Publishing Our Public Content Policy and Introducing a New Subreddit for Researchers

At Reddit, we believe in the open internet. We also believe that privacy is a right. As the Internet ecosystem continues to evolve, we're publishing a new type of policy, our Public Content Policy, to help give our communities, developers, and researchers a better sense of how we think about access to public content and the protections that should exist for users. This is distinct from our Privacy Policy, which covers how we handle the minimal private/personal information users provide to us; it is also distinct from our Content Policy, which sets out our rules for what content and behavior is allowed on the platform.

Unfortunately, we see more and more commercial entities using unauthorized access or misusing authorized access to collect public data in bulk, including Reddit public content. Worse, these entities perceive they have no limitation on their usage of that data, and they do so with no regard for user rights or privacy, ignoring reasonable legal, safety, and user removal requests. While we will continue our efforts to block known bad actors, we need to do more to restrict access to Reddit public content at scale to trusted actors who have agreed to abide by our policies. But we also need to continue to ensure that users, mods, researchers, and other good-faith, non-commercial actors have access.

Anyone accessing Reddit content must abide by our policies, and we are selective about who we work with and trust with large-scale access to Reddit content.

Our Public Content Policy

Our policy outlines the information partners can access via a public-content licensing agreement as well as the commitments we make to users about usage of this content. It takes into account feedback from a group of moderators we consulted when developing it:

• We require our partners to uphold the privacy of redditors and their communities. This includes respecting users' decisions to delete their content and any content we remove for violating our Content Policy.

• Partners are not allowed to use content to identify individuals or their personal information, including for ad targeting purposes.

• Partners cannot use Reddit content to spam or harass redditors.

• Partners are not allowed to use Reddit content to conduct background checks, facial recognition, government surveillance, or help law enforcement do any of the above.

• Partners cannot access public content that includes adult media.

• And, as always, we don't sell the personal information of redditors.

We will never license or distribute non-public content, such as private messages or mod mail, or non-public account information, such as email address, browsing history, IP address, etc.

Reddit for Research

It's important to us that we continue to preserve public access to Reddit content for researchers and those who believe in responsible non-commercial use of public data. Researchers and academics contribute meaningful and important research that helps shape our understanding of how people interact online. So, we're building out tools and an environment to help researchers access Reddit content, including a subreddit, r/reddit4researchers, aimed at better supporting researchers and improving access to public data on Reddit. We're in the very early stages of this effort but are partnering with OpenMined to develop a program and increase the ranks of researchers collaborating with us and each other.

Public Reddit data is valuable to many audiences, and interested parties can consult the below chart to better understand Reddit data access points.

Our Public Content Policy and researcher community allow us to provide critical information and ensure Reddit remains accessible for users, moderators, researchers, and other non-commercial entities.