The 'Chimpire' network of racist subreddits (SPLC, 2013–2015)

In its 2015 Intelligence Report feature 'Black Hole,' the Southern Poverty Law Center documented one of the largest concentrations of organized racist activity then operating on Reddit: a self-described network nicknamed the 'Chimpire.' The network was not a single forum but a deliberately constructed web of interlinked subreddits devoted to anti-Black racism, cross-promoting one another to consolidate an audience and to route users between communities. According to the SPLC, a user operating under the handle 'Jewish_NeoCon2' organized the network with the explicit, dehumanizing aim of expanding its reach across the platform.

The network began coalescing around 2013 and, within roughly a year, had grown to encompass dozens of active subreddits, many built around grotesque caricatures and slurs and others organized as racist responses to specific news events. The hub community was r/CoonTown, which by mid-2015 had on the order of fifteen thousand subscribers, while the broader constellation drew still more participation. The structure mattered: by spreading content across many communities, the network created redundancy, so that moderation of any single forum did less to disrupt the whole.

The SPLC's account is significant because it framed the problem in terms of organization and intent rather than isolated offensive posts. The report described the Chimpire as a window onto some of the darkest corners of the web, and it situated Reddit's tolerance of these communities within a broader pattern in which the company emphasized the legality of speech over its capacity for harm. For years administrators had declined to remove communities that trafficked in racist content so long as they stopped short of explicit, direct incitement.

The network also intersected with later criminal cases. Among the moderators of affiliated neo-Nazi and white-supremacist subreddits was Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a serial troll who operated numerous accounts across the ideological spectrum and was later arrested in a bomb plot; his involvement illustrated how these communities attracted not only committed ideologues but also bad-faith provocateurs who amplified extreme content.

Reddit's August 2015 content-policy update and ban wave dismantled the Chimpire's hub by removing r/CoonTown and a cluster of its largest affiliates, an action the company framed as targeting communities that incited or harassed. Yet the SPLC and journalists noted at the time that the response was partial: some adjacent racist communities survived under a quarantine regime rather than an outright ban, and others reconstituted under new names. The Chimpire stands as a documented case study of how hateful communities can organize into resilient networks on a mainstream platform, and of how enforcement that targets a hub may scatter rather than eliminate the underlying activity.