Reddit's Delayed Ban of r/GasTheKikes and r/KikeTown (2015)

Among the hate communities Reddit hosted in the mid-2010s were r/GasTheKikes and its successor r/KikeTown, openly antisemitic subreddits whose names invoked the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Anti-hate researchers described r/GasTheKikes as one of the platform's most virulent communities — 'a massive online Jew-hating community' that ranked among the worst subreddits then operating.

Reddit's response was notably slow. As the Times of Israel reported, the platform banned the group only after roughly nine months of complaints and campaigning, including pressure from the Southern Poverty Law Center. When r/GasTheKikes was removed, a successor community, r/KikeTown, sprang up in its place; Reddit first quarantined r/KikeTown and then banned it as well, a stop-start pattern that let the content persist under new names.

The episode unfolded during the same 2015 period in which Reddit, under CEO Ellen Pao and then Steve Huffman, introduced its first meaningful anti-harassment policy and carried out early hate-community bans such as r/CoonTown. Yet the delay in acting against explicitly genocidal antisemitic communities exposed the gap between the new policy on paper and its enforcement in practice, and it became a recurring case study in later analyses of antisemitism on the platform by the Anti-Defamation League and others.

The r/GasTheKikes and r/KikeTown bans are a discrete but important entry in Reddit's long record of tolerating hate until outside pressure forced its hand — a pattern that connects the 2015 harassment-policy era to the far larger June 2020 Great Ban five years later.