Reddit: "An Incubator Of Hate"?

Image from Wikipedia.

Charlie Warzel's article in BuzzFeed is subtitled, "Reddit’s decision to police “behavior, not ideas” isn’t just foolish — it’s reckless." Below are two excerpts from the article but be forewarned: very racist, anti-Black content follows:

     As Reddit celebrates its 10th birthday, it is stuck in the untenable position of simultaneously trying to clean up its most vile nether regions while still creating conditions that attract racism and misogyny the way a porch light draws in moths. [emphasis added] The site’s management has recently taken several genuine steps to make users feel safer on Reddit: In February, they set out to define its standards of harassment and revenge porn; earlier this month, they acted to enforce those standards by banning five of the site’s most odious subreddits.

[and. . .]

     But if the company’s rhetoric suggests an organization committed to eradicating hate and bigotry, its actions are that of one that’s ultimately unwilling to do the hard work of abolishing the conditions in which hate and bigotry thrive. The r/CoonTown forum is far from the site’s only racist forum: Before being banned for harassing redditors in other subreddits, r/n*****s was the site’s most infamous racist community. And in 2013, the popular racist subreddit r/GreatApes branched off into a network of smaller groups known as “The Chimpire.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “within a year, the Chimpire network had grown to include 46 active subreddits spanning an alarming range of racist topics, including ‘Teenapers,’ ‘ApeWrangling,’ ‘Detoilet,’ and ‘Chicongo,’ along with subreddits for both ‘TrayvonMartin’ and ‘ferguson.’” And that list fails to include the darkest, most egregious communities like r/WatchN*****sDie, the content of which very much reflects the group’s name. On Reddit, hate is alive and well, and in some cases, growing.

Was Dylann Roof reading Reddit too? On an entirely different top: