Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Reddit, the ‘Alt-Right’s’ Online Home, Kicks Them Out

Last night, Reddit banned two forums associated with the white nationalist “alt-right” movement, hours after one group had celebrated a banner month during which they had attracted thousands of new subscribers. Reddit shut down the two main congregating points for the “alt-right” — r/altright and r/alternativeright — leaving only a brief explanatory note.

Reddit said that both pages had violated the site’s content policy, “specifically, the proliferation of personal and confidential information,” known also as “doxing.”

This may have had something to do with an ongoing campaign to identify a masked man who famously punched “alt-right” figurehead Richard Spencer last month.

According to one r/altright moderator, they were “encouraging users to go to some kind of ‘bounty’ site, where users collaborate to attempt to gather personal information on targets,” according to a private message sent to the site Gizmodo.

This may be a reference to the site WeSearchr, where more than $5,000 has being raised to dox Spencer’s masked assailant.

“We anticipated Reddit would terminate the sub soon because they typically don’t allow these types of right-wing groups to get much bigger than 20,000 subscribers, and /r/AltRight was rapidly nearing that point,” Throwahoymatie, a former mod of r/altright told Gizmodo in a private message.

JohnnyTruthSeed, told Gizmodo that the subreddit was shut down because it had grown too popular: “the administrators of Reddit are cucks [and] we were exposing the truth about Zionism.”

Reddit, which prides itself as being a champion of free speech, has struggled with the question of if and when to regulate hateful speech.

For example, in November Steve Huffman, Reddit’s CEO, said he modified posts from Trump supporters who were harassing him online. In July of 2015, Reddit also banned a group dedicated to targeting overweight people.

Other social media platforms have also had difficulty dealing with the energized “alt-right” movement. Spencer and a handful of other “alt-rght” accounts were booted from Twitter, seemingly after violating the platform’s rules pertaining to hateful speech. Spencer’s account was reactivated, but his publication Radix Journal is still banned. (The bounty site WeSearchr has also been kicked off.)

Members of the “alt-right” were already seeking to spin the Reddit ban to their advantage.

“There’s nothing we can do about censorship on social media,” Hunter Wallace, also known as Brad Griffin, wrote on the new website Altright.com, “but maybe we can parlay all of this censorship and repression into a romantic image. We’re dangerous. We’re edgy. We’re outlaws.”

Email Sam Kestenbaum at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.