TIME Investigation: Reddit's Failure to Police Non-English Hate Speech

In January 2022, TIME published an investigation reporting that Reddit had allowed hate speech to flourish across many of its non-English and non-US communities. The article drew on interviews with 19 Reddit moderators from around the world who said the company repeatedly ignored their warnings about hateful content in languages and regions its English-centric trust-and-safety operations did not adequately cover. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they had received death threats and other attacks for their work. The investigation opened in Portugal, where a moderator who reported a racist thread in r/Portugueses received an automated reply within minutes stating that the content did not violate Reddit's Content Policy.

The reporting focused heavily on India-related communities. TIME documented that subreddits including r/Chodi and r/DesiMeta carried Islamophobic content, with posts depicting Muslims as ignorant, violent or incestuous and, in some cases, calls amounting to genocide against Muslims. r/Chodi, the largest offshoot of r/India, was created in 2019 and had grown to 90,000 members producing hundreds of posts a day, evading banned-word lists with coded slurs such as 'Abduls' for Muslims. One r/India moderator said he had tried to report such comments '20 or 30 times, easily' without reply, and moderators found Reddit's own recommendation system surfacing r/Chodi posts inside r/India itself.

The investigation framed the problem as structural. Reddit's volunteer moderator corps numbered at least in the tens of thousands, while the company had only expanded its paid workforce from 700 to 1,300 over the prior year — and had announced in December 2021 that it intended to go public in 2022 following a $10 billion valuation. Reddit told TIME that automation and machine learning 'help moderators remove 99% of reported hateful content.' Volunteers described the personal cost: a Portuguese moderator was stalked across LinkedIn and Instagram, with one user offering Bitcoin to anyone who could find his address, and a Brazilian moderator was doxxed and told 'I will find each one of you and kill you slowly.'

The findings tracked Reddit's own historical posture. CEO Steve Huffman had confirmed in April 2018 that the use of racial slurs did not contravene the site's rules, and told a user that year that banning hate speech was 'not really done' and 'an impossible precedent to uphold,' adding 'we are not the thought police.' The company adopted a site-wide hate policy only after intense criticism in 2020. India's The Quint, following up during the Bulli Bai harassment scandal, reported that Reddit had 3.57 million users in India as of 2020 and that Indian communities called out for hate had simply gone private, turning them into 'virtual locker rooms.'

The report became a catalyst for enforcement. In late March 2022, Reddit banned r/Chodi for violating its rule against promoting hate and quarantined r/GenZedong, a self-described 'Deng-ist' community of more than 57,000 members, for containing 'a high volume of information not supported by credible sources.' Both groups immediately directed their members elsewhere, including to Telegram.