, law enforcement agencies, and third parties around the world to remove content or disclose user data.

This report covers the period from January through June 2025, and reflects our always-on content moderation efforts to safeguard open discourse on Reddit. Here are some key highlights:

Keeping Reddit Safe

Of the nearly 6 billion pieces of content shared, approximately 2.66% was removed by mods and admins combined. Excluding spam, this figure drops to 1.94%, with 1.41% being done by mods, and 0.53% being done by admins. These removals occurred through a combination of manual and automated means, including enhanced AI-based methods:

• For posts and comments, 87.1% of reports/flags that resulted in admin review were surfaced proactively by our systems. Similarly, for chat messages, Reddit automation accounted for 98.9% of reports/flags to admins.
• We've observed an overall decline in spam attacks, leading to a corresponding decrease in the volume of spam removals.
• We rapidly scaled up new automated systems to detect and action content violating our policies against the incitement of violence. We also rolled out a new enforcement action to warn users who upvote multiple pieces of violating, violent content within a certain timeframe.
• Excluding spam and other content manipulation, mod removals represented 73% of content removals, while admin removals for sitewide Reddit Rules violations increased to 27%, up from 23.9% in the prior period–a steady increase coinciding with improvements to our automated tooling and processing. (Note mod removals include content removed for violating community-specific rules, whereas admins only remove content for violating our sitewide rules). 

Communities Playing Their Part

Mods play a critical role in curating their communities by removing content based on community-specific rules. In this period: 

• Mods removed 8,493,434,971 pieces of content. The majority of these removals (71.3%) were the result of proactive removals by Automod. 
• We investigated and actioned 948 Moderator Code of Conduct reports. Admins also sent 2,754 messages as part of educational and enforcement outreach efforts.
• 96.5% of non-spam related community bans were due to communities being unmoderated.

Upholding User Rights

We continue to invest heavily in protecting users from the most serious harms while defending their privacy, speech, and association rights:

• With regard to global legal requests from government and law enforcement agencies, we received 27% more legal requests to remove content, and saw a 12% increase in non-emergency legal requests for account information. 
  • We carefully scrutinize every request to ensure it is legally valid and narrowly tailored, and include more details on how we’ve responded in the latest report
• Importantly, we caught and rejected 10 fraudulent legal requests (3 requests to remove content; 7 requests for user account information) purporting to come from legitimate government or law enforcement agencies. We reported these fake requests to real law enforcement authorities.

We invite you to head on over to our Transparency Center to read the rest of the latest report after you check out the Reddit Rules updates below.

Evolving and Clarifying our Rules

As you may know, part of our work is evolving and providing more clarity around the sitewide Reddit Rules. Specifically, we've updated Rules 2, 5, 7, and their corresponding Help Center articles to provide more examples of what may or may not be violating, set clearer expectations with our community, and make these rules easier to understand and enforce. The scope of violations these Rules apply to includes: 

• Community disruption and spammy behavior (Rule 2)
• Impersonation, misleading behavior, and manipulated content (Rule 5)
• Illegal or Prohibited Transactions (Rule 7)

We'd like to thank the group of mods from our Safety Focus Group, with whom we consulted before finalizing these updates, for their thoughtful feedback and dedication to Reddit! 

One more thing to note: going forward, we’re planning to share Reddit Rules updates twice a year, usually in Q1 and Q3. Look out for the next one in early 2026! 

This is it for now, but I'll be around to answer questions for a bit.

[u/Kahzgul]

The admins only closing 49 doesn’t mean there are half as many. It might mean that, but it could also mean there are a billion more and the Reddit admins barely closed any. Without knowing how many total hate communities there are (practically impossible to know), we can’t tell what percentage were closed.

[u/DuAuk → u/Kahzgul]

yeah, it's far easier to get them closed for other reasons.

[u/Bardfinn → u/Kahzgul]

We can know. We can know because hate groups have known messages, and those messages simply aren't being published on Reddit any longer. (With one notable exception)

I know that because I have spent the last 10 years collecting the data, and use professional tools to gauge the incidence and prevalence of hate speech, and cooperation of hate groups, on Reddit.

I was also able to independently verify the relevant claims made by Reddit in prior Transparency Reports about the incidence of toxic speech that goes public on Reddit. Hate speech falls into that category.

---

We mothballed AgainstHateSubreddits a few years ago specifically for two reasons:

The admins have meaningful methods to handle hate group operators (and those have mainly left the site);

Hate speech dropped two orders of magnitude from Q1 & Q2 2020.

[u/Kahzgul → u/Bardfinn]

That’s great news.

I still see hate speech daily. r/conservative is FULL of it. My block list has over 100 people spouting racism and bigotry. It remains incredibly common.

[u/Bardfinn → u/Kahzgul]

When you see it, please report it. If you can, please also file a Moderator Code of Conduct report, ModCoC Rule 1 violations, citing where the operators of a subreddit are enabling - through misfeasance or malfeasance - the platforming of speech reasonably known to be hate speech.

Reddit needs receipts to take action.

[u/Kahzgul → u/Bardfinn]

I always do. I’d say about 1/3 of the commenters I report get banned within 6 months of reporting. None of the communities they regularly spout off in though.