Adrienne Massanari
Reddit is the fourth most visited site in the United States (and seventh globally).1 Anyone can create a community, called a subreddit, on the open-source platform, and each Reddit member (Redditor) can vote on content and subscribe to subreddits of interest. In addition to being a hub for geek culture and fandom, it is also playing a less savory role in mainstreaming the “alt-right.” The “alt-right”—a loose collection of white ethnonationalists, misogynists, Islamophobes—has gained national attention in the United States with the ascendance of Donald Trump, and mirrors far-right sentiment globally.2 While these sorts of movements are not a new phenomenon, nor is their presence on the web,3 a definite shift is happening in spaces like Reddit and on other social media. Previously marginal groups are gaining a foothold, often using memetic logics to radicalize and spread their message of hate. Unfortunately, Reddit administrators seem unwilling to intervene in any meaningful way, instead suggesting that outright bans of many objectionable communities will not effectively address the issue. This counters research which suggests that banning hate speech and subreddits that traffic in harassing others improves discourse across the platform.4
In this chapter, I outline the reasons for the “alt-right’s” outsize presence on Reddit. I contend that this is due both to toxic “geek masculinity” that permeates many of the most popular subreddits and to specific technical affordances of the platform. Underlying both the technical and the social realities of Reddit is a valorization of techno/cyberlibertarian values,5 and in particular an unrestricted version of free speech that normalizes and amplifies sexist and racist discourse. Reddit’s origins as a hub of geek masculinity often mean that women and women of color are viewed as interlopers or objects to be critiqued and sexualized.
Reddit has long been home to geek fandom and niche interests. Since each Reddit user can subscribe to subreddits of interest, there is no one Reddit experience. However, examining the most popular subreddits is telling, with the top twenty-five focusing mostly on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); video games; and popular culture.6 Redditors are a technically savvy group, who tend to spend lots of time online and often work in/around industries in information technology and technology. Reddit has also become a hub for breaking news and current events coverage, with the Pew Research Center suggesting that almost 80 percent of Redditors get news from the site.7 Redditors are mostly men under thirty years old who have some amount of college, and they tend to be more liberal than the general U.S. population.8 Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that Reddit’s dominant culture represents a kind of “geek masculinity.”9
Geek or nerd masculinity is often positioned in opposition to hegemonic masculinity.10 As Lori Kendall argues, the “nerd” stereotype often resists many notions of hegemonic masculinity, as nerds are not interested in pastimes coded as “masculine,” such as sports, and are often portrayed as sexually frustrated.11 The nerd or geek also embodies a particular social category: white, cisgendered, heterosexual, middle-class, and able-bodied.12 And this creates a conundrum, as, “confronted with his cultural centrality and white, masculine privilege—geeks are most frequently represented as white males—the geek seeks a simulated victimhood and even simulated ethnicity in order to justify his existence as a protagonist in a world where an unmarked straight white male protagonist is increasingly passé.”13 Therefore, geek masculinity embodies both elements of marginality and unrecognized privilege. As Joseph Reagle notes, the narrative often becomes one of “geek triumphalism,” in which geeks experience a deep sense of marginalization and insecurity because of their unique, niche interests, but may also view themselves as being successful (and superior) precisely because of these same factors.14 This triumphalism often makes them unwilling to accept critique—as they may see themselves as above reproach or bias because of their past experiences as “outsiders.” Concomitantly, geek culture often champions meritocratic logics that tend to view success or failure as the result of individual effort rather than of systems or cultures that might support or impede a person’s progress. As Christopher Paul argues, “By individualizing people, meritocracy has the impact of making people judgmental and rude, while making individuals more likely to attribute their status in life to their own efforts or lack thereof, which makes us less sensitive to others.”15
On Reddit, this kind of meritocratic logic is mirrored by the platform’s technological affordances. The voting system, for example, is designed to demonstrate the relative worth of a given submission or comment. While on the surface this appears democratic, suggesting that each Redditor has an equal voice in shaping conversations, it is not entirely the case. First, Reddit’s algorithm weights earlier votes more heavily than later votes, meaning that those individuals (usually moderators) who spend a significant time on the site are more likely to shape the platform’s overall conversation. Second, power law dynamics shape the likelihood of the most popular content becoming more popular, with more-upvoted content being more likely to be voted up by others (and appearing first given the site’s default sorting mechanism). Third, voting is easily gamed, by bot accounts designed to shift the conversation in a particular direction through mass upvoting, by individuals using multiple accounts to vote on content, or by groups of Redditors banding together to “brigade” other subreddits. In addition, studies suggest that many Reddit users do not read submitted content before voting on it, instead merely basing their votes on the title or headline of the piece.16 This kind of voting behavior can transmit fake news, conspiracy theories, and rumors across subreddits with ease.
