Update: Reddit users in r/SubredditDrama have posted about why r/AltRight was banned, claiming that it was as a result of users leading efforts to reveal the personal and private information of their opponents online, an act known as “doxxing.” One commenter wrote: “There is a website I can’t link that is taking money to crowdfund doxxing efforts. After the admins banned that domain, the mods on /r/altright continued to manually approve submissions to that site and added them as sticky/announcement posts. My guess is that is the reasoning behind the ban.” Another user added: “I read the thread; they were doxxing people who called for “violence” on the altright [sic]. They saw it as justice, I see it as angry internet people trying to get other angry internet people arrested.”
Original Story: Reddit has banned the alt-right subreddit, shutting down the largest online forum for the far-right political movement.
The alt-right has risen to prominence in tandem with Donald Trump’s presidency, with the movement growing in notoriety over the past couple of years and even being the subject of a speech from former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who famously branded half of Trump’s supporters (including the alt-right) a “basket of deplorables,” decrying their racism, sexism and xenophobia.
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The alt-right’s leaders, including Richard Spencer who recently made headlines after footage of him being punched went viral, have made frequent efforts to rebrand their far-right ideologies as “race realism” rather than racism, though the group’s actions and comments tell a much different story. Alongside coining the term alt-right, Spencer’s biggest claim to fame has been a video of a speech he gave after Trump’s election to fellow alt-right members, in which the audience was shown making Nazi gestures and shouting “Sieg Heil!”
Now the alt-right’s subreddit has been taken down, bringing an end to what had become known as a hub for white supremacy on the self-described “front page of the internet.”
It’s unclear exactly what led r/AltRight to be shut down at this point, though the site states that the subreddit was banned “due to a violation of our content policy, specifically, the proliferation of personal and confidential information.” Despite Reddit having previously banned a number of sites for hate speech and breaking their terms of service, r/AltRight had somehow avoided the cut, despite its moderators insisting in the sub’s rules that users must read the hugely anti-Semitic book The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem and its posts filled with hate speech.
https://twitter.com/DevRelCallum/status/820870190938341376
It’s not known at this point whether or not the banning of r/AltRight is part of another Reddit crackdown on subreddits guilty of hate speech or breaking its ToS, or whether this is simply a lone incident. Either way, it’s good to see the site finally taking action.
