Reddit’s automatic moderation tool is flagging the word “Luigi” as potentially violent — even when the content isn’t.
Earlier this week, a moderator from r/popculture saw Reddit’s AutoModerator system flag a post about the video game Luigi’s Mansion 3 because it included the word “Luigi,” giving them instructions to “check for violence.”
A Reddit spokesperson, who requested that The Verge not use their name due to the sensitive subject matter, said there is no “sitewide filter for the word ‘Luigi’ or expectation that users stop talking about Luigi Mangione,” the person who prosecutors accuse of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.
But Reddit does appear to be flagging comments that mention “Luigi” in some cases, even those unrelated to Mangione — just not in the way that it first appeared to be. The Reddit spokesperson said that because r/popculture had recently fallen down to a single moderator, automod features kicked in, including a way to filter for “keywords that could — but don’t necessarily — indicate violating content.” The remaining moderator of r/popculture told The Verge that the mod team didn’t add “Luigi” to the list of keywords, Reddit did.
The r/popculture moderator posted about the Luigi issue to the r/FreeLuigi subreddit, a grassroots community where people discuss the Mangione case. The subreddit has strict rules in place to avoid violating Reddit’s moderation rules, like referring to Mangione’s by his initials and a blanket ban on content that calls for or endorses violence. But the moderators still fear that Reddit will decide to shut it down — even if they don’t run afoul of the platform’s rules.
Meanwhile, r/popculture — which has over 125,000 members — is closing down due to issues that the remaining moderator pins on Reddit. The moderator who posted about the “Luigi” issue announced last night they were shutting down the entire community “due to Reddit admins being complete fucking morons.” In the post, the moderator says that another member of the team was suspended and that Reddit has been unhelpful in trying to resolve the suspension.
The Reddit spokesperson said that the r/popculture moderator was suspended for approving content containing direct calls for violence, “including images celebrating [the Donald Trump rally shooter] and content calling to assassinate the president.” An r/popculture moderator denied this happened, and said the content in question was a photo of the shooter that did not celebrate him. The Reddit spokesperson notes that the automod features are temporary for r/popculture and that moderators can still approve the content for posting.
The “Luigi” issue comes the same week as Reddit’s new crackdown on banned content. Earlier this week, the company announced it would warn users who upvote content that is banned on the platform. The policy applies to users who upvote such content several times in “a certain timeframe,” Reddit says in a post, and the company will begin with enforcing the rule on violent content. The spokesperson says that at this time nobody has been suspended under the new rule.