We’ve tried to spell it out at clearly as possible, but some are having a hard time grasping its intent and execution.

This policy has been in place for years. It is not new, and it hasn’t changed. New attention on Metallica and this sub doesn’t mean that we, the mod team, are doing anything different than before.

Intent:

1. To prevent this sub from being infested with political pandering, hatred, toxicity, or any of the other shit that overwhelms much of Reddit. Why? Because it’s fucking annoying and we’re trying to have a good time here.
2. To help facilitate a smaller, more approachable mod team by reducing the friction that necessitates a larger, less personal mod team with less accountability. In other words, w

e try

1. to keep our mod team down to the bare minimum so that we don’t have 50 moderators crushing the life out of this su

b a

1. nd holding no accountability because everyone just ignores modmail. We t

ry

1. to respond to every reasonable message that comes in to modmail and make decisions fairly. Some may not believe that to be true, but those are usually the people who message us with insults because they had a comment removed. There are plenty of people who will testify to the fact that we have indeed admitted when we’ve made a mistake, and we have also reversed decisions just because the user was polite and recognized why we made the decision we made. You don’t get that with larger mod teams. The downside to this is that we don’t have the numbers to tackle massive breakout fights, and if we allowed politics, that would be a daily thing. People are always trying to make some sort of political statement, and it will always bring the fights.

Execution:

1. Discussing the political themes of song lyrics is permissible. Attempting to connect them to modern events, or use those lyrics to beat your particular ideological drum, is not. For example, if you were to discuss Eye of the Beholder and its themes of censorship and political manipulation, it would be OK right up until you started naming politicians or political parties. Like the song, we can discuss the themes without making a partisan statement.
2. Except as outlined above, politically charged post and comments are simply removed.
3. Users who post politically inflammatory posts or comments have their content removed, and may either be warned, temporarily banned or permanently banned, depending on the severity and repetition of the violation.

We have not, and WILL not push any political agenda on this sub. If you believe that to be taken place, message the moderators with your concerns. The moderation team consists of people across the political spectrum by design. I never asked anybody what their politics were before hiring them on as a mod, and the whole point behind that was to make sure there was balance. Despite some toothless smart ass comments I may have made on a different subreddit, no, there is no chance that I would be choosing people of any particular political persuasion to be a mod. Ask any of the moderators on the team whether I’ve ever asked them who they voted for - I do not care as long as they do the job and keep politics off of this sub.

Anybody who believes they have had content removed for political reasons is encouraged to message the moderators or even me directly. You may not think you will get anywhere by doing that, but the only way for you to know that you will, is to try.

I will give one example of a time where we had to remove some content, and were accused of doing so for political reasons.

A user posted a piece of artwork that drew out some bigoted responses from other Redditors. We left the post up for a period of time and worked to remove the offensive comments and ban the users leaving them. At some point, the task of babysitting that thread to keep the bigoted comments at bay became too much for the current moderation team to stay on top of, so we removed the post. And I may be wrong, but we messaged the user who made the post and explained this to them and I believe they were understanding.

I believe that I also put up an offer to add additional moderators after that incident, and may have added one or two because the response was fairly low. Keep in mind, just because we ask for moderators doesn’t mean we get many responses, and the only other option is to take on moderators who don’t have any interest in this community and just want Reddit power.

Edit: formatting broke. Editing doesn’t fix it. Sorry.