Reddit’s logo. Photo by Getty Images

By Mira Fox May 1, 2025

Subreddits come in many flavors — serious, flippant, hateful, gossipy. But usually, the subreddits with obvious names are mainstream. r/Judaism, devoted to general, polite questions, thoughts and discussion, is the homebase for Jewish content. Similarly, r/running is a place to post training regimens or talk about the best energy gels to eat during a marathon.

To find the kind of edgy jokes or hate speech that can often populate a site like Reddit, you have to dive deeper into subreddits with creative naming conventions, which often mine niche references or jokes. (See: r/JewDank, for “dank memes” of the Jewish persuasion, or r/runningcirclejerk for navel-gazing jokes about running.)

But r/holocaust did not follow this convention. Instead of being a place for remembrance, historical queries or analysis, r/holocaust was, as some redditors put it, a cesspool. Nearly a decade ago Reddit detectives discovered that the moderators running the r/holocaust forum also moderated white nationalist forums with names like r/whiterights. (That subreddit has since been banned.) They deleted posts with factual and historical information about the Holocaust, and filled the subreddit with antisemitic slurs, conspiracies and Holocaust denial. For over a decade, however, Reddit refused to do anything

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On Yom HaShoah, however, moderators of the r/Jewish subreddit triumphantly announced that they had revived r/Holocaust – and this time, it was in the hands of experienced Jewish redditors.

The squatzis of r/Holocaust

A moderator of the new incarnation of the subreddit, who wished to remain anonymous thanks to the antisemitism on the platform, spoke to me by email about how and why they had worked to bring the forum back to life.

One of the main concerns was Reddit’s agreement with OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, to allow the company to scrape the social media site’s content to train its AI engine; Google’s AI does the same. That meant hate speech and conspiracy theories could end up spreading through the chatbot. The moderators hoped they could fight this trickle-down hate speech by putting more, correct information online, through a forum like r/holocaust.

The idea was birthed after Oct. 7. “Early on, as we were grieving the loss of 1,200 people in Israel while simultaneously dealing with an unprecedented onslaught of hate speech on Reddit, the idea of reinstating r/holocaust arose,” said the moderator.

But it was a complicated proposition; the name r/holocaust had been banned on Reddit after more than a decade of control by white supremacists.

Because Reddit is a volunteer-run social media site, each subreddit forum is moderated by its users. Though there are some site-wide rules, most of the enforcement is left to moderators — shutting down comments on posts that get too nasty, deleting posts and banning users. That means that the so-called “mods” have a lot of power over each community.

It’s unclear whether Holocaust deniers started r/holocaust, or simply managed to take over as moderators. Either way, eventually one particular Holocaust-denying Reddit user, who went by the neutral-sounding username u/soccer, became the head moderator of r/Holocaust over a decade ago. Despite complaints from users, u/soccer then applied to be the head moderator of several other communities and, through a Reddit loophole of sorts by which Reddit higher-ups could install new moderators, was given control.

After gaining power over at least a dozen subreddits u/soccer invited other Holocaust deniers, often with more blatantly antisemitic usernames like u/GodBlessAdolfHitler, as fellow moderators. They linked the subreddits to other far-right forums, like r/MensRights and r/redpill, and turned them into spaces for Holocaust denial and racism.

In addition to r/holocaust, Holocaust deniers ran subreddits like r/mossad, which was mostly antisemitism, and r/blackpanthers — a space devoted not to the Black Panther party, as it might sound, but to anti-Black racism. This had the dual effect of exposing unsuspecting redditors to racist content when searching for other topics and preventing the targets of their hate from creating easy-to-find forums.

Devoted Redditors were well aware of the issue, particularly after the “squatzis,” as users termed the Nazis controlling useful subreddits, took over the page for the popular, and outspokenly progressive, webcomic xkcd. The comic’s creator, Randall Munroe, got involved in petitions to remove the white nationalists from the subreddit in a battle that went on for years.

But Reddit was unwilling to remove the Nazi moderators, seemingly worried that users would revolt site-wide with complaints about bias or undue control; the social media site is generally praised by its users for its hands-off approach.

Instead, users were forced to create other subreddits with slightly less obvious names, to fill the role of the subverted forums. A forum called r/HaShoah took the place of r/holocaust. (r/Shoah had also been overtaken by Holocaust deniers.) Redditors did their best to get the word out about the alternative subreddits and direct traffic to real sources of information. But anyone searching for information about the Holocaust was still likely to land on r/holocaust first.

Getting r/holocaust removed, and reinstated

Eventually, in 2019, r/Holocaust was banned from Reddit; the site had just changed its policies on bullying, and the subreddit was taken down within hours of their implementation. (A post on r/conspiracy, a forum for conspiracy theorists — which still exists — bemoaned its loss, calling it “a cool hangout for some open minded guys doing their research.”)

That still left a gap: It remained hard to find factual information about the Holocaust on Reddit, since the obvious forums for discussing such topics were banned. Hence, the rebirth.

But Reddit has a policy against reinstating banned subreddits. So the moderation team from r/Jewish began to contact the site in early 2024 to discuss hate speech on the platform, try to workshop a definition of antisemitism for the platform to use across all subreddits and to advocate for bringing r/holocaust back to the platform. Eventually, the site agreed.

“Our engagement with Reddit has included conversations with admins on the Community, Safety, and Policy teams, including individuals at the VP level,” the moderator of r/holocaust said. “They understood us to be good actors because of our longstanding leadership of Jewish and Israeli communities on Reddit and our advocacy for Jews on the platform and around the world.”

The new moderation team hopes to bring Holocaust survivors and their descendants onto the subreddit for AMA — “Ask me anything” — sessions, as well as collaborate with Holocaust memorials and museums for post and content.

Still, currently, posts are locked; the moderators are concerned about antisemitic hate speech infiltrating again. The team said they are working on developing protocols to allow people to share details from their own family history with the Holocaust, and engage in good faith, but there’s every reason to be nervous.

But even though r/Holocaust is back, cleansed of its Nazism for the time being — all existing users and content was deleted — there’s still debate.

In an announcement post about its “rescue” on r/Jewish, arguments immediately broke out in the comments around what the subreddit should cover. Some argued that there should be special attention paid to other, non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, such as the Roma. Another annoyed poster referred to this as “all lives mattering” the Holocaust.

Though the posts on r/holocaust will be factual this time around, that doesn’t mean they won’t be contested.

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