Reddit Bans r/GreatAwakening and the QAnon Subreddits (September 2018)

r/GreatAwakening was the central and largest hub for the QAnon conspiracy theory on Reddit — the false claim, originating on anonymous imageboards in late 2017, that a cabal of elites runs a global child-trafficking ring opposed by Donald Trump. After Reddit removed the original QAnon subreddit, r/CBTS_Stream ('Calm Before the Storm'), in March 2018 for incitement of violence and posting private information, r/GreatAwakening rose to become the movement's central community on the platform, helping carry QAnon from its imageboard origins into a broader audience.

At its peak the subreddit was extraordinarily active: reporting at the time of the ban placed its subscriber count in the range of roughly 54,000 to 71,000, with the community averaging on the order of 10,000 comments per day. It served as a clearinghouse for 'Q drops,' interpretation threads, and offline organizing, and was instrumental in mainstreaming the theory beyond fringe forums.

On September 12, 2018, Reddit banned r/GreatAwakening along with a backup community and roughly 17 other QAnon-focused subreddits — a group that included communities such as r/BiblicalQ, r/Quincels, r/QProofs, and r/thestorm. The removals followed months of documented violent threats and harassment tied to the conspiracy theory, behavior that reportedly continued even after the community's own moderators urged users to stop posting violent content in the weeks before the ban.

Reddit grounded the action in its content policy, reiterating that it is 'very clear in our site terms of service that posting content that incites violence, disseminates personal information, or harasses will get users and communities banned from Reddit.' Press accounts emphasized that the bans addressed inciting violence, doxxing, and harassment rather than the conspiracy beliefs themselves — a conduct-based rather than viewpoint-based rationale.

The deplatforming pushed QAnon communities toward other venues — including Voat, 8chan, and dedicated QAnon websites — where the movement continued to grow and harden. The September 2018 sweep is widely treated as an early, partial intervention against a conspiracy movement that would later be tied to real-world violence and eventually face much broader platform crackdowns across social media in 2020 and 2021. It became an early case study in how conspiracy communities migrate and intensify after deplatforming.