Reddit Bans r/MGTOW (2020 Quarantine, 2021 Ban)

MGTOW ('Men Going Their Own Way') is an anti-feminist, misogynistic male-separatist movement within the online 'manosphere,' and r/MGTOW was a major Reddit node for it. Reddit quarantined the subreddit in early 2020 following a 2020 academic preprint that grouped MGTOW among manosphere communities 'growing in size and in their involvement in online harassment and real-world violence.' The quarantine cut its ad revenue and forced an opt-in warning.

Reddit permanently banned both r/MGTOW and its backup r/MGTOW2 in August 2021 under its hate policy. A Reddit spokesperson said: 'Reddit's site-wide policies explicitly prohibit content that incites violence or promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability. The subreddit in question was banned in accordance with these policies.' The ban followed roughly a decade of complaints that members joked about violence against women.

Reporting linked the movement to real-world harm: Newsweek noted Christopher Hasson, a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant sentenced to 13 years for stockpiling weapons, whose browsing history included tens of thousands of visits to the MGTOW subreddit. As with Reddit's other late actions, a community openly documented as misogynistic for years was first only quarantined and banned only after sustained scholarly and public pressure.