Reddit Bans r/ChapoTrapHouse in the June 2020 Purge
June 2020
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.
What happened
On June 29, 2020, Reddit announced a revised content policy whose new Rule 1 banned communities promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability, and removed roughly 2,000 subreddits the same day. r/ChapoTrapHouse — the forum for the left-wing 'dirtbag left' podcast Chapo Trap House, with roughly 150,000 to 160,000 subscribers — was the most prominent non-right-wing community swept up in the action.
Reddit's community-specific rationale was that the subreddit 'consistently host[ed] rule-breaking content and their mods have demonstrated no intention of reining in their community.' Like the much larger r/The_Donald, which was banned the same day, r/ChapoTrapHouse had been quarantined in 2019 before the 2020 removal.
The timing came about three weeks after the George Floyd protests began and amid a period when large subreddits went dark to protest Reddit's handling of racist content. Critics on the left argued Chapo was included partly to provide political balance against the far larger The_Donald ban, though Reddit's stated basis was repeated rule-breaking and unresponsive moderation rather than the podcast's politics.
Impact
Demonstrated that Reddit's 2020 hate-policy enforcement reached beyond the right and became a flashpoint in debates over whether the purge was principled or partly cosmetic political balancing.