The Reddit vs. Gawker Link-Ban War

In October 2012, Gawker journalist Adrian Chen prepared to publish the real-world identity of 'Violentacrez,' a prolific Reddit moderator of roughly 400 subreddits who ran shock communities including r/picsofdeadkids and, at one time, r/jailbait. When word spread on 10 October that the article was coming, the user deleted his accounts. He had offered on 5 October to delete his account in exchange for Gawker withholding his details and been declined; in leaked chat logs he worried that a Reddit administrator had given Chen his real name and photo.

The communities at issue had a long history. r/jailbait, which featured sexually charged but non-nude images of mostly underage girls, drew Anderson Cooper's on-air criticism in 2011 and was shut down about a week after his segment, when a user posting a photo of a girl he said was his 14-year-old ex-girlfriend offered nude pictures as well and at least 70 users requested copies. Chen's 2012 reporting was spurred by r/creepshots, a successor forum of covert photos of women that had recently gotten a substitute teacher fired over an alleged photo of a student and prompted the 'Predditors' Tumblr.

Many Reddit communities viewed the coming expose as doxxing. A moderator known as karmanaut proposed in the private DefaultMods forum that moderators ban Gawker links to deter personal attacks on moderators, and the moderators of r/politics, a default subreddit which together with r/gaming and r/entertainment reached about four million readers, announced they would disallow Gawker network links 'until action is taken to correct this serious lack of ethics and integrity.' Their statement referred to Chen as a 'journalist' in scare quotes and said publication 'would have a significant impact on his life'; a widely cited comment argued Violentacrez did not 'deserve to have his life ruined.' More than seven subreddits joined in, including r/MensRights and r/WoW, and Chen responded by threatening DMCA takedowns against Reddit links to his posts.

Reddit's paid staff drew a different line. When site-wide filters caught the Gawker article itself, General Manager Erik Martin said the block was a mistake and reversed it, while declining to overrule volunteer moderators: 'Moderators are free to moderate their subreddits as they see fit,' he said. 'They can ban all usernames that start with the letter g if they want.' Amid the standoff, r/creepshots went private after an anonymous user gave its moderator 48 hours to shut it down, and was then officially banned.

Chen's piece, published 12 October 2012, identified Violentacrez as Michael Brutsch, a programmer for a financial services company in Texas. Within days Brutsch was fired, left with little savings and no health insurance for himself and his disabled wife, while sympathetic Redditors organized PayPal donations for him. The feud was picked up by the New York Times, the Guardian and the Atlantic, and crystallized the free-speech tensions at the heart of Reddit's design, pitting the community's anti-doxxing norm against journalistic accountability and demonstrating how much editorial power unpaid moderators of default subreddits could wield.