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 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and livestreamed the first attack on Facebook. 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 and accident investigators. The Christchurch footage, and moderators' refusal to remove it, prompted the company to reverse course within hours.
The Reddit bans were one node in a frantic, industry-wide effort to stop the video's spread. Facebook later said it removed roughly 1.5 million copies of the video in the first 24 hours, blocking about 1.2 million at upload; YouTube and Twitter scrambled with automated takedowns as re-uploaders raced to defeat them. The episode fed directly into New Zealand and Australian policymaking, including the May 2019 'Christchurch Call' pledge by governments and tech firms to curb violent extremist content online and Australia's new criminal penalties for platforms that fail to remove 'abhorrent violent material.'
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; Facebook alone reported removing about 1.5 million copies of the video in 24 hours. 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 helped spur the international Christchurch Call.
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