User:16912 Rhiannon/Reddit Controversies

Controversial content
The website generally lets moderators on individual subreddits make decisions about what content to allow on that subreddit in addition to Reddit's site-wide rules, and has a history of permitting some subreddits dedicated to controversial content. Many of the default pages are highly moderated, with the r/science subreddit banning climate change denialism,, the subreddit r/news banning opinion piece and columns, and r/politics banning right-wing and left-wing publications and other news organizations that provide lots of "bad journalism". Reddit has changed its site-wide content policies several times, sometimes in reaction to controversies. In 2011, under then-CEO Yishan Wong, a community that posted pictures of "jailbait" was banned after one of its users posted a nude photograph of a 14-year-old girl because the post violated U.S. law. After another questionable subreddit was created, Reddit altered its policies to explicitly ban "suggestive or sexual content featuring minors".

In August 2014, moderators and administrators removed a sizeable amount of content related to the Gamergate controversy; one thread in the "gaming" subreddit lost almost 24,000 comments. This included the subreddit "ZoeQuinnDiscussion", which was banned for violating the Reddit rules. Administrators attributed the bans to 4chan for raiding threads and causing harm, the accuracy of which was debated by some redditors.

Also in August 2014, links to photos from the 2014 celebrity photo hack were widely linked to across the site. A dedicated subreddit, "TheFappening," was created for this purpose, and contained links to most if not all of the criminally obtained explicit images. Some images of Liz Lee and McKayla Maroney from the leak were identified by redditors and outside commentators as child pornography because the photos were taken when the women were underage. The subreddit was banned on September 6. The scandal led to wider criticisms concerning the website's administration from The Verge and The Daily Dot.

On December 18, 2014, Reddit took the unusual step of banning a subreddit, "SonyGOP", that was being used to distribute hacked Sony files.

Later on June 10, 2015, Reddit shut down the 150,000-subscriber "fatpeoplehate" subreddit and four others citing issues related to harassment. Responding to the accusations of "skewed enforcement", Reddit reaffirmed their commitment to free expression and stated, "There are some subreddits with very little viewership that get highlighted repeatedly for their content, but those are a tiny fraction of the content on the site."

After Wong resigned and Ellen Pao became interim CEO in November 2014, Reddit cracked down on involuntary pornography; people could report compromising photos of themselves on Reddit and the company would remove them. Soon after, Reddit banned five of what it said was its most offensive communities. When Huffman rejoined the company as CEO in 2015, he continued this push to ban highly offensive communities. In August 2015, Huffman introduced a policy which led to the banning of several offensive and sexual communities, including those featuring illegal activity and harassment, posts of “private or confidential information”, and sexual content involving minors. Some subreddits werevquarantined due to having "highly-offensive or upsetting content", removing the subreddits from public listings and requiring an opt-in to view them. Reddit also states that the site would not make any revenue from these subreddits. Huffman was quoted in The New Yorker: "Yes, I know that it’s really hard to define hate speech, and I know that any way we define it has the potential to set a dangerous precedent. I also know that a community called Coontown is not good for Reddit". Reddit prohibits content that "encourages or incites violence", and has blocked communities that had done so.

While the banning of the largest toxic communities were controversial at the time—with some commenters saying that the bans went too far and others saying that the bans did not go far enough—an academic study published in 2017 confirmed that the bans of several large toxic communities by Pao and Huffman in 2015 reduced hateful speech by as much as 80% among former users from those subreddits that remained on the site after the bans took place.

In May 2016, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview at the TNW Conference that, unlike Facebook, which "only knows what [its users are] willing to declare publicly", Reddit knows its users' "dark secrets". The video reached the website's main feed.

On November 23, 2016, The Washington Post reported Reddit had banned the "Pizzagate" conspiracy board from their site stating it violated their policy of posting personal information of others, triggering a wave of criticism from users on r/The_Donald, who claimed the ban amounted to censorship The Reddit forum r/pizzagate was devoted to a conspiracy theory derived from the John Podesta leaked emails, a theory that alleged the D.C. Pizzeria Comet Ping Pong "is at the center of a child-abuse ring tied to John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s former campaign manager". After the forum was banned from Reddit, the wording "We don't want witchhunts on our site" now appears on the former page of the Pizzagate subreddit.

