Social news sharing website Reddit has finally cracked down on blatantly racist content following the release of a new content policy Wednesday.

The new policy, detailed by Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman in a post to Reddit, is claimed to be a consolidation of various rules and policies that Reddit has accumulated over the years into a single set of guidelines that can be used going forward.

The only noticeable change to past practices at Reddit is the introduction of a new “Quarantine” policy that sees the site applying a set of restrictions that will result in subreddits with “objectionable content” only being viewable to users who explicitly opt-in.

Causing some concern in terms of free speech given that bullying, social justice warrior subreddits supported by Reddit admins such as r/ShitRedditSays pretty much object to everything, “objectionable content” is defined as anything considered extremely offensive to the “average” redditor.

In a surprising move, given that the new content policy doesn’t specifically forbid it, a number of horrifically racist subreddits have been banned on the basis that they “violate the spirit of the policy by making Reddit worse for everyone else.”

Banned subreddits include /r/CoonTown, /r/WatchNiggersDie, /r/bestofcoontown, /r/koontown, /r/CoonTownMods, and /r/CoonTownMeta.

In a discussion on the announcement post, Hoffman responded to a query in regards to the likelihood that moderators of such subreddits will simply set up a new subreddit under a different name, saying that “when something gets banned the mods often attempt to recreate the same communities, which we try and stay on top of, so it’s an ongoing process today.”

Good and bad

The new, consolidated content policy is a welcomed move by Reddit in that it clears up various disparate rules and interpretations of rules in the past, presenting a document that redditors can use a basis to know if what they are doing is within the rules of the site.

Few will shed tears at the banning of the racist subreddits, and there’s zero question that Reddit is better off without them, but it does raise some questions around Reddit’s commitment to free speech.

People love to use the quote wrongly attributed to Voltaire about defending the right to free speech, but there is a far better quote on the subject from former U.S. Supreme Court and Nuremberg Trials Judge Robert H. Jackson: “The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.”

Hopefully now that Reddit has purged itself of some of their more clearly abhorrent subreddits that it doesn’t go further in trying to police speech which they don’t agree with on the basis that it is politically incorrect or that it offends social justice warriors.