Controversial Reddit communities
On the social news site Reddit, some communities are centred around explicit, violent, propagandist, or hateful material. Many such subreddits have been the topic of controversy, at times receiving significant media coverage. Journalists, attorneys, media researchers, and others have commented that such communities shape and promote biased views of international politics, the veracity of evidence-based medicine, misogynistic rhetoric, and other socially disruptive concepts.
Contrary to popular opinion as well as previous staff practices and statements, the founders of Reddit have stated they did not intend the platform to be a "bastion of free speech", where hate speech would be tolerated. However, for a period of time, Reddit allowed these controversial communities to operate largely unrestricted. The site's general manager, Erik Martin, has argued that objectionable material is a consequence of allowing free speech on the site.
Eventually, Reddit administrators instituted usage rules to allow for the banning of groups and members who stole or exposed personal information or images or promoted illegal activity, violence, shaming, race or gender-based hatred, harassment, or extremist speech. Nevertheless, there remain various active and heavily-trafficked subreddits which skirt the edges of the rules.
Critics argue that while concerned Redditors and moderators often report these subs, they often remain open until a specific incident, or the actions of an individual, forces them to come under more intense scrutiny and requires administrators to decide between allowing distasteful content or suppressing dangerous or destructive communities. Critics have also charged that the site has been inconsistent in what it bans. Some banned users and communities have created or moved to other platforms, with some even saving a duplicate of their subreddit in order to preserve it elsewhere, in the event it gets banned.
History
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 initially they could only be created by Reddit administrators. In 2008, subreddit creation was opened to all users.Reddit rose to infamy in October 2011, when CNN reported that Reddit was harboring the community, a subreddit devoted to sharing suggestive or revealing photos of underage girls. In a 2011 incident, an user posted a provocative image of an underage girl. A wave of Reddit users sent private messages to the poster requesting more photos of the girl. Various news sources criticized r/Jailbait, and Reddit administrators closed the forum.
In 2012, the subreddit received major backlash for sharing suggestive or revealing photos of women taken without their awareness or consent. Adrian Chen wrote a Gawker exposé 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.
In 2020, administrators banned the subreddit r/The_Donald for harassment, having previously instructed moderators to take down content in violation of site policies as well as imposing a quarantine to reduce the subreddit's visibility.
Quarantining
In 2015, Reddit introduced a quarantine policy to make it more difficult to visit certain subreddits. To visit or join a quarantined subreddit, users must bypass a warning prompt. In addition, to prevent users from viewing their content accidentally, quarantined subreddits do not appear in non-subscription based feeds such as. Additionally, quarantined subs do not generate revenue, and their user count is not visible. Since 2018, subreddits have been allowed to appeal a quarantine.Misinformation
Reddit is highly prone to the spread of misinformation and disinformation due to its decentralized moderation, user anonymity, and lack of fact-checking systems. A 2023 NPR article suggested that Redditors should exercise caution before taking user-created unsourced content as fact. 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.Medical misinformation
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. A study the following year revealed an abundance of unsourced and potentially harmful medical advice on Reddit for urinary tract infections, like suggesting fasting as a cure.Foreign influence
Critics have argued that since 2019, Russian-sponsored troll accounts and bots have taken over prominent left-wing and right-wing subreddits such as,, and, "suggest a Russian-led attempt to antagonize and influence Americans online, which is still ongoing."Drug use
Some subreddits are dedicated to discussing unapproved or illegal drugs, including meth, opioids, novel psychoactive substances, performance-enhancing drugs such as anabolic steroids and SARMs, and 2,4-Dinitrophenol, a chemical compound used as a pesticide and herbicide and in the manufacture of explosives which has controversially been used as a weight loss drug, despite the FDA having declared it unfit for human use in 1938 due to its causing cataracts and fatal overdoses. However, drugs-related subreddits have also enabled research and could provide information that would be difficult or impossible to obtain otherwise. Reddit also contains subreddits dedicated to addiction recovery.Snark subreddits
In snark subreddits, members gossip about, express frustration towards, or "snark" on public figures. Some of these subs specifically target female influencers such as YouTubers and TikTokers.Banned subreddits
Banned subreddits refer to subreddits that Reddit has shut down indefinitely.Antisemitic subreddits
frenworld
, whose title is derived from the alt-right meme "Clown World", attracted controversy over its use of Pepe the Frog edits and clown imagery to promote racist dog whistles, notably attacking Jews. The Times of Israel and The Daily Dot found numerous references in the subreddit to Holocaust denial, the USS Liberty incident, and alleged racial crime statistics.A major aspect of the sub was users' use of slang and childish diction, such as "nose-fren" and "longnose" for Jews, "bop" for committing violence or genocide, and "Honk honk" as a euphemism for "Heil Hitler". On June 20, 2019, after it had accumulated around 60,346 subscribers, the sub was banned for glorifying violence., which hosted similar content, was banned on July 2, 2019.
GasTheKikes
was another antisemitic subreddit, the name of which alluded to the gas chambers used in the Holocaust. New York magazine described it as a "massive online Jew-hating community" among "the worst of the worst" subreddits. The community was banned from Reddit, after which a successor subreddit named took its place. In 2015, was first quarantined, then banned.Beatingwomen
On June 9, 2014, Reddit closed a subreddit called. The community, which featured graphic depictions of violence against women, was banned after its moderators were found to be sharing users' personal information online. These moderators were also collaborating to protect one another from site-wide bans. After r/beatingwomen was banned, the community's founder rebooted the subreddit under the name in an attempt to circumvent the ban; in response, Reddit banned his user account.ChapoTrapHouse
was a subreddit dedicated to the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. It is associated with the "dirtbag left" style of left-wing politics. The community had 160,000 regulars before being banned on June 29, 2020 because they "consistently host rule-breaking content and their mods... demonstrated no intention of reining in their community." Previously, the community had been quarantined for content that promoted violence. The subreddit's userbase later migrated to an instance of Lemmy, a Reddit alternative.The "Chimpire"
The term "Chimpire" refers to a collection of subreddits and affiliated websites that promoted anti-black racism and frequently used racial slurs.In June 2013, Reddit banned the subreddit for engaging in vote manipulation, inciting violence, and disrupting other communities by posting racist content. Reddit general manager Erik Martin noted that the sub was given multiple chances to comply with site rules: "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".
Following the ban of, the subreddit grew to become the most popular "Chimpire" site, with over 15,000 members at its peak. Many of the posters on these subreddits were formerly involved with.