If 8chan was the shooter’s firewood, Facebook the match, and YouTube the oxygen, Reddit is a place where the fire he set is still smoldering.

The shooter, well versed in seedy internet culture, sought to weaponize social media platforms, leaving breadcrumbs of his ideology on the crass 8chan message board, across Twitter and Facebook profiles, and in his Facebook livestream of the attack which quickly spread to YouTube. Since the slayings, two prominent subreddits have regularly hosted messages justifying the shooting. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter also scrambled to remove copies of it in the hours after the attack.Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.ĭays after the tragic shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Reddit remains a home for the exact type of white supremacist and Islamaphobic hate that the killer used to rationalize his massacre. Reddit wasn’t the only platform that struggled to stop broadcasting the video recorded by the New Zealand gunman. The video of the New Zealand massacre has prompted renewed calls for social media platforms to do a better, and quicker, job when it comes to ridding their platforms of gruesome, extremist content. Reddit just issued subreddits 'Watch People Die' and 'Gore' a flagrant foul and an ejection. In a move to shield users from “accidentally viewing content that many be offensive or upsetting,” Reddit quarantined the r/watchpeopledie, and r/gore subreddits, along with more than one dozen others, last September, and required users to opt-in to them, before viewing the gruesome content. In 2017, Reddit changed its content policy to prohibit any posts that encourage, glorify, or incite violence, however that policy is open to interpretation.

Reddit has long had an “anything goes” reputation, letting people post whatever they want under the pretense of free speech.

“Subreddits that fail to adhere to those site-wide rules will be banned.” “We are very clear in our site terms of service that posting content that incites or glorifies violence will get users and communities banned from Reddit,” a Reddit spokesperson told Fortune in an emailed statement.

Christchurch shooting video reddit