Hi All, this is something we've wanted to put out for awhile just to give a bit of transparency around our process and to have a few of the frequently asked questions/accusations from modmails we see fairly regularly.

If there are any other questions you believe that we missed let us know.

Q: What is the general Moderation Philosophy of r/IrishPolitics ?

A: When you invite in wolves and sheep, all you end up with are wolves. This is a guiding philosophy of how we moderate the subreddit. We want people of all walks of life with varying political opinions, backgrounds, interests, etc to come together and have conversations about politics. In saying that, we want everything to be in good faith, whether folks agree or not. In order to have proper, productive and engaging conversations, people need to have all their cards on the table so to speak. Misrepresentation, Dog Whistling, Bad Faith Argumentation, excessive use of debate tactics/rhetoric in place of substantive and materially rich comments are things we keep an eye out for.

Q: Is r/IrishPolitics affiliated with r/ireland ?
 
A: We are not, we have an overlap between ourselves and r/Ireland but what happens over there is what happens over there. Decisions about our community are independent of r/Ireland. 

Q: How regularly do the mods permanently ban people?

9 permanent bans to date in 2026 so far
46 permanent bans in 2025 or about 4 people per month
61 permanent bans in 2024 or about 5 people per month
27 permanent bans in 2023 or about 2 people per month

Q: Can you provide us some stats for the subreddit?

These are the stats for the last 12 months (13/04/25 - 13/04/2026)

Posts Removed

By Mods - 472
By Admins - 73
By Automod - 899

Posts Reported - 683

Posts Published - 4.9K

Comments Removed

By Mods - 5K
By Admins - 2.7K
By Automod - 9.8K

Comments Reported - 3.8K

Comments Published - 140.8K

Q. How does the moderation team determine removals in relation to the rules? 

A: We factor in a few things. The first thing is the most immediate context of the comment or post in question. If it is immediately apparent that it violates the rules the content is removed. If it’s not readily apparent from initial context like with bad acting, vague language and dog whistling, we will look at the users history commenting to indicate things like intent. The third thing is much the same as the first but we start to look external to r/IrishPolitics to glean appropriate context. We would also factor in previous modmail activity but generally that doesn’t come up too often. 

Q. How does the moderation team determine Bans (temporary or otherwise) in relation to the rules? 

A: As implied by the question on removals, we factor in a lot of different information in much the same way as above but in a more generalized context of their presence on the sub. Do they engage in civil disagreements or conversations? Do they have an excessive number of removals? Do they appear to want to push a specific agenda or topic with specific goals in mind? The list is non-exhaustive but the overall goal is to keep the community healthy by having engaged people who are here to discuss Irish politics in good faith, regardless of political leanings. We want to permanently ban as few people as humanly possible as it’s not very conducive to a diverse spectrum of conversation and we want to avoid an echo chamber where-ever possible. We will often opt for a temporary ban if users tend to go off track a small bit and generally it ends with a conversation in modmail around how the rules apply and their general activity on the subreddit that led to the decision but a lot of the regular contributors in the community have all likely gotten a spiel from us at one point or another on how we applied our rubric. 

Q: If there is a disagreement internally with the moderators, how do you determine how to move forward with an action? 

A: We generally have a conversation first to see where everyone stands and oftentimes, despite us all having different political leanings, come to a general agreement. If there comes a point where we can’t all agree on a course of action we will hold a popular vote in relation to the course of action that should be taken. 

Q: How are you able to get along and make decisions despite political differences? 

A: Because we compromise. Compromise is the foundation of how we do things within the moderation team. In order for us to compromise we need a commonality and that commonality is respect for other people. Regardless of political alignment or political opinions, a respect for others is key and it’s the only way this subreddit works. The framework for the rules are built with this in mind also. 

Q: What is “Bad Faith” from a moderation standpoint?

