Reddit Censors Links to Celebrity Photo Hack

In a controversial move, Reddit’s CEO Yishan Wong offered a blog post explaining as to why the company rarely takes down “morally objectionable or otherwise inappropriate” subreddits – all whilst the site took down /r/TheFappening and related subreddits that pointed towards the recent celebrity photo hack.

Since going live with the statement, Mr Wong updated the post adding:

Those two events occurring together have created great confusion. That is: we put up a blog post explaining why we don’t ban things for reason X (which some people want us to, but we will not), but at the same time behavior in a subreddit started violating reason Y (a pre-existing and valid rule for which we do ban things) and we banned it, resulting in much confusion.

Following the move, a news thread about the topic quickly rose to the frontpage – offering an inside look at the reaction from the sites users – many of which saw the multiple subreddit takedowns as hypocritical and conflicting. Users noted that over the span of the material being posted, reddit site traffic increased dramatically – on top of donations coined “reddit gold” to users who posted in the aligned threads. It’s been a week since the leaks, with other highly controversial material available through the site – bringing concern to surrounding factors behind the takedowns beyond that of DCMA takedown notices. It would seem there’s still some explaining left to do behind the censorship from the company.

Thank you TechChrunch for providing us with this information.