The long hate purge

The Southern Poverty Law Center documented a self-described network of dozens of interlinked racist subreddits, the 'Chimpire,' that grew on Reddit for nearly two years before the 2015 ban wave dismantled its hub.

A widely cited BuzzFeed News investigation argued that Reddit's structure and hands-off governance had made it a hospitable environment for organized hate communities, framing the problem as systemic rather than incidental.

In 2015 Reddit removed r/GasTheKikes and its successor r/KikeTown — openly antisemitic communities whose names invoked the Holocaust — but only after months of external pressure, exemplifying the platform's slow, reactive enforcement against hate that its own 2015 harassment policy was supposed to address.

Reddit removed the flagship alt-right subreddit r/altright on February 1, 2017 for repeated content-policy violations, citing the doxxing of, and a 'bounty' campaign against, the man filmed punching white-nationalist Richard Spencer.

Across 2017–2018 Reddit quarantined and banned a cluster of white-nationalist subreddits — quarantining r/European in 2016 and banning it March 12, 2018, and removing r/EuropeanNationalism and similar subs in the October 25, 2017 violence-policy purge.

Days after the August 2017 Charlottesville rally, Reddit banned r/Physical_Removal, a community that advocated the 'physical removal' and killing of leftists and glorified Pinochet-style death flights.

On September 27-28, 2018, Reddit formalized and expanded its 'quarantine' mechanism — gating offensive subreddits behind an opt-in warning page, stripping ad revenue, and hiding them from search — then applied it to more than 20 communities including r/CringeAnarchy, r/WatchPeopleDie, r/TheRedPill, and r/Braincels, triggering accusations of censorship and inconsistent enforcement.

Reddit banned r/MillionDollarExtreme — the community tied to Sam Hyde's comedy troupe — on September 10, 2018 for violating its violent-content rules, two days before the QAnon sweep.

Reddit quarantined the 400,000-subscriber r/CringeAnarchy in September 2018 and banned it on April 25, 2019 after it hosted anti-Muslim content justifying the Christchurch mosque massacre.

Reddit banned r/frenworld on June 20, 2019 for glorifying or encouraging violence, after the cartoon-frog 'fren' aesthetic was found to mask an economy of coded neo-Nazi and antisemitic dogwhistles.

On June 29, 2020 Reddit rewrote its content policy into eight explicit rules and banned roughly 2,000 subreddits the same day under a new rule against hate based on identity or vulnerability — the largest enforcement event in its history.

r/ChapoTrapHouse, the left-wing 'dirtbag left' podcast community, was banned on June 29, 2020 in Reddit's mass content-policy purge — the most prominent non-right-wing subreddit removed that day.

A line of studies, beginning with analysis of Reddit's 2015 ban wave, measured whether removing hate communities reduced hateful activity and tracked where displaced users migrated when they did not disappear.