Reddit Bans r/Ice_Poseidon (2018 Quarantine, 2019 Ban)

r/Ice_Poseidon was the fan community for Paul Michael Joseph Denino, an American 'IRL' (in-real-life) live streamer known as Ice Poseidon who pioneered the always-on, location-revealing style of mobile broadcasting. The community was widely described as toxic and harassment-prone, and the content and audience became notorious for the harms that flowed from that format: viewers repeatedly engaged in 'stream sniping' (locating and confronting Denino on stream), doxxing, and swatting — the practice of falsely reporting an emergency to provoke an armed police response at a target's location.

The defining incident occurred in late April 2017, when Denino was swatted while aboard a commercial flight at Phoenix airport after a viewer phoned in a bomb threat falsely attributed to him; law enforcement pulled him off the plane on landing. Twitch permanently banned him the following day for revealing his location and endangering others, with Kotaku reporting on the episode in May 2017. Denino subsequently moved his operation to YouTube, but the culture of harassment, location-tracking, and confrontation followed his community across platforms.

Reddit placed r/Ice_Poseidon under quarantine in September 2018, with admins citing 'the high degree of bigotry present in your community, as well as widespread use of abusive and derogatory language.' Quarantine stripped the subreddit of ad revenue and required visitors to acknowledge a content warning before entering. Reporting by Kotaku documented a 'never-ending cycle' of toxic engagement in which viewers tracked Denino's location to stage real-world confrontations, called in repeated swattings, and used slurs and harassment, because fans were 'guaranteed a reaction that feels real.'

In October 2019, Reddit escalated to a full ban, removing both r/Ice_Poseidon and its community-run sister subreddit r/Ice_Poseidon2. The dual removal targeted the original forum and the backup community fans had created in anticipation of enforcement — a recurring pattern in which deplatformed communities spawn successor subreddits that are then banned together.

The real-world harm was substantial and physical: repeated swatting incidents sent armed police to respond to false threats, endangering Denino, bystanders, and — in the airplane case — an entire flight grounded over a bomb-threat hoax. The Ice Poseidon case became a reference point in wider debates about the IRL streaming format and platform responsibility for real-world harm. After the Reddit ban, fan activity dispersed to other forums and chat platforms, and Denino's later ventures kept the figure controversial well beyond the subreddit's removal.