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Reddit has become less toxic after banning hate groups
Reddit got a lot of flack when it banned hate communities like /r/coontown and /r/fatpeoplehate -- a lot of people called the move a censorship and criticized the website's administrators. According to a study by researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and other institutions, though, that move worked well for what the platform was trying to accomplish. The social network has effectively reduced the prevalence of hate speech on its website by killing those subreddits, as well as the copycats that pop up before they even gain traction.
Reddit bans some of its most well-known racist communities
Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong predicted that racist and sexist users who agitated to push his replacement, Ellen Pao, out the door were actually sealing their own fates, and it appears that has happened. Newly-returned leader Steve Huffman just announced that as a part of its new Content Policy, Reddit will do more than just quarantine some of the most vile content hubs its members have built -- it will ban some of them. That includes r/Coontown and some of its spinoffs (but apparently leaves other gems to be shoved behind the curtain), which Huffman says are getting chopped because they "exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else." As the new CEO puts it, those communities were becoming what Reddit was known for, and making it hard to recruit people.
