Reddit Quarantines r/GenZedong Over Ukraine War Disinformation

On 23 March 2022, Reddit quarantined r/GenZedong, a self-described "Deng-ist" Marxist-Leninist community focused on China with more than 57,000 members. Reddit administrators said the community was quarantined for containing "a high volume of information not supported by credible sources." A quarantine is one of Reddit's harshest sanctions short of a ban: quarantined communities are stripped of all of their subscribers, generate no revenue, and do not show up on general Reddit feeds, and visitors must click through a content warning to enter.

The action came amid the early weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, days after a post on r/AgainstHateSubreddits alleged that r/GenZedong subscribers were spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine and downplaying the number of civilian deaths there. The community had also long been a haven for those skeptical of Uyghur oppression in China. The quarantine landed the same week Reddit banned r/Chodi, an India-focused forum with over 90,000 members that saw hundreds of new posts a day, for violating the rule against promoting hate — a paired crackdown that followed TIME's January 2022 reporting on Reddit's struggle to control hate speech in some of its non-English subreddits. Beyond its posted notices, a Reddit spokesperson declined to comment.

r/GenZedong was one of several communities Reddit acted against in this period. On 1 March 2022, Reddit quarantined the much larger r/Russia, which had over 265,000 subscribers as of 28 February, along with the days-old r/RussiaPolitics, and removed an r/Russia moderator for acting in bad faith; the company said it connected directly with the remaining moderators to provide guidance and remind them of its policies.

The quarantine tool itself carried a documented track record. Reddit revised the policy on 27 September 2018, adding a comprehensive appeals process as it swept more than 20 communities, including the 400,000-subscriber r/watchpeopledie, into opt-in status, and it quarantined the pro-Trump forum r/The_Donald in June 2019 over threats of violence. A peer-reviewed study of the r/TheRedPill and r/The_Donald quarantines, using over 85 million Reddit posts, found new-user influx fell by 79.5 percent and 58 percent respectively while existing users' misogyny and racism levels remained unaffected.

Aftermath followed the pattern that research described. Both r/GenZedong and r/Chodi directed their members elsewhere, including Telegram, and one new r/Chodi outpost welcomed members to "a better free speech experience." The community also drew outside mockery: in 2022 the hacker group Anonymous uploaded a meme mocking r/GenZedong to a hacked Chinese government tourism site. The quarantine fed an ongoing debate about so-called "tankie" and CCP-aligned communities on Reddit, with critics arguing the platform tolerated coordinated state-friendly messaging for too long and supporters arguing the action was ideologically motivated.