Earlier today Reddit banned r/altright, the primary community on the site for the so-called “alt-right.” And for a variety of reasons, that’s about all we know.
The subreddit had always courted controversy and pushed the bounds of Reddit’s relatively lax policies on speech. Users from r/altright
often made inflammatory remarks about a variety of marginalized groups and many
espoused views in the white supremacist/national socialist spectrum. Two of the subreddit’s moderators also appear to have been terminated, though it’s unclear if that’s related to the subreddit’s ban.
Because moderators had
artificially inflated r/altright’s subscriber count, there’s no telling how large the community was. Like other banned abusive subreddits (r/fatpeoplehate and r/pizzagate to name a few), r/alright have made a new home for themselves on Reddit knockoff Voat. That community presently displays 314 subscribers.
Gizmodo reached out to one of Reddit’s “powermods” who told us via email that he heard “they were encouraging users to go to some kind of ‘bounty’ site, where users collaborate to attempt to gather personal information on targets.” If true, that description matches Chuck Johnson’s WeSearchr, which was recently banned from Twitter. This moderator also suggested the ban might have been planned well in advance, pointing us to a comment left by CEO Steve Huffman on his most recent
announcements post—though it could of course be coincidental.