As articulated above, geek masculinity/triumphalism champions a kind of superiority based on intellect and esoteric knowledge. This manifests in several ways on Reddit. In other work, I have noted that Redditors tend to prize rationality, authenticity, and accuracy.17 At the same time, there is a tendency for rumors, fake news, and conspiracy theories to spread quickly across subreddits, particularly during crisis moments. For example, after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, members of the /r/bostonbombing subreddit wrongly identified several individuals as suspects, including a Brown University student who was later found to have died by suicide. This interest in crowdsourcing intelligence around crisis moments is driven in part by a general skepticism of the ability of government agencies and law enforcement. It is also in keeping with a kind of techno/cyberlibertarianism that permeates Reddit, which has manifested in large-scale political activism around such things as net neutrality, surveillance, and online piracy.18
Redditors have also demonstrated a tendency to engage and support conspiracy theories, especially if they relate to geek fandom or if it furthers their own vision of geek masculinity. Most notably, this includes #Gamergate, an anonymous hashtag activist movement. It started in late 2014 when a woman game developer (Zoe Quinn) was accused of cheating with a games journalist and other industry leaders in an effort, her ex-lover alleged, to gain positive support and reviews for her work. This led to a large-scale harassment campaign against women game developers, critics, and industry professionals. While #Gamergate proponents claimed that they were concerned with the lack of “ethics in games journalism” that Quinn’s alleged infractions represented, their actions looked suspiciously motivated by other factors.
While much of the harassment campaign was Twitter-based, Reddit served (and continues to serve) as the public hub for conversation about #Gamergate through /r/KotakuInAction (KIA). KIA’s name references both the Gawker-owned gaming blog Kotaku (which is seen as the foremost hub of “politically correct” games journalism) and another subreddit, /r/TumblrInAction, dedicated to sharing and making fun of posts gathered from Tumblr (seen as the anti-Reddit given its user base).19 Like the larger #Gamergate movement, posts to KIA often have little to do with video games. This may be due in part to a natural ebb and flow of #Gamergate, which peaked between August and November 2014 (according to Google search trends), but I would argue that it also points to the reality of #Gamergate, which was more about railing against social justice and political progressiveness than it was about games.20 While KIA still discusses #Gamergate proper, it also regularly features content related to the men’s rights movement, the suppression of free speech on college campuses by so-called social justice warrior (SJW) activists, anti-affirmative action polemics, and stories about vaunted members of the so-called intellectual dark web.21
Ultimately, #Gamergate activists are angry at the diversifying audience for video games, and viewed increasing representations of marginalized groups within gaming content as somehow “political correctness” gone amok.22 One group, SJWs, are particular targets. For #Gamergate supporters, SJWs represent an insidious other: simpering liberals who are intent on destroying video games (and culture) and the “gamer” identity with their insistence that every game (or any other cultural product) conform to their sanitized version of reality. This feeds into a larger conspiracy theory that SJWs are embedded in multiple places of power within not just the games industry, but also Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C. Unsurprisingly, many within the alt-right became outspoken #Gamergate supporters (most notably Milo Yiannopoulos and #Pizzagate conspiracist Mike Cernovich), and many of the tactics used by #Gamergate activists were later refined by the “alt-right” during the U.S. presidential election campaign of Trump.23
By far the most difficult community for Reddit administrators and users has been /r/The_Donald (TD). While Pew data suggested that many Redditors supported primary candidate Bernie Sanders during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign,24 by late 2016 /r/SandersforPresident was outpaced significantly by TD subscribers (and both subreddits had far more subscribers than /r/HillaryClinton). TD is still wildly popular, currently ranking number 188 with over 620,000 subscribers, according to Redditlist.25 Research suggests that throughout the election cycle, incivility and negative partisanship were particularly high in TD26—and this spilled over to other spaces on Reddit as well.
