Reddit Is Finally Facing Its Legacy of Racism

Adam Serwer: The white nationalists are winning

Despite Reddit’s public claim that it doesn’t tolerate harassment, moderators of subreddits that draw attention from racist trolls say they have had to make do with their own ingenuity and technical know-how for years. TheYellowRose, a 30-year-old moderator of the subreddit r/blackladies who signed on to the open letter, has spent the past eight years battling racism on Reddit nearly every day. Periods of peak harassment map to real-world events, she told me, citing the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, as a period of particularly intense harassment. The subreddit was subject to repeated “brigading”—a term for when users of one subreddit organize coordinated attacks against another.

“We were heavily brigaded by a subreddit called r/GreatApes, which is not about animals,” she told me. “We sent countless messages to the admins asking for help, over and over again.” Shortly after, her team wrote an open letter titled “We have a racist user problem and Reddit won’t take action,” which was signed by dozens of subreddits. “We heard nothing,” she said. (A Reddit spokesperson said the company is aware of that letter but declined to comment on it, citing the fact that the company was under different leadership at the time.)

Five years ago, left to its own devices, r/blackladies built its own, custom auto-moderator. It automatically bans any user who has ever posted in any subreddit that r/blackladies considers dangerous—the largest being r/The_Donald. TheYellowRose helped Dubteedub draft the recent open letter and reviewed it before it was published. Although her previous attempt to compel the company to change failed, she felt it was important to join a chorus making clear that the majority of Reddit users don’t want to use a website overrun by racists.

The current wave of protests has elicited promises of solidarity from companies in every industry—some more genuine-seeming than others, and some ridiculous. Reddit’s claim that its “values are clear” was not especially convincing, but a huge cross section of its user base has made its values quite explicit as a response. No one would suggest that moderation is a task as simple as banning some hateful keywords, or that Reddit can ever become a utopia so long as the offline world lets racism fester. But the cultural shift the letter represents may prove more important than any granular tweaks to a content policy.

Reddit is known for racism right now, but if hundreds of millions of people who use it don’t want it to be, that says something about its future—and the future of social-media platforms more broadly. Many Americans have spent months inside, on the internet, thinking about what it means to live online. Now many of them are in the streets, thinking about how to tackle racism. More than ever, it’s obvious that the internet is the real world. What happens here matters. What happens here happens out there.

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology.