Reddit has been nothing short of chaos recently. Users left, staff left, and lots and lots of people got very, very upset. Following on from recent subreddit shutdowns and restrictions, today the site announces that it is bowing to pressure from certain quarters and closing down a number of racist subreddits.
Having culled harassment sections of the site, the latest victims of Reddit's ban hammer are the subreddits /r/CoonTown, /r/WatchNiggersDie, /r/bestofcoontown, /r/koontown, /r/CoonTownMods, /r/CoonTownMeta. The bans come as the site updates its content policy meaning that the six racist subreddits are now in violation of Reddit rules -- and the new rules don't seem to be going down well.
Reddit co-founder Steve 'spez' Huffman broke the news in Reddit's announcement section, and it didn’t take long for hundreds of vocal, vitriolic, and venomous responses to appear. While you might expect the culling of racist content to be broadly welcomed, the announcement actually led for calls for greater transparency and a more equal way of managing other hate communities.
Today we removed communities dedicated to animated CP and a handful of other communities that violate the spirit of the policy by making Reddit worse for everyone else: /r/CoonTown, /r/WatchNiggersDie, /r/bestofcoontown, /r/koontown, /r/CoonTownMods, /r/CoonTownMeta.
He went on to explain a little about the reasons behind the decisions:
Our policies are not changing dramatically from what we have had in the past. One new concept is Quarantining a community, which entails applying a set of restrictions to a community so its content will only be viewable to those who explicitly opt in. We will Quarantine communities whose content would be considered extremely offensive to the average redditor.
Today, in addition to applying Quarantines, we are banning a handful of communities that exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else. Our most important policy over the last ten years has been to allow just about anything so long as it does not prevent others from enjoying Reddit for what it is: the best place online to have truly authentic conversations.
I believe these policies strike the right balance.
Some people weren't happy with the reasons given for the closure:
It would be nice if for once reddit could just be honest. If you want to ban /r/coontown for being extremely racist, then just come out and say so. You didn't ban them because they exist solely to annoy other redditors, enough of this "we're banning behavior not content" nonsense. You're banning content.
Many commenters questioned why racist subreddits had been singled out, while other hate sections and bigoted subreddits were being left alone. Some pointed to other racist subreddits that "seem to have dodged the bullet", including /r/WhiteRights, /r/AntiPOZi, /r/nazi, /r/TheGoyimKnow, /r/ferguson, /r/GasTheSnoo, /r/KikeTown, /r/Ben_Garrison, and /r/thephilosophyofrape.
As ever, an attempt to balance freedom of speech (as a concept, not a law) with limiting harassment and hateful content appears to have slightly backfired, upsetting many of the more vocal users of the site. Could Reddit have said or done anything that would have made everyone happy? Probably not. But if nothing else, the site serves as a macrocosm of the internet as a whole, perfectly illustrating the difficulty in policing online content.