NEW YORK — Social-networking and news site Reddit says it will remove photos, videos and links with explicit content if the person in the image hasn’t given permission for it to be posted.
The move marks a shift for the online venue, which has had a hands-off approach to privacy, largely allowing its 160 million users to police their own forums within certain guidelines such as no child pornography or spam. The change comes about six months after hackers obtained nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities and posted them to social media sites including Twitter and Reddit.
A posting on the site, signed by Reddit executives including CEO Ellen Pao, said the shift is an effort to “help grow reddit for the next 10 years and beyond.” Effective March 10, any photograph, video or digital image of a person who is nude or engaged in a sexual act is prohibited if the subject hasn’t given permission for it to be used. Anyone who wants an image of themselves removed from the site can email contact(at)reddit.com.
Reddit, owned by Conde Nast’s Wired Digital, did not return a request for comment.
Social media sites have varying policies on nudity. Facebook prohibits images containing nudity altogether. Twitter doesn’t mediate legal content but recommends that content with nudity or violence be marked as sensitive. It also lets users flag questionable content for review.
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