Reddit Bans r/CoonTown and Other Racist Subreddits Under Steve Huffman's New Content Policy

On August 5, 2015, Reddit co-founder and newly reinstated CEO Steve Huffman, posting as u/spez, announced an updated content policy in r/announcements and simultaneously banned a set of notoriously racist communities, including r/CoonTown and its satellites (r/WatchNiggersDie, r/bestofcoontown, r/koontown, r/CoonTownMods, r/CoonTownMeta) along with r/RapingWomen. The action came about a month after Huffman returned following the resignation of interim CEO Ellen Pao.

The new policy formalized a distinction between two enforcement tiers. Communities deemed extremely offensive would be 'quarantined' — hidden from general browsing and viewable only by opt-in users. A smaller set deemed to exist solely to annoy other redditors and make Reddit worse would be banned outright. r/CoonTown, which had survived an earlier June 2015 round of bans aimed at harassment, fell into the latter category.

The framing drew criticism. Rather than condemning the subreddits primarily for racist content, Huffman emphasized operational burden, saying the small number of such communities consumed a disproportionate share of moderation resources. He also stated Reddit was never intended to be a 'bastion of free speech.' Critics argued the rationale was muddled and set an ambiguous standard, while some users complained the policy was simultaneously too aggressive (a slippery slope to broad censorship) and too timid (leaving many borderline communities merely quarantined). As with the June bans, users of removed communities migrated toward Voat and stood up evasion clones.

The efficacy of the 2015 bans became one of the most-studied questions in content-moderation research. The 2017 CSCW paper "You Can't Stay Here" concluded the bans worked as intended: many affected accounts abandoned Reddit, those who stayed reduced their hate-speech term usage by more than 80% relative to controls, and 'invaded' destination subreddits did not become measurably more hateful — countering the common assumption that deplatforming simply spreads toxicity elsewhere on the same site.