Reddit has announced updates to its impersonation policy to ensure it’s prepared for bad actors trying to manipulate its platform with malicious deepfakes and other manipulated content.
While impersonation is one of the rarest report classes it receives, Reddit is moving preemptively to update its policies to better cover various cases it has already been seeing, and others it expects to be seeing a lot more of in the future.
According to a recent announcement, “the classic case of impersonation is a Reddit username pretending to be someone else– whether a politician, brand, Reddit admin, or any other person or entity.” This is a pretty narrow case that doesn’t cover other examples that appear from time to time, “like fake articles falsely attributed to real journalists, forged election communications purporting to come from real agencies or officials, or scammy domains posing as those of a particular news outlet or politician.”
In order to protect its platform from misuse in this new environment, that could include “malicious deepfakes of politicians, or other, lower-tech forged or manipulated content that misleads.” As such Reddit has updated its impersonation policy:
“Reddit does not allow content that impersonates individuals or entities in a misleading or deceptive manner. This not only includes using a Reddit account to impersonate someone, but also encompasses things such as domains that mimic others, as well as deepfakes or other manipulated content presented to mislead, or falsely attributed to an individual or entity. While we permit satire and parody, we will always take into account the context of any particular content.”
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