Reddit Purges Nazi And Far-Right Message Boards

The Verge reports:

Reddit has shut down several Nazi and white supremacist subreddits after a policy change banning material that “encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people.”

The news was posted earlier today in Reddit’s moderator news forum, and commenters noted that at least 10 subreddits have been banned since then, including r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, and r/DylannRoofInnocent. Reddit is also banning anything that glorifies or encourages abuse of animals, including bestiality-themed subreddits.

This is a noteworthy shift for Reddit, which was reticent to ban almost any non-illegal material until 2015. It’s since removed some overtly hate-oriented boards over doxing and general nuisance, and “quarantined” others — including at least one of the newly banned ones, as Gizmodo writes — so they’re not visible to casual visitors.