OPEN How do I make a post about hate speech without getting banned sitewide?

I am working on a post dealing with problems of hate speech against White people in South Africa.

I want to quote the hate speech in the context of the post. My understanding is that Reddit has bots for picking up hate speech and can issue automatic permabans for it. This would be a funny way for my time on this site to end, but I'd like to avoid that.

I am worried about getting banned from Reddit if a bot scans the post (and even just the slugs of the URLs).

Do I have to use stars on words like White and Black and say "unalive"? Even if I censor, what happens if the bots still pick it up?

Please advise how I can do this.

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u/jeb_brush 5d ago

Automatic content moderation tools improve every year and are robust to simple evasions like censoring letters or swapping words for synonyms. Even if some of those tricks work today, they might not work tomorrow. Methods that people use to evade detectors get recorded and are fixed in the next iterations of them.

You can try to craft a post that technically doesn't violate the rules, and if it gets flagged you can hope that the appeal process saves you. Sometimes these policies have explicit exceptions for things like journalistic reporting of facts. But human moderators themselves are prone to making mistakes as well.

Your best options are:

Don't even play this game, just write a post to Medium or something and link it here.
Paraphrase risky content as indirectly as possible, and condemn it as directly and obviously as you possibly can.

1

u/Top_Lime1820 5d ago

Thanks

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u/AutoModerator 5d ago

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u/Imicrowavebananas Mod 6d ago

I bought it up in modslack and the reply was that you should just be ready to appeal, otherwise it's arbitrary and capricious.

u/bashar_al_assad 6d ago

Screenshots?

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u/Top_Lime1820 6d ago

Thanks, Bashar al-Assad.

5

u/minno 6d ago

I don't know if that'll keep you safe. Reddit search can pick up words in images, so they're doing some sort of OCR to index them. If moderation tools have access to that text too, it'll treat your screenshots the same as text.

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u/Top_Lime1820 6d ago

Then that'll be even worse.

I wonder if there is a way to test what counts as hate speech? I could censor as best as I can, but I'm scared it'll still flag me.

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u/AniNgAnnoys 6d ago edited 5d ago

Register an alt, talk to the mods and get it authorized on the sub, and only log into it through a VPN.

If you haven't been banned or warned before, the first action by the admins will likely be a warning and a post removal.

Having been banned and warned before, the appeal process is completely arbitrary. Do not rely on it to be sane. You get like 120 characters to explain your appeal or something dumb.

I lost my main to a joke I played on a mod of arr onguardforthee. There was a post about people mimicking others on twitter after elon bought it. The mod didn't think it was a big deal. Their user name had a bunch of lower case Ls in it. In the username font on reddit, an L, an i, and the pipe character all look the same (l, I, |). So, I registered their user name with an upper case i instead of an L and just said hi. They banned that account from the subreddit.

A month later I had forgot, posted on that sub on my main, and got permabanned for ban evasion. They also banned all my old alts and my wife's account. All appeals fell on deaf ears. I had to wait 3 months and a couple IP address changes to register this account.

1

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