4chan Hidden Jailbait
Lutero Chaloux
Some communities on the social news site Reddit (known as "subreddits") are devoted to explicit, violent, or hateful material, and have been the topic of controversy, sometimes receiving significant media coverage.
When Reddit was founded in 2005, there was only one shared space for all links, and subreddits did not exist. Subreddits were created later, but could only initially be created by Reddit administrators. In 2008, subreddit creation was opened to all users.[1]
Reddit rose to infamy in October 2011, when a report by CNN showed that Reddit was harboring the r/Jailbait community, which was devoted to sharing suggestive or revealing photos of underage girls. After commenters were seen asking for nude photos of underage girls, and under significant external scrutiny, Reddit shut down r/Jailbait.[2]
In 2012, the subreddit r/Creepshots received major backlash due to being a subreddit for sharing suggestive or revealing photos of women taken without their awareness or consent. Adrian Chen wrote a Gawker expos of one of the subreddit's moderators and identified the person behind the account, starting discussion in the media about the ethics of anonymity and outing on the Internet.[3]
In 2015, Reddit introduced a quarantine policy to make visiting certain subreddits more difficult. Visiting or joining a quarantined subreddit requires bypassing a warning prompt.[4] In addition, quarantined subreddits do not appear in non-subscription based (aggregate) feeds such as r/all in order to prevent accidental viewing,[5] do not generate revenue, and their user count is not visible. Since 2018, subreddits are allowed to appeal their quarantine.[6]
Due to Reddit's decentralized moderation, user anonymity, and lack of fact-checking systems, the platform is highly prone to spreading misinformation and disinformation.[7] It has been suggested that those who use Reddit should exercise caution in taking user-created unsourced content as fact.[8] Reddit communities exhibit the echo chamber effect, in which repeated unsourced statements come to be accepted among the community as fact, leading to distorted worldviews among users.[9]
A 2021 letter from the United States Senate to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman expressed concern about the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on the platform.[10] Another example is a 2022 study revealing an abundance of unsourced and potentially harmful medical advice for urinary tract infections, such as suggesting fasting as a UTI cure.[11]
It has been suggested that since 2019, Russian-sponsored troll accounts and bots have formed and taken over prominent left-wing and right-wing subreddits on Reddit, such as the r/antiwar, r/greenandpleasant, and r/aboringdystopia subreddits, "suggest[ing] a Russian-led attempt to antagonize and influence Americans online, which is still ongoing."[12]
Some subreddits are dedicated to discussion of illegal or unapproved drugs including meth,[13] opioids,[14][15][16] novel psychoactive substances,[17][18] performance-enhancing drugs such as anabolic steroids and SARMs,[19] and 2,4-Dinitrophenol, a weight loss drug declared unfit for human use by the FDA in 1938 due to causing overdose deaths and cataracts.[20] However, drugs-related subreddits have also enabled research and could provide information that would be difficult or impossible to obtain otherwise.[17][20] Reddit also contains subreddits dedicated to addiction recovery.[21]
On June 9, 2014, a subreddit called r/beatingwomen was closed by Reddit. The community, which featured graphic depictions of violence against women, was banned after its moderators were found to be sharing users' personal information online, and collaborating to protect one another from sitewide bans. Following the ban, the community's founder rebooted the subreddit under the name r/beatingwomen2 in an attempt to circumvent the ban, but was banned afterwards.[22][23]
r/Braincels was the most popular subreddit for incels, or "involuntary celibates", after r/Incels (see below) was banned, gaining 16,900 followers by April 2018. The subreddit promoted rape and suicide.[24] The subreddit was banned in 2019, after violating Reddit's content policy with respect to bullying and harassment.[25][26][27]
r/ChapoTrapHouse was a subreddit dedicated to the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House which is associated with the term dirtbag left.[28][29] The community had 160,000 regulars before being banned on June 29, 2020, because they "consistently host rule-breaking content and their mods have demonstrated no intention of reining in their community."[30] Previously, the community had been quarantined for content that promotes violence.[29] The community of the subreddit later migrated to an instance of Lemmy, a Reddit alternative.[31]
The term "Chimpire" refers to a collection of subreddits and affiliated websites that promoted anti-black racism, including frequent use of racial slurs. In June 2013, the subreddit r/niggers was banned from Reddit for engaging in vote manipulation, incitements of violence, and using racist content to disrupt other communities. Reddit general manager Erik Martin noted that the subforum was given multiple chances to comply with site rules, noting that "users can tell from the amount of warnings we extended to a subreddit as clearly awful as r/niggers that we go into the decision to ban subreddits with a lot of scrutiny".[32] Following the ban of r/niggers, the subreddit r/Coontown grew to become the most popular "Chimpire" site, with over 15,000 members at its peak.[33] Many of the posters on these subreddits were formerly involved with r/niggers.[34][35][36]
One of these subreddits, r/shitniggerssay, was banned in June 2015 at the same time as r/fatpeoplehate.[37] In the midst of changes to Reddit's content policy, r/Coontown was banned in August 2015.[38]
r/Chodi, whose name is derived from a crude Hindi sexual slang term, was a right-wing Indian subreddit that claimed to be a "free speech sub for memes, jokes, satire, sarcasm and fun". The sub, which had over 90,000 subscribers as of January 2022, frequently propagated Islamophobic, anti-Christian, homophobic, and misogynistic content, with open calls for genocide against Muslims. Time reports that users used intentional misspellings and slang to circumvent Reddit's anti-hate speech software.[39][40] The Quint cited the subreddit's popularity as an example of how Reddit is used as a haven for hate speech in India.[41] It was banned on March 23, 2022, for promoting hate, causing its users to move to Telegram.[42]
r/ChongLangTV, whose name is derived from the Great Wave off Kanagawa, was a Chinese-language subreddit that espoused extreme anti-Chinese sentiment. The sub, which had over 53,000 subscribers as of March 2022, was banned on March 2, 2022, for "exposing privacy of others." A participant of the subreddit told Radio Free Asia that the Reddit ban was due to Chinese long-arm internet censorship.[43] Following the ban, the community's founder rebooted the subreddit under the name r/CLTV in an attempt to circumvent the ban, but was banned afterwards.
A year after the closure of r/jailbait, another subreddit called r/CreepShots drew controversy in the press for hosting sexualized images of women without their knowledge.[44] In the wake of this media attention, u/violentacrez was added to r/CreepShots as a moderator;[45] reports emerged that Gawker reporter Adrian Chen was planning an expos that would reveal the real-life identity of this user, who moderated dozens of controversial subreddits, as well as a few hundred general-interest communities. Several major subreddits banned links to Gawker in response to the impending expos, and the account u/violentacrez was deleted.[46][47][48] Moderators defended their decisions to block the site from these sections of Reddit on the basis that the impending report was "doxing" (a term for exposing the identity of a pseudonymous person), and that such exposure threatened the site's structural integrity.[48]
When Chen informed u/violentacrez about the impending expos, the user pleaded with Chen not to publish it, as he was concerned about the potential impact on his employment and finances, noting that his wife was disabled and he had a mortgage to pay. He also expressed concern that he would be falsely labeled a child pornographer or antisemite, due to some of the subreddits he had created. Despite u/violentacrez's offer to delete his postings and leave Reddit, Chen insisted he would still publish the piece.[3][49]
Chen published the piece on October 12, 2012, revealing that the person operating the u/violentacrez account was a middle-aged programmer from Arlington, Texas named Michael Brutsch.[3][50] Within a day of the article being published, Brutsch was fired by his employer, and the link to the expos was briefly banned from Reddit.[51][52] He stated on Reddit after the article was published that he had received numerous death threats.[53]
Reddit CEO Yishan Wong defended the content Brutsch contributed to the site as free speech, and criticized efforts to ban the Gawker link on the same basis.[54] Wong stated that the staff had considered a site-wide ban on the link, but rejected this idea, for fear it would create a negative impression of the site without getting results.[55] Brutsch later briefly returned to Reddit on a different account, and criticized what he stated were numerous factual inaccuracies in the Gawker expos.[56]
A week after the expos, Brutsch held an interview with CNN that aired on Anderson Cooper 360. In the interview with journalist Drew Griffin, Brutsch was apologetic about his activity on Reddit. He explained that he was most fond of the appreciation he got from other redditors, and that Reddit helped him relieve stress. Brutsch also described the support he had from administrators, stating that he had received an award for his contributions. Reddit noted that the award was for winning a community vote for "Worst Subreddit", and stated that they regretted sending it, as well as claiming the u/violentacrez account had been banned on several occasions.[57][58] Brutsch subsequently noted on Reddit that he regretted doing the interview, and criticized the accuracy of the statement Reddit gave to CNN.[59]
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