Reddit Bans r/Chodi for Anti-Muslim Hate Speech
March 2022
On 23 March 2022 Reddit banned the India-focused r/Chodi, a community of over 90,000 members, for promoting hate against Muslims, following a TIME investigation into hate speech on the platform.
What happened
On 23 March 2022, Reddit banned r/Chodi, an India-focused political subreddit with more than 90,000 members and hundreds of new posts a day. Reddit administrators said the community was banned for violating the platform's rule against promoting hate.
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, alongside content described by moderators of other Indian subreddits as Islamophobic and, in places, calling for violence against Muslims. The same enforcement wave saw Reddit act against other communities flagged for misinformation.
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. Banned users quickly migrated to Telegram and attempted to recreate the community in new subreddits.
The episode underscored both the real-world communal-tension stakes of moderation decisions in India and the persistent problem of community migration and reconstitution that limits the durability of platform bans.
Impact
The ban removed a large, established hate-promoting community but also illustrated the limits of enforcement, as members rapidly migrated to Telegram and spun up successor subreddits, while sharpening the politicised debate over moderation of Indian communal speech.