After a Twitter call-out from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Reddit has banned a community dedicated to posting degrading images and comments about Black women.
The subreddit, called r/DegradeEbonyThots, was started in mid-March and had almost 4,000 subscribers. But when Motherboard viewed it following Ohanian’s tweet, an automated notification by Reddit said that the subreddit was recently very popular, and suggested adding a post.
“This reddit is dedicated [sic] humiliation and degradation of black women,” the description said, and continued with further racist, sexist phrases about Black women.
The subreddit was banned shortly after we contacted Reddit.
If you visit the subreddit now, you’ll see it was banned for violating rule number one of its content policy, which reads that Reddit is “a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people.”
Reddit’s history with racist content dates back years; in 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out that many racist subreddits were popular. In 2018, when The Verge asked Reddit CEO Steve Huffman if “obvious open racism” was against the site’s rules, he said “no.” In June, following the death of George Floyd, more than 800 moderators on Reddit signed an open letter demanding the company add a policy regarding hate speech. Later that month, Reddit announced that it had expanded its content policies while also banning more than 2,000 subreddits that were in violation.
