Reddit Bans r/DarkHumorAndMemes in the June 2020 Purge

r/DarkHumorAndMemes was one of the most active communities removed in Reddit's June 29, 2020 'Great Ban,' the mass enforcement action that accompanied the platform's content-policy overhaul and removed roughly 2,000 subreddits. The subreddit operated under the banner of 'dark humor' and edgy meme-sharing, but it was identified by Reddit and by news outlets covering the purge as a community where the 'it's just a joke' framing was used to host and circulate identity-based hate content. Unlike the inactive majority of communities removed that day, it was specifically named by multiple outlets among the handful of most-active subreddits banned.

The ban was carried out under the newly rewritten Rule 1, which prohibited communities and users that 'incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability.' The June 2020 overhaul was significant precisely because it converted Reddit's previously 'implicit' anti-hate stance into explicit, enforceable language, giving administrators a concrete basis to remove communities that had used irony or comedy framing as a shield for bigoted content.

Variety listed the most active banned subreddits as including 'darkhumorandmemes; consumeproduct; darkjokecentral; gendercritical; cumtown; imgoingtohellforthis2; wojak; and soyboys,' and The Advocate independently named 'Dark Humor And Memes' alongside The_Donald, Gender Critical, and ChapoTrapHouse. The community was swept up together with r/Imgoingtohellforthis2, the successor to the long-running edgy-meme community r/ImGoingToHellForThis — a name that itself encapsulated the 'offensive on purpose' ethos that Reddit's new policy targeted, illustrating the pattern of removing original 'dark humor' hubs and their backup subreddits together.

'Dark humor' subreddits of this kind were repeatedly criticized for using a 'just a joke' framing as cover for racist, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ content — precisely the bad-faith pattern Reddit's revised Rule 1 said it would not protect. The Great Ban that claimed r/DarkHumorAndMemes was broad and ideologically mixed, simultaneously removing high-profile communities such as r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse, with Reddit framing the overall action around conduct rather than political alignment.

In the aftermath, r/DarkHumorAndMemes became a recurring example, cited in coverage by Variety, The Advocate, and Engadget, of how 'dark humor' and 'just a joke' framing functioned as a vector for identity-based hate that Reddit's pre-2020 rules had failed to address. The broader campaign it was part of expanded to nearly 7,000 banned subreddits by August 2020, and the Rule 1 language used to justify its removal became the standard basis for subsequent hate-related enforcement on the platform.