Reddit Bans r/MillionDollarExtreme (MDE) (September 2018)
September 2018
Reddit banned r/MillionDollarExtreme — the community tied to Sam Hyde's comedy troupe — on September 10, 2018 for violating its violent-content rules, two days before the QAnon sweep.
What happened
The community was tied to the comedy troupe Million Dollar Extreme, fronted by Sam Hyde and best known for the Adult Swim show 'Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace,' which premiered in 2016 and was cancelled that December amid alt-right controversy. By 2018 the subreddit had roughly 43,000 subscribers and had become a hub for white-supremacist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic content.
Reddit banned it on September 10, 2018 alongside successor subs r/milliondollarextreme2 and r/billionshekelsupreme. A spokesperson said it had been 'banned for violating our violent content rules,' invoking the incitement-to-violence prohibition added in Reddit's October 2017 policy update. MDE's YouTube channel had already been removed in May 2018.
Reporting, notably by BuzzFeed News, criticized the ban as too narrow — invoking only the violent-content rule when the community's core problem was sustained white-supremacist content. The ban came two days before Reddit removed the large QAnon hub r/GreatAwakening on September 12, 2018. Separately, Sam Hyde's name is recurrently spread by fans as a false suspect after mass shootings, an online harassment and disinformation pattern tied to the broader fanbase.
Impact
Removed a prominent 'ironic' extremist comedy community and exposed the limits of citing a single narrow rule when a community's central problem is broad identity-based hate.