Are You Sure You Want to View This Community? Exploring the Ethics of Reddit’s Quarantine Practice

ABSTRACT

In the United States, social media organizations are not legally liable for what users do or say on their platforms and are free to regulate expression in any way they see fit. As a result, dark corners of the Internet have emerged to foster communities whose sole purpose is to create and share content that subjugates members of traditionally marginalized groups. The subreddit,/r/TheRedPill, is one such community. This article explores whether hiding this offensive content through digital “quarantine” or removing the community altogether is more ethically justifiable. We draw on theorizing about the ethics of social media content moderation to develop a framework for ethical decision-making based on transparency, corporate social responsibility, and human dignity to guide decisions about content removal. Using/r/TheRedPill as a case study, we argue that the most ethically justified course of action is for Reddit to remove the site entirely from its platform.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ /r/the_donald,/r/fatpeoplehate, and/r/beatingwomen have all been banned from the site (/r/the_donald in June 2020)./r/KotakuInAction remains active and open on the site.

² All of the examples provided here are of banned subreddit communities.

³ At the time of this writing, Reddit has announced that it is working on new policy changes reflective of widespread calls for reforms in the wake of protests brought about by the death of George Floyd and many other people of color in the United States. This announcement came with a slate of new subreddit bans, including the popular but very controversial/r/the_donald.