Reddit Bans r/fatpeoplehate and Four Other Subreddits Under New Anti-Harassment Policy

On May 19, 2015, under interim CEO Ellen Pao, Reddit announced a new anti-harassment policy that defined harassment as "systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person conclude that Reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas, or fear for their safety or the safety of those around them." Pao framed the shift as a deliberate move away from absolutism, stating it was not the site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform.

On June 10, 2015, Reddit enforced that policy with its first round of bans, removing five subreddits: r/fatpeoplehate, r/hamplanethatred, r/neofag, r/transfags, and r/shitniggerssay. r/fatpeoplehate was by far the largest, with roughly 150,000 subscribers, and had become known for tracking down and harassing specific individuals — including, in the period before the ban, the staff of the fitness site Imgur after images were removed. Reddit administrators justified the action on behavioral, not ideological, grounds, explaining the company would ban subreddits that allow their communities to harass individuals when moderators do not take action.

The response was immediate and hostile. A vocal segment of the user base denounced the bans as censorship and flooded the site with content harassing leadership — most notably interim CEO Ellen Pao, whose image was posted across the front page alongside fat-shaming pictures and demands that she resign. New clone subreddits with names mimicking the banned community sprang up faster than admins could remove them, and some banned communities migrated to the alternative platform Voat, which briefly buckled under the influx of traffic.

The episode became a landmark test of platform moderation. It was later examined in the influential 2017 study "You Can't Stay Here" (Chandrasekharan et al., CSCW), which analyzed more than 100 million posts and found that, relative to matched control groups, accounts from r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown who stayed on Reddit cut their use of hate-speech terms by more than 80%, while many other accounts left the platform entirely — and that the subreddits the migrants moved into did not see a measurable rise in hate speech. The bans thus became one of the earliest pieces of empirical evidence that deplatforming can curb hateful behavior rather than merely relocate it.