Reddit Bans r/Chodi for Anti-Muslim Hate Speech

On 23 March 2022, Reddit banned r/Chodi, an India-focused political subreddit whose name derived from a crude Hindi sexual slang term and which claimed to be a free-speech sub for memes, jokes, satire, sarcasm and fun. The community had more than 90,000 members and saw hundreds of new posts a day; Reddit administrators posted a message saying it had been banned for violating the platform's rule against promoting hate. By January 2022 its subscribers openly called for genocide against Muslims and frequently propagated Islamophobic, anti-Christian, homophobic, and misogynistic content, using intentional misspellings and slang to circumvent Reddit's anti-hate-speech software.

The ban followed a January 2022 TIME investigation that documented dozens of posts a week on r/Chodi that denigrated Islam and depicted Muslims as ignorant, violent, or incestuous. Moderators of r/India, another India-focused subreddit, told TIME they had alerted Reddit employees to the behavior several times but were ignored. The Quint similarly reported that communities like r/Chodi and r/DesiMeta engaged in open calls for "Muslim genocide," and r/India moderators described a detection mechanism lacking for Indian languages, saying reports of non-English abuse often yielded nothing more than an automated response.

The same enforcement wave saw Reddit quarantine r/GenZedong, a self-described "Deng-ist" community with over 57,000 members, for containing "a high volume of information not supported by credible sources." Quarantined communities are stripped of their subscribers, generate no revenue, and do not appear in general Reddit feeds. A Reddit spokesperson declined to comment beyond what was posted on the website.

The action drew mixed reactions. Some Indian users and the report's authors viewed it as overdue accountability for a community that had operated for years; others framed it as politically motivated censorship of Hindu-nationalist speech. After the crackdown, both groups directed their members elsewhere, including Telegram, and one new outpost of r/Chodi was soon posting transphobic memes and welcoming members to "a better free speech experience." Attempts to recreate the community in new subreddits followed the familiar pattern of migration and reconstitution that limits the durability of platform bans.

The ban applied Reddit's sitewide Rule 1, which states that Reddit is "a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people" and that communities promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned. The episode underscored both the real-world communal-tension stakes of moderation decisions in India and the persistent gap between Reddit's written rules and its capacity to enforce them in non-English communities.