Reddit Bans r/WatchPeopleDie and r/gore After Christchurch Shooting Livestream
March 2019
On March 15, 2019, within hours of the livestreamed Christchurch mosque shootings, Reddit permanently banned the long-running r/WatchPeopleDie (300,000+ subscribers) and r/gore communities after users shared footage of the attack, citing its policy against glorifying or encouraging violence.
What happened
On March 15, 2019, a gunman killed dozens of worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and livestreamed the first attack. Copies spread rapidly across platforms. On Reddit, users in r/WatchPeopleDie — a subreddit roughly seven years old with more than 300,000 subscribers dedicated to real footage of human death — actively sought and shared mirrored links to the massacre video, in some cases via direct messages after the footage began to be removed.
Reddit moved to eliminate the community in under 24 hours. By March 15 it had permanently banned r/WatchPeopleDie along with r/gore and r/wpdtalk. Visitors saw a message that the communities violated Reddit's content policies, 'specifically our policy against glorifying or encouraging violence.' A spokesperson said posting content that incites or glorifies violence would get users and communities banned.
The ban marked an escalation from Reddit's earlier approach. r/WatchPeopleDie had been quarantined in September 2018 — unsearchable and opt-in but still accessible. As recently as the night before the ban, a Reddit spokesperson had defended the subreddit as having educational value for medical professionals. The Christchurch footage, and moderators' refusal to remove it, prompted the company to reverse course.
Impact
The bans were part of a broader, industry-wide scramble to contain the viral spread of the Christchurch livestream, alongside Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. For Reddit, the episode demonstrated the limits of its quarantine system, which had allowed a community built around real death footage to persist for years; an acute crisis was required before the platform removed it. The removal of such a notorious subreddit became a frequently cited example in debates over moderating graphic, violence-glorifying content and foreshadowed Reddit's later systematic enforcement.