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346 issues
r/KotakuInAction, Reddit's central Gamergate hub, was never permanently banned; in July 2018 its founder briefly privated it calling it 'infested with racism and sexism,' but Reddit admins restored it within about an hour.
The subreddit r/deepfakes coined the term and pioneered AI face-swapped non-consensual celebrity pornography before Reddit banned it and related communities in February 2018 under its involuntary-pornography policy.
In a widely-cited peer-reviewed study, communication scholar Adrienne Massanari argued that Reddit's harassment problem is not incidental but structural — that the platform's voting algorithm, hands-off governance, and geek-masculine culture actively support what she termed 'toxic technocultures,' using Gamergate and The Fappening as evidence.
Days after fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend Melinda Vasilije in Kitchener, Ontario, Ager Hasan posted an account of the killing to Reddit while a fugitive; he was arrested in Texas, extradited, and convicted of second-degree murder in 2023.
After CNN identified the anonymous Reddit user behind a Trump-shared anti-CNN wrestling meme in July 2017, its statement reserving the right to publish his name triggered the #CNNBlackmail backlash and a wave of harassment against CNN journalists' families.
Federal prosecutors convicted four men — Ryan Collins, Edward Majerczyk, George Garofano and Emilio Herrera — for phishing schemes that compromised celebrities' iCloud and Gmail accounts; the stolen nude photos were mass-distributed on Reddit's r/TheFappening in 2014.
In November 2017, Electronic Arts' reply defending 'Star Wars: Battlefront II' loot-box progression became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history — later certified by Guinness World Records — and a turning point in the backlash against paid game mechanics.
Dan McComas and Jessica Moreno, who left Reddit in 2015 over disagreements about how the site should be run, raised about $11 million to build Imzy — a community platform with civility rules meant to fix Reddit's harassment problems — only for the 'nicer Reddit' to shut down in 2017 for failing to find a market.
Network-measurement research by the Open Observatory of Network Interference found reddit.com blocked by Iranian ISPs as part of the country's centralized filtering regime, a block that has persisted for years.
Actress Jenna Elfman's April 2017 AMA promoting her sitcom 'Imaginary Mary' was flooded with questions about Scientology, and outlets reported nearly all of them went unanswered.
On November 7, 2017, Reddit banned the ~40,000-subscriber r/Incels community under a newly updated policy prohibiting content that encourages or glorifies violence. The incel community regrouped on r/Braincels, which Reddit quarantined in September 2018 and banned in late 2019.
Days after the August 2017 Charlottesville rally, Reddit banned r/Physical_Removal, a community that advocated the 'physical removal' and killing of leftists and glorified Pinochet-style death flights.