Reddit has an ugly side, and I’m not talking about its pro-Donald Trump subreddit or a community that appears to be organized around sharing pictures of dragons mating with cars (I think it’s best to not provide a link to either of those). It’s difficult to compare reddit to other websites, since it’s basically a collection of over 850,000 communities (or ‘subreddits’) that are sustained through user submissions and comments. Some notable subreddits are dedicated to sharing world news, providing answers to scientific or historical questions, or philosophical discussions. So it’s not a traditional social media platform like Facebook or Twitter, which are centered around interacting with friends or followers, and it’s also not like a typical web forum that’s focused on a particular topic, theme, or hobby. It’s a platform for communities, which – depending on the particular subreddit – may function as a news aggregator, as a space for critiquing films, or a spotlight for artwork.
But what happens when there’s a community that isn’t about sharing crocheting tips or pictures of outer space, and instead, is organized around sexist or racist principles? In other words: how does reddit deal with hate groups?
The short answer: not very well. Reddit, like many other websites and social media platforms, seems to view freedom of speech as the number one principle that it must uphold; this is wrapped up in the usual grandstanding about promoting free and open discussion, ideals that evoke vague images of Athenian democracy, the United States Constitution, and Guy Fawkes masks. Subreddits and users are certainly banned all the time, but for their behaviour, not their ideas. White supremacist subreddits (of which there are unfortunately many) won’t be banned due to the nature of their community, but they’ll be deleted if they encourage their users to ‘brigade’ other communities or dox people (posting personal information, such as addresses, names, or telephone numbers online).
This dedication to free speech is on the one hand admirable, but on the other hand, reddit was previously home to one of the largest white-supremacist communities on the Internet. The subreddit in question was eventually deleted last year, but as reddit’s CEO explained: “We didn’t ban them for being racist. We banned them because we have to spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with them.” In other words, in spite of appearing to be more proactive through the banning of a number of hate groups, reddit’s philosophy remains largely the same: it would rather provide the infrastructure for one of the largest white-supremacist communities on the internet than dare appear to infringe on lofty free speech ideals.
Back in 2014, reddit notably banned pages that were dedicated to posting and sharing stolen nude images of celebrities that were obtained through a breach of Apple’s iCloud. However, some users – despite celebrating the crackdown – criticized this move as somewhat hypocritical or hollow. There are still many subreddits that share images of women without their consent; banning the subreddits involved in the 2014 iCloud hack, these users argued, wasn’t to protect the rights of the women involved, but rather a PR move to stifle growing criticism of the site at a time when it was ramping up its attempts to monetize the platform. In other words, reddit doesn’t care as much about clamping down on communities that involve harassing or violating regular women who have less power and visibility, because there isn’t the same degree or threat of bad press involved.
An interesting case study is the subreddit r/TheRedPill. It bills itself as a kind of self-improvement lifestyle, promoting ‘masculine’ values and ideals and teaching its followers “sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” In short, it’s sort of a self-improvement pickup artist community that presents the world as one which is increasingly hostile to men, who must use manipulation and deception to trick women into sleeping with them. Posts and articles on the subreddit often appropriate evolutionary biology to support ridiculous claims and ideas – women evolved to be submissive and desire a strong, masculine, ‘alpha’ male, etc. And in case you’re wondering, the name ‘The Red Pill’ presumably comes from The Matrix films, in which the protagonist is offered a choice between a red pill and a blue pill: if he takes the blue pill, he will return to his fake, artificially produced world, but if he takes the red pill, he will awaken to the truth and see reality for the first time. This of course reveals how r/TheRedPill sees itself – a community that reveals the truth about our society, which has supposedly become anti-male thanks to those darned feminists fighting for equality.
One post from the subreddit is a “Guide to Managing Your Bitches” that aims to teach its readers how to be “strict with [their] girl.” Another is a link to a blog post that claims women are incapable of emotionally maturing beyond the capacities of a teenager, and will use “all kinds of irrational and basically abusive behaviour” against their partners (it seems wrong to provide links to these, but if you’re feeling morbidly curious you can easily find them with a bit of googling).
Last year a data scientist attempted to see which subreddits were the most “toxic,” sampling comments from the top 250 subreddits and performing a number of tests that involved looking for ad hominem attacks, overt bigotry, and other signs of “toxicity.” The level of support for so-called toxic comments was measured by looking at its score (determined by other users giving the comment ‘upvotes’ or ‘downvotes’). Unsurprisingly, the analysis revealed the highest level of support for toxic comments in the r/TheRedPill.
As part of an article about reddit and sexism, a writer for The Daily Dot asked for “Tips for women jounring Reddit” in the subreddit r/TwoXChromosomes, a community that’s all about sharing content that relates to “experiences as women, for women, or about women.” Most of the advice from other users was, sadly, to “roll with the punches,” since “a little hostility toward women is just the lay of the land.” From offhand jokes about going “back to the kitchen” to “male redditors mocking girls for including themselves” in pictures, many of the users voiced resignation to dealing with a landscape littered with sexism. Subreddits like r/TheRedPill can be mostly avoided, but they’re just part of that background noise.
With over 234 million unique users and 8.19 billion monthly pageviews, it would be difficult (and misguided) to make any hard and fast characterizations about the people who browse and submit to any of the site’s over 850,000 subreddits. Not to mention, racism and sexism aren’t just a reddit problem, but an Internet problem. The anonymity and accessibility of the web – which facilitate communities like r/syriancivilwar, a crowd-sourced news gathering subreddit that I wrote about here – allow racists and sexists to connect with one another and share their bigoted opinions.
And then there are always subreddits like r/EyeBleach, where you can find pictures of, for example, a Pomeranian deressed up as a pirate. Why? As the About Us section explains, “After a long day of seeing what internet anonymity can do to people, you’re bound to need some eyebleach.”
