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

r/MGTOW was the principal Reddit community for 'Men Going Their Own Way,' a strand of the online 'manosphere' whose adherents argue that men should withdraw from relationships and, in many cases, from social engagement with women altogether. The ideology overlaps with men's rights activism, pick-up artistry, and incel communities, and academic researchers have repeatedly grouped MGTOW among manosphere movements associated with the radicalization of men into misogynistic belief systems. By 2019 the subreddit had grown to roughly 104,000 members, making it one of the largest dedicated manosphere forums on the platform.

Scrutiny intensified after a February 2020 study by Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Jeremy Blackburn and colleagues, summarized in MIT Technology Review, which traced how the manosphere was becoming more toxic as users migrated toward communities espousing hostility and violence toward women. The paper identified MGTOW and similar communities as 'growing in size and in their involvement in online harassment and real-world violence.' Following that research, Reddit placed r/MGTOW under quarantine in early 2020, a status that strips a community of ad revenue and forces visitors to click through a warning that the content is considered offensive.

The community also surfaced in the federal prosecution of Christopher Paul Hasson, a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant arrested in 2019 with a stockpile of firearms and ammunition who prosecutors said aspired to 'kill as many people as possible' in service of white nationalism. Court filings established that Hasson's most-visited website was the MGTOW subreddit, which he accessed tens of thousands of times between 2017 and 2019, alongside searches for sniper tactics, bomb-making material, and the manifestos of far-right terrorists. He was sentenced to more than 13 years in federal prison in early 2020.

On August 3, 2021, Reddit permanently banned both r/MGTOW and its backup r/MGTOW2 under its hate policy, roughly eighteen months after the quarantine and following about a decade of complaints that members joked about violence against women. 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.'

After the ban, MGTOW activity dispersed to standalone forums and other platforms rather than disappearing, a pattern documented across deplatformed manosphere communities. 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, in line with Reddit's broader 2020-2021 enforcement push following its June 2020 content-policy overhaul.