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June 18, 2020 02:46 pm

Racism Is Rampant on Reddit, and Its Editors Are in Open Revolt

An anonymous reader shares a report: The volunteer moderators of Reddit's r/blackladies community -- an online message board that currently has over 40,000 members -- wrote an open letter outlining their frustrations with the popular website in August 2014. They had pitched their message board, known as a subreddit, as a safe space for Black women, but were being deluged with hateful comments and links to racist content from anonymous accounts. "They are relentless, coming in barrages," the moderators wrote. "We have a racist user problem and Reddit won't take action." Several months later Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit's co-founders, joined a comment thread on r/blackladies discussing the letter. Ohanian, who had recently returned to the company as its executive chairman, said protecting communities like theirs from abuse was a "top priority." He solicited suggestions on how to do it, and expressed interest in an "ongoing dialogue with all of the mods who signed onto the open letter." Reddit user TheYellowRose, a r/blackladies moderator who helped write the letter said in a recent phone interview that Ohanian's promised dialogue never materialized. To TheYellowRose, who asked to be identified only by her screen name because she is still regularly subjected to racist abuse and fears physical violence if her identity is revealed, Ohanian's initial enthusiasm for the idea seemed like just another example of the company's leaders trying to say the right things without seriously confronting the ways their site harbored extremists and gave them a place to organize. Reddit has faced several potential inflection points in its approach to racism in the six years since then, but has never undertaken a full enough reckoning to satisfy its critics. It's facing another big moment in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. Once again, the pressure is coming in part from the volunteers who moderate Reddit's countless message boards. On June 1, Steve Huffman, another co-founder who has been chief executive since 2015, sent a note to Reddit employees voicing support for the Black Lives Matter movement. "We do not tolerate hate, racism, and violence, and while we have work to do to fight these on our platform, our values are clear," he wrote.

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