Reddit announced on Wednesday evening that it was shutting down several neo-Nazi forums that promote violence — just hours after it was revealed that a Trump-loving Redditor had fatally stabbed his own father.
In an announcement posted on its website, Reddit said it was cracking down on violent content in a way that it hadn’t done before.
“Going forward, we will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people,” the website wrote. “Likewise, we will also take action against content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals. This applies to ALL content on Reddit, including memes, CSS/community styling, flair, subreddit names, and usernames.”
Among other neo-Nazi communities, Reddit has shut down /r/pol,/r/nazi, and /r/DylannRoofInnocent.
Reddit didn’t discover their ethics until after the Daily Beast exposé, so it’s a bit difficult to give them so much as one point for doing the right thing. They have had one very long time indeed to clean their forums up; they’ve certainly received enough complaints over the years from users as well as outside criticism. It will be interesting to see if they actually follow through this time, and stand against their former stance of ‘hey, sewers are alright, we’re making a lot of money!”
Via Daily Beast and Raw Story.
Marcus Ranum says
If your “ethics” are based on “whups, that was embarrassing” and trying to kick cat litter over the poop droppings you leave -- you haven’t got a sense of ethics, you’ve got a sense of shame. Which, Reddit should.
Marcus Ranum says
I’m still waiting for twitter to shut down that noisy abusive jerk that keeps threatening to kill millions of people.
Caine says
Marcus:
That’s like waiting for a president with the spine to pardon Leonard Peltier. Never gonna happen.
Marcus Ranum says
Caine@#3:
That’s like waiting for a president with the spine to pardon Leonard Peltier.
(red mist)
Mark Jacobson says
Yeah, I’ll consider entertaining the possibility that Reddit found an ounce of ethics if they shut down r/The_Donald. Not holding my breath.