I can’t breathe. Black lives matter.

As the gap of the political divide in our world grows deeper, we would like to take a few minutes of your time or express our support of equal treatment, equal justice, to express solidarity with groups which have been marginalized for too long, and to outright say black lives matter. The AskReddit moderators have decided to disable posting for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — the time George Floyd was held down by police — and we will lock comments on front page posts. Our hope is that people reading this will take a moment to pause and reflect on what can be done to improve the world. This will take place at 9PM CDT.

AskReddit is a discussion forum with which we want to encourage discussion of a wide range of topics. Now, more than ever, it’s important to talk about the topics that divide us and use AskReddit to approach these conversations with open minds and respectful discussion.

This is also an important opportunity to reiterate our stance on moderation. Simply put, we believe it’s our duty to ensure neutral and fair moderation so people with opposing views can use our platform as a place to have these important and much needed discussions about their views, our hope being that the world will benefit as a result. We feel that it is our duty to make sure that AskReddit is welcoming to all. To that end, we have a set of rules to ensure posts encourage discussion and to ensure users feel safe, welcome, and respected. As always, blatant statements of racism or any other kind of bigotry will not be tolerated. We want users to be able to express themselves and their views. Remember that everyone here and everyone you see in the news are human beings, too.

With all of that in mind, we reiterate our encouragement for people to discuss these hard, and often uncomfortable, topics as a way to find alignment, unity, and to progress as a society.

We ask that you take a few minutes to research a charity that aligns with your beliefs or a cause you care about and that you donate to it if you’re able. Rolling Stone put together a lot of links to different funds across many states if you would like to use this as a place to start.

-The AskReddit mods

Submitted June 02, 2020 at 05:14PM by AskRedditModerators https://ift.tt/2Xrw0Cd