In February 2017, Reddit banned the alt-right subreddit (r/altright) for violating its terms of service, more specifically for attempting to share personal information about the man who attacked alt-right figure Richard B. Spencer. The forum's users and moderators accused Reddit administrators of having political motivations for the ban.

In 2017, computer scientists at three universities published the study "You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech". Examining data from 100 million posts, the study's authors determined that Reddit's content bans were effective. "Users participating in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced their hate speech usage", the computer scientists determined.

On July 12 the creator and head moderator of the GamerGate subreddit r/kotakuinaction, removed all of the moderators and set the forum to private, alleging it to have become "infested with racism and sexism". A Reddit employee restored the forum and its moderators an hour later.

In January 2019, a Philippine-based subreddit, r/jakolandia was accused of "distributing” posts of photos of women, including celebrities, apparently without their consent, similar to "a number" of secret Facebook groups that had been engaging in illegal activity of sharing "obscene" photos of women and possibly child pornography.

Boston Marathon (2013)
Following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Reddit faced criticism after users wrongly identified a number of people as suspects. Notable among misidentified bombing suspects was Sunil Tripathi, a student reported missing before the bombings took place. A body reported to be Sunil's was found in Providence River in Rhode Island on April 25, 2013, according to Rhode Island Health Department. The cause of death was not immediately known, but authorities said they did not suspect foul play. The family later confirmed Tripathi's death was a result of suicide. Reddit general manager Martin later issued an apology for this behavior, criticizing the "online witch hunts and dangerous speculation" that took place on the website. The incident was later referenced in the season 5 episode of the CBS TV series The Good Wife titled "Whack-a-Mole", as well as The Newsroom.

Subreddit blackouts (2015)
On July 2, 2015, Reddit began experiencing a series of blackouts as moderators set popular subreddit communities to private, in an event dubbed "AMAgeddon," a portmanteau of AMA ("ask me anything") and Armageddon. This was done in protest of the recent firing of Victoria Taylor, an administrator who helped organize user-led interviews with famous people on the popular "Ask Me Anything" subreddit, r/IAmA. Organizers of the blackout also expressed resentment about the lack of communication between Reddit administrators and subreddit moderators. The blackout intensified on July 3 when former community manager David Croach gave an AMA about being fired. Before deleting his posts, he stated that then-interim CEO Ellen Pao dismissed him with one year of health coverage when he had cancer and did not recover quickly enough. Following this, a Change.org petition to remove Pao as CEO of Reddit Inc. reached over 200,000 signatures. Pao posted a response on July 3 as well as an extended version of it on July 6 in which she apologized for bad communication and not delivering on promises. She also apologized on behalf of the other administrators and noted that problems already existed over the past several years. On July 10, Pao resigned as CEO and was replaced by former CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman.

Spezgiving (2016)
On November 23, 2016, Steve Huffman admitted to having replaced his username with the names of r/The_Donald moderators in many insulting comments on the subreddit for about an hour. He did so by changing insulting comments made towards him and made it appear as if the insult were directed at the moderators of r/The_Donald. The CEO apologized and declared intentions to take actions against "hundreds of the most toxic users" of Reddit and "communities whose users continually cross the line".

Russian interference (2016, 2018)
The Internet Research Agency seeded Reddit with disinformation during the 2016 United States presidential election. Huffman admitted the existence of "a few hundred" Russian propaganda accounts that Reddit found and removed. Reddit launched a group at the company "specifically devoted to investigating efforts to manipulate our site" to prevent future interference. Huffman admitted new Russian interference in 2018. During an AMA on Reddit, Huffman said the site saw approximately 1,000 posts from users to 130 subreddits. Reddit said there was no evidence the accounts were part of the Internet Research Agency.