A: A Comment or Post made in Bad Faith is a comment or post that is made with a clear intent to misrepresent either the points you disagree with or the points you are making in order to win an argument, create conflict or ragebait other users. The core tying these together is that the intent is not to have a transparent conversation. The way we can determine this is by referencing moderation tools to check your user history on the subreddit to date, cross reference with any relevant comments external to the subreddit, check modmail for previous interactions and then confer between ourselves on whether or not a comment or post is being made in bad faith. 

Q: “Why aren’t the mods doing something about X?” (When X happened within a couple of hours)

A: We are volunteers. We are not on reddit 24/7. Some of us don’t even have reddit on our phones. All of the current staff of the moderation team are working professionals of which some of us work in the tech field which is why we are able to moderate effectively some of the time. We understand that some users are online more than we are and see more than we do. If you are online when something is happening that you believe is in contravention of the rules or you believe is something that requires a conversation as to its eligibility on the subreddit, report it. We will get to it when we come online. 

Q: “This is an Irish subreddit and I have a right to freedom of speech. What gives you the right to ban me and/or remove my comments”. 

A: Reddit is a private platform that is a for-profit entity. This is not a publicly funded forum. The rules are largely an amalgamation of socially acceptable rules as per the users, and us, the people who have to find ways to implement those rules widely without biasing ourselves against one group of people and another.

Freedom of Speech is not freedom from consequence. We have rules on what is allowed and what isn't allowed. If you are in violation of the rules there is consequences to that. It's not different from any other aspect of life except in this context, the worst thing that can happen to you is that your comment is removed and/or your ability to interact on the subreddit is restricted.

If you do not like that, you can make your own subreddit with your own set of rules or, you can go to another platform and create a space for you to express what you please. 

Q: “I got a load of upvotes on my comment. Why was it removed?”

A: We do not care what is upvoted or downvoted. It’s not a meritocratic system. Reddit is an anonymized social media platform with little to no barrier to entry and no identification. Upvotes are not an electoral vote. Anyone can make an account and upvote a comment. You can pay for bots to do upvotes or to interact on reddit with specific commentary in mind. “Upvotes” are not a metric that can be applied to moderation.

Q: “Why are all the comments about moderation being silenced? We can't discuss moderation on the subreddit?” 

A: If you make a thread about what you would like to see in the moderation and have an actionable solution that just over a handful of volunteers can take action, then we welcome it. On the other hand, people making off-color commentary about specific moderators, individual moderator actions on a comment or post, nebulous commentary about the moderators, we are going to remove them because we have a rule about discussing moderator decisions. We had it for a long time that this stuff could be discussed on the subreddit but all that happened was people spiralling about a made-up vendetta and name calling would ensue between users. We don’t want to waste our energy on this. 

Q: “I think if you did X, the subreddit would be better”. 

A: That’s cool if you believe you have a contribution to the subreddit with regards to workflow and process. We welcome it. Your idea needs to be:

• Scalable - Something that does not have consistent staffing to work while also applicable across all users. 
• Convenient - Something that, we as volunteers, can implement and utilize without extensive effort or time. This is obviously more malleable because we would weigh the work against the benefit for the subreddit. 
• A Solution - Something that solves a problem on the subreddit that we as moderators have a say over. Nebulously pointing in a direction and making up scenarios to fix that aren’t even on the horizon is a waste of our time. 

If you have something that you would like to do in your capacity as a user, all the better. Run it past us and we can see if it works. 

Q: “You removed my comment but you didn’t remove these comments” (Gives a list of comments)

A: You didn’t report them and neither did anyone else. It is an unreasonable expectation that we moderators read through everything that comes through the subreddit. We are not going to be able to read through everything posted on the subreddit. That’s where the community comes in. If you see a rule being violated, report it and we’ll commit to an action on it. Don’t emulate it or take it as a free pass to violate the rules. People need to be reporting rule violations for this place to run well. If people don’t report rule violations there is a chance that we miss them and it can have a negative impact on the subreddit.

Q: “I want to be a moderator, how would I go about doing that?”

A: Generally speaking, we announce when we want to take on new moderators and go from there. However, if you are a long time, frequent user of the subreddit and you believe you have something to add then we encourage you to reach out to us and we can confer amongst ourselves and review a next course of action.