Reddit Bans r/Physical_Removal for Inciting Violence (August 2017)
August 2017
Days after the August 2017 Charlottesville rally, Reddit banned r/Physical_Removal, a community that advocated the 'physical removal' and killing of leftists and glorified Pinochet-style death flights.
What happened
r/Physical_Removal was a community of more than 9,500 subscribers built on the premise that Democrats and leftists 'will have to be physically separated and removed from society.' Its name and culture referenced Augusto Pinochet's 'death flights' — throwing dissidents from helicopters — an allusion written into the community's rules.
Reddit banned it on August 15, 2017, in the immediate aftermath of the August 12, 2017 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, under its terms of service prohibiting content that incites violence. Reporting documented members wishing death on people in anti-hate subreddits, voicing support for concentration camps, and writing 'poems about killing'; just before the ban, a top post mocked Heather Heyer, who was murdered in the Charlottesville vehicle attack. The Daily Beast noted Reddit acted only about seven weeks after citing the same subreddit as an 'expression of the open internet,' underscoring a post-Charlottesville reversal.
A December 2018 follow-up reported that the 'physical removal' and helicopter meme persisted on Reddit despite the ban, documenting roughly 30 instances of r/The_Donald users calling for similar killings — evidence the rhetoric migrated rather than ceased.
Impact
An early post-Charlottesville test of Reddit's violence policy that showed both a reversal from prior permissiveness and the limits of bans, as the underlying violent rhetoric resurfaced in larger communities.