Popular online forum Reddit announced Thursday that it will use a new policy for harassment to make sure users have a pleasant experience while visiting its website.
As part of the new policy, those who witness harassment on the service or get harassed themselves can email Reddit employees serving as moderators who can then remove content or ban offenders from the site, according to The New York Times.
Reddit deems harassment in its new policy as "Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them."
The goal for Reddit is to combat the use of its site for posting hateful and offensive content, which the company says prevents other users from speaking out against the problem on the site. Executives also said this issue is keeping the firm from obtaining more visitors, as it hopes to add to its 200 million user base.
According to a survey conducted in March, one big reason Reddit users don't tell their friends to use the site is because they want to keep their friends from seeing such negative content, The Next Web reported. The survey, which involved more than 15,000 users, also found that people feel uncomfortable commenting on the site at all because of the stress that negative responses can create.
Revenge porn is one form of harassment that Reddit has been fighting, having issued a ban in February on posting other people's nude photos without their permission, NY Times reported.
"Revenge porn didn't exist in 2005. Smartphones didn't really exist in 2005," said Alexis Ohanian, executive chairman of Reddit. "We're taking the standards we had 10 years ago and bringing them to speed in 2015."
Reddit hopes the new policy will encourage visitors to express themselves freely without worrying about receiving abuse from a small portion of users.
"We've heard a lot of complaints and found that even our existing users were unhappy with the content on the site," said Ellen Pao, chief executive of Reddit. "We don't think this behavior represents what Reddit is."
