A reminder to respect the humanity of the victims of the ongoing conflict in Palestine

[u/PlenitudeOpulence]

Greetings everyone,

I am making this announcement in hopes of touching base with all of our members about what we hoping to see in future submissions on our subreddit. As most of you know, this subreddit has a long history of documenting the humanity of all people around the world regardless of race or religion. Though our primary goals and mission of our subreddit has not changed since its founding, current geopolitical events have unfortunately complicated what was seemingly a straightforward policy on openness towards posting videos that are real around the world. Due to the ongoing bombardment of civilians in Palestine, we are unfortunately seeing an immense rise in the amount of videos that show raw footage of children being mortally wounded and other crimes against humanity. These videos are often traumatic and have caused immense psychological suffering and pain to some of our users and moderation team.

Moving forward, we will be asking our users to please use their better judgment and avoid posting videos of children that showcase raw violence and gore without any discussion or context. While we are not asking our users to completely omit raw footage from the ground of Gaza and the rest of Palestine, we are specifically calling for our users to avoid posting videos that focus on excessive gore/violence involving children.

Many of our users and moderators have children of their own… and seeing such devastation on the ground of Gaza has been traumatizing to witness and moderate. When I helped found this subreddit, I never expected to see such horrible depictions videos of war against a civilian population and could never have anticipated such a thing when creating the ruleset of the subreddit. I have given instructions to my moderator team to please be mindful of these types of videos, and to remove any if they cross that line. We will not be banning any users for posting videos that are real, but we will be trying to re-orient and remind our users to please respect the humanity of the children that have been lost in this conflict. These children had families and stories of their own that we as observers must respect and empathize with.

This policy will not be used to stifle discussion or the showing of reality in Palestine but instead will be used in extreme circumstances to reign in the amount of extreme violent content being posted at times that truly crosses the line and does not serve to provide any type of advocacy for the human rights of Palestinians. We do not want shock videos and gore being a central focus of the subreddit. Instead, we will be reminding our users that the subreddit’s focus is to humanize all human beings regardless of where they come from around the world.

Remember, please keep the humanity of those shown on video in mind when you are deciding to upload something to the subreddit. If any of you have any questions pertaining to how this policy will be implemented you may ask on this thread and I'll do my best to try and elaborate further.

Thanks everyone.

[u/IndigoMagali]

Agreed to keep the humanity, but some could argue that by not showing the reality of what is happening, we are not allowing people to develop the anger, shock, and horror that is sometimes required to motivate them into action.