Hi everyone,

At Reddit, we’re always looking for ways to keep the platform human, transparent, and respectful of your privacy. Today we’re sharing some clarifications to of the : "Don't break the site." While the spirit of the rule hasn’t changed, we are adding specific details to address platform misuse and behavior that degrades the experience of Redditors.

What is changing?
We’ve updated the policy language to be more explicit about what it means to “interfere with normal use of Reddit”. We are also connecting Rule 8 to our User Agreement and Developer Terms, so the ground rules are clear for everyone – whether you’re a user, developer, or an entity interacting with our services.

Here are the key highlights:  

• We are using the term “app” to include everything from traditional programs to bots, AI agents, and non-human operated accounts.  

• As we’ve , to remain in good standing, apps must identify themselves and . This supports our app labeling initiative so you know when you’re interacting with an automated account.

• We’re reflecting long-standing requirements from our and directly into Rule 8, specifically: 

  • Respecting user deletions. This has always been the rule, and we’re reiterating it here: if a Redditor deletes their content, apps are prohibited from continuing to display or store local copies of that content.

  • No unauthorized scraping. Accessing or collecting Reddit data continues to be a violation of our terms.   

• We are prohibiting the creation of accounts through automated or "agentic" means. While we’re okay with posting from a single automated account –if and otherwise within our rules–, using scripts or AI to spin up dozens or hundreds of accounts remains a violation of our site wide rules. 

Why are we making this update?

These changes are part of our commitment to foster a trusted ecosystem for Redditors and ensure that Reddit remains a place for .

Hello redditors,

This is from Reddit’s Trust & Safety Policy team! It's that time of the year, and we're back with new data and insights in our and periodic updates to the Reddit Rules. 

Reddit Transparency Report

Reddit’s biannual Transparency Report highlights the impact of content moderation efforts by community moderators and admins 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 July through December 2025. During this time, redditors created 2.2 billion posts and comments to share headlines, debate opinions, and discuss stories with real, human perspectives across tens of thousands of Reddit communities. Individual users also exchanged 3.9 billion private messages and chats in 1:1 or small group, real-time conversations. 

Here are some key highlights of our always-on content moderation efforts to safeguard open discourse on Reddit:

Keeping Reddit Safe

A total of 154,198,211 posts and comments were removed by mods and admins, or deleted by the posters of this content themselves. In addition, admins were responsible for the removal of 2,421,864 private messages and chats (only admins can execute these removals). These actions occurred through a combination of manual and automated means, including enhanced AI-based methods:

• For posts and comments, 86.4% of reports/flags that resulted in admin review were surfaced proactively by our systems before users had to report this content. Similarly, for chat messages, Reddit automation accounted for 99% of reports/flags to admins.

• Across content types, the majority of admin removals were for spam (54%), with the remaining share of admin removals focused on other Reddit Rules violations.

• We improved and expanded our automated systems supporting enforcement against hate and harassment in posts and comments, which led to significant increases (+200%) in related actions.

• Through our with the nonprofit SWGfl to implement their , we've been able to meaningfully increase proactive detection of potential non-consensual intimate media in chat, which led to a 89.6% increase in chat messages removed for this violation compared to the previous reporting period.

The Role of Moderators

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

• Mods removed over 81 million posts and comments over this period, including removals that aren’t necessarily tied to Reddit Rules violations (e.g., off-topic or improperly formatted content).

• 68.6% of mod removals were handled by automated systems, such as or moderation apps built on (Reddit's developer platform). 

• We investigated and actioned 878 Moderator Code of Conduct reports. Admins also sent 2,250 messages as part of educational and enforcement outreach efforts.

• Spam makes up the overwhelming majority of community ban reasons in this period (76.7%), while the remaining bans were largely due to communities being unmoderated (98.4% of the remaining bans).

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 9.7% more legal requests to remove content, and saw a 4% increase in non-emergency legal requests for account information compared to the last report. 

  • We took no action on 79.9% of requests to remove content (e.g. if the request was incomplete, overbroad, or inconsistent with or human rights standards).

  • We received 1,223 requests for account information from global government or law enforcement agencies and disclosed information in response to 861 of these requests. The vast majority of these requests were part of standard law enforcement investigations. 

    • We share information with any government, and we carefully scrutinize every request to ensure it is legally valid and narrowly tailored, pushing back when these requirements aren’t met. You can see more details on how we’ve responded in the latest report.

  • Importantly, we caught and rejected 26 fraudulent legal requests (15 requests to remove content; 11 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 to read the rest of the after you check out the Reddit Rules updates below.

Clarifying Rule 1 policies

As you may know, part of our work is evolving and providing more clarity around on an ongoing basis. Over the past several months, we reviewed our enforcement guidelines and processes and engaged in conversations with mods from our to collect valuable perspectives. Throughout this process, our goal has been to uphold the spirit of Rule 1—”Remember the Human”—reaffirm protections against evolving forms of abuse, and ensure that Reddit remains a place where people can freely and safely share, debate, or criticize a range of ideas or beliefs.

As a result, we have revised our Help Center articles pertaining to the , , and policies to provide more examples of what may or may not be violating in order to set clearer expectations with our community and make Rule 1 easier to understand. Importantly, the substance of these long-standing policies remains the same.

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

Here at Reddit, we take youth safety online seriously and believe child safety measures are crucial to a healthier internet overall. It’s why we’ve already proactively put global protections for minors in place and will keep working to strengthen them. It’s also why we have never marketed to young people and are with Australia’s new Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA) law.

That said, we believe there are more effective ways for the Australian government to accomplish our shared goal of protecting youth, and the SMMA law carries some serious privacy and political expression issues for everyone on the internet. So, we are filing an application to have the law reviewed by Australia’s High Court. You can read our application

What this case is about

While we agree with the importance of protecting people under 16, this law has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions), and creating an illogical patchwork of which platforms are included and which aren’t. 

Even the eSafety Commissioner said the law’s approach is . Many and many of our own users have raised similar concerns.

“There are less restrictive alternatives available that could achieve the aim of protecting children and young people from online harms, but without having such a significant negative impact on other human rights.”

Lastly, this law is applied to Reddit inaccurately, since we’re a forum primarily for adults and we don’t have the traditional social media features the government has taken issue with. 

What this case is not about

This case is not an attempt to avoid compliance. We are with the law and will continue engaging with eSafety.

This is also not an effort to retain young users for business reasons. Unlike other platforms included under this law, the vast majority of Redditors are adults, we don’t market or target advertising to children under 18, and had an age rating of “17+” in the Apple App Store prior to the law. Simply put, users under 16 are not a substantial market segment for Reddit and we don’t intend them to be.

This case is also not about opposing child safety measures or even regulation. There are more targeted, privacy-preserving measures to protect young people online without resorting to blanket bans. For example, age assurance at the device or app store level – like , among the first of its kind in the world – would be easier for consumers (including parents) and better protect user privacy than forcing age verification across a bunch of platforms. 

Despite the best intentions, this law is missing the mark on actually protecting young people online. So, while we will comply with this law, we have a responsibility to share our perspective and see that it is reviewed by the courts. 

As usual, we’ll stick around and answer your questions.