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Controversial Reddit communities

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On Reddit, there have been a number of controversial communities devoted to explicit, violent, propagandist, or hateful material. Although Reddit administrators have instituted rules to allow for the banning of such communities, there still remain various active and heavily-trafficked subreddits which skirt the edges of the rules.

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  • The popular social networking and news-sharing site Reddit once hosted a group called Game of Trolls. Its rules were simple: if you successfully upset someone on Reddit without them realizing they were being trolled, you won a point. If you were identified as a troll, you lost a point. The highest scorers were listed on a leaderboard. … Game of Trolls was eventually banned by Reddit; a highly unusual step for the otherwise liberal site, but testament to the pervasiveness and persistence of the Reddit trolls.

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  • There were a half dozen or so subreddit communities that I had never heard of before that had posts sitting on the front page of Reddit. The common thread among all of them seemed to be rooted in getting angry at or mocking other people. … The first one that I noticed was /r/MurderedByWords, which featured screenshots of social media interactions containing a "response which completely destroys the original argument in a way that leaves little to no room for reply." There was /r/PublicFreakout, "dedicated to people freaking out, melting down, losing their cool, or being weird in public." Perhaps needing the least explanation was /r/IAmATotalPieceOfShit, where users post social media screenshots or videos of others who they think fit the namesake for the community. Meanwhile, over in /r/IAmVerySmart, the users mock "people trying too hard to look smart."

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  • Due to the younger demographic of many of Reddit's users, some of its content can seem immature, crude, or inappropriate. There is very little censorship on the site and pictures containing nudity or grotesque injuries are posted regularly (although they can be easily hidden).

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"There is also a dark side, communities whose purpose is reprehensible, and we don't have any obligation to support them." (Steve Huffman, r/announcements)

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  • By late October, Huffman's policy team, along with trust and safety and legal, had solidified their tougher policy on violent posts. The new rule: "Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise, do not post content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals." It opened the door for Reddit to ban another extensive list of subreddits. These were mostly far-right-leaning and Nazi-sympathizing forums and those that glorified harm or death, such as r/selfharmpics and r/PicsOfDeadKids. … Also banned were r/europeannationalism, r/nazi, and r/killthejews, and a few sites that mocked, parodied, or stemmed from r/CoonTown. Animal abuse, harm, or bestiality comprised another significant subset of the list.

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  • Reddit's administrators had just deleted a subreddit called r/Pizzagate, a forum for people who believed that high-ranking staffers of Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, and possibly Clinton herself, were trafficking child sex slaves. The evidence, as extensive as it was unpersuasive, included satanic rituals, a map printed on a handkerchief, and an elaborate code involving the words "cheese" and "pizza." … The conspiracy theorists, in turn, claimed that they'd been banned because Reddit administrators were part of the conspiracy.
  • But let's take the infamous picsOfDeadkids example. The actual content of that subreddit is mostly autopsy photos. Obviously it's a troll subreddit and created to get a reaction, and I'd guess 98% of redditors think it's gross/offensive etc. But what if the name of the subreddit was r/autopsyphotos or r/doyoureallywanttogointocriminalforensics and they were sincere in their discussion of these images? Would some of that 98% now be ok with it? I would bet at least some would. What if it wasn't kids but adults? Or historical autopsy photos only? The point is I don't want to be the one making those decisions for anyone but myself, and it's not the business reddit is in.
  • /r/MensRights—the "Men's Rights Activism" hub mentioned earlier—professes to be a site of measured social advocacy, but other subreddits make little effort to sugarcoat their misogyny, opting instead to engage in open, unapologetic bullying. /r/TumblrInAction mocks the left leaning, feminist "social justice warriors" said to populate Tumblr. /r/SRSSucks critiques the vocal feminism of /r/ShitRedditSays. /r/TheRedPill—reappropriating a metaphor for awakening from the 1999 film The Matrix—advocates for hegemonic masculinity and a return to traditional gender roles. /r/FatPeopleHate—until it was banned in June 2015—described itself as a space for "shitlords oppressing fatties" and housed photos of individuals deemed worthy of mockery due to their weight.

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  • Over the years, the site has been condemned by critics because users have shared inappropriate images and content that has included hate speech against particular groups. Reddit users have posted pictures of dead children. Moreover, people are often harassed for who they are based on their religion or their ethnicity. For example, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate groups, at least 46 active subreddits are devoted to white supremacy, the racist idea that white people are superior to all other races.

See also

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Wikipedia
Wikipedia
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