How Reddit made it okay to hate women

Last week I wrote in Felix about ‘GamerGate’, a loosely defined movement nominally about “ethics in video game journalism”. In the article I outlined how really the movement is about harassing women online.

But GamerGate wasn’t created when some developer was accused of sleeping around: it’s the latest manifestation of a long history of online misogyny. Specifically, the kind that’s become the accepted norm in certain dark corners of popular forums like Reddit and 4chan.

Let me start by saying that Reddit is a very large and diverse website, with forums for every topic imaginable, and people from all walks of life. You want a forum (‘subreddit’) for science? Game of Thrones? Horror stories? All this and more awaits you!

4chan, on the other hand, is less welcoming. It’s notorious for being a vile place, where anonymity allows people to be quite cruel. It’s perhaps less surprising that 4chan has become a haven for online misogyny, but Reddit’s a different case.

Reddit has a dark side, and it’s a big one. For example, after nude photos of several (female) celebrities were leaked a few months ago, users set up a subreddit dedicated solely to uploading and sharing these photos. The subreddit was banned eventually, but only due to a flood of legal notices – not out of any sense of decency or empathy for those affected.

In fact, in a blog post, CEO Yishan Wong defended his principles by saying “we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community.” Coincidentally, these principles are the ones where he gets to keep the lucrative, coveted images available on his site.

Wong is essentially saying that people should be free to discuss anything they believe in a legal sense, but also in the sense that any viewpoint should have an opportunity to reach any audience. So, for example, if bigots want to talk to each other about bigotry, the admins of Reddit don’t see it as their responsibility to step in. If Reddit is a government, it’s a libertarian one.

They claim no responsibility for the subreddits’ content, but still provide the ‘real estate’ and association with the known Reddit brand to these people. This leads, worryingly, to examples like the /r/WhiteRights subreddit, with thousands of openly racist users.

The feminism subreddit, /r/feminism, provides a more interesting example: how was the moderator selected? Simple: someone saw that there was no /r/feminism, and registered themselves with the admins as a moderator. That was the end of his involvement with the paid, official Reddit staff. After that he had carte blanche to do anything he wanted with the “/r/feminism” brand.

This particular moderator is controversial because he has made some arguably highly anti-feminist statements. So what can feminists on Reddit do to make the subreddit a safer space for them? Nothing, pretty much, which might have surprised them – it’s easy to be fooled into thinking Reddit is more administrated and less user-run than it really is.

Of course, there is some ‘government intervention’. Any subreddit that attracts too much bad media attention gets banned quickly. You can also get banned for exposing the identity of other Reddit users. So the admins ware happy to intervene, but only when the website traffic is jeopardised.

A bigger problem, though, is that you get subreddits that turn into echo chambers for some nasty stuff, most notably the infamous /r/TheRedPill.

It’s shocking how bad /r/TheRedPill is in contrast to the profile and overall niceness of so much of Reddit, but what’s more shocking is how popular it is – it claims over 85,000 users! Not the biggest subreddit by a long shot, but not insignificant either. What exactly is it?

Named for the classic scene in The Matrix where Neo swallows the ‘red pill’ to discover the hidden truth about reality, /r/TheRedPill claims to present its users with the ‘truth’: that feminism was created by women to control and manipulate men, and that it’s really _men _who are oppressed in our society. It’s a stupid, demonstrably false idea, obviously, but these people take it dead seriously.

Just browsing through the front page, threads like “Women are not what you expect them to be”, “women are children” and “the deregulation of the sexual marketplace” (in case you’d forgotten that libertarianism obsession of theirs) are the norm. This forum basically conditions men to treat women as prizes and to be wary of their ‘tricks’ and deceit.

Let me be clear: this subreddit isn’t an outlier. There’s an even bigger one called /r/MensRights, which claims to be a safe space for men to discuss issues affecting them, but seems to mostly exist to criticise feminism. (Top thread as of writing? “Can We Try To Focus on Men’s Rights, not “I Hate Feminists!” jokes?”)

The denizens of these forums will deny it, but it’s actually pretty uncontroversial: both of these forums are hate groups, no different to /r/WhiteRights, and Reddit has approved and sanitised them. They’ve also given them the tools they need to communicate, organise, advertise, associate, and persuade, and they profit from doing this. If you like, here’s the Tweet-sized summary: on Reddit (and our old pal 4chan), hatred of women is accepted and in many places expected.

Again, I stress, a lot of Reddit isn’t like this. If you just hang out in /r/TwitchPlaysPokemon you won’t see any of this. If you really love gardening, 95,000 other people do too! Go hang out on /r/Gardening! And, of course, people from TheRedPill and MensRights will deny accusations of misogyny.

But this is precisely Reddit’s problem – these echo chambers warp the users’ perspective on what constitutes ‘misogyny’ so much that they don’t see their own hatred. And then, despite the problems they’re causing, Reddit still claims to be mainstream and open to all. After all, in its slogan it claims to be “the front page of the internet.”

With this safe space for misogyny (again, 4chan’s role can’t be understated), is it any surprise that harassing women online has become so organised? Something like GamerGate was inevitable, it just needed a nucleation site like the Zoe Quinn accusations. Viewed from this perspective, it’s clear that our society still has a long way to go.

Thanks to Joseph Henderson for helping me write this by providing many details about how Reddit works.