TD continues to be somewhat different from other political subreddits on the platform (such as /r/Libertarian, /r/Conservative, /r/Democrats, for example), featuring far more memes than actual news and a lingua franca that is almost impenetrable to outsiders. It is also extremely effective in pushing far-right ideas and racist speech through memetic content. Researchers have argued that while 4chan’s /pol (politically incorrect) board creates an outsize number of memes given its size, TD is actually more efficient in spreading them to other spaces online.27 These also easily spread across Reddit. For example, in 2016 TD postings was overrepresented on /r/all (the listing of top-rated content across Reddit) because of a loophole in Reddit’s algorithm. This bug was later fixed, but it’s possible that this act introduced many Redditors to the “alt-right” ideas TD peddles.
Unlike other political subreddits, TD is for supporters only, with moderators regularly banning individuals with impunity. Questioning Trump’s policies or even asking for clarification about them is a bannable offense. This is somewhat ironic given that Trump supporters also decry public spaces and college campuses as being overrun with SJW “snowflakes” who cannot tolerate having their ideas challenged. And, despite significant evidence of the community breaking voting rules by brigading other subreddits, calling for violence against certain individuals, and doxing journalists, Reddit administrators have still not rid the platform of /r/The_Donald.28 CEO Steve Huffman recently told Redditors that banning the subreddit “probably won’t accomplish what you want. However, letting them fall apart from their own dysfunction probably will. Their engagement is shrinking over time, and that’s much more powerful than shutting them down outright.”29 But this stance is not tenable given the significant part that TD, other reactionary subreddits, and bots played in spreading fake news from Russian trolls across the platform during the 2016 election cycle.30 A number of observers have suggested that the real reason TD and other troubling (but popular) subreddits are not banned outright is because the company generates significant revenue from them.31
In keeping with the techno/cyberlibertarian ethos that underpins Silicon Valley culture, Reddit administrators have long championed an unrestricted approach to free speech on their platform. Former interim CEO Ellen Pao, when announcing the ban of troublesome fat-shaming harassment subreddit/r/fatpeoplehate in June 2015, said, “We’re banning behavior, not ideas.”32 This seems to be the general approach of Reddit’s administrators: rather than directly take a stand against sexist, racist, transphobic, and misogynistic speech, simply wait for subreddits where hate speech festers and spills over into harassing “behavior.” After the ban, Pao was subjected to a large-scale harassment campaign, leading her to suggest in an op-ed that the “trolls” were winning the internet.33
Reddit’s administrators have long championed a “hands-off” approach to content, typically requiring volunteer moderators to police their own subreddits as they see fit. Prior to 2012, Reddit had few limitations on content, dealing with the most egregious of these on a case-by-case basis. In February 2012, following a media exposé of Reddit’s child pornography “problem,” administrators explicitly banned content featuring sexualized images of minors. This followed several months in which popular subreddits such as /r/jailbait (which featured sexualized images of clothed minors stolen from other social media sites) flourished—in part because of the powerful status of their moderators. Since moderating subreddits is an unpaid, onerous position, moderators of problematic subreddits often gain outsize influence. For example, Gawker’s Adrian Chen argued that part of the reason infamous moderator Violentacrez’s odious subreddits (which included /r/jailbait, /r/incest, /r/chokeabitch, /r/Jewmerica, among others) were allowed on the platform is that he would also regularly report child pornography to administrators so they could report it to the appropriate authorities.34
This becomes a double bind for administrators. On the one hand, they are dependent on unpaid labor to manage the site and deal with spam and other troubling content, as Reddit has few paid community managers given the size of its user base. On the other hand, it is often the most powerful moderators/users who post objectionable content in the first place. After Chen published Violentacrez’s identity, many subreddits banned Gawker postings in retaliation, calling it “a breach of ethics and integrity.”35 And despite their dependence on moderators to ensure the platform’s success, the relationship between moderators and administrators remains tense—with moderators often frustrated by the lack of tools and support from admins.36
Despite these realities, Reddit administrators tend to quarantine troublesome subreddits, preventing them from appearing in /r/all or on its front page, rather than removing them entirely. Visitors to these subreddits must also explicitly opt in, and these subreddits do not generate ad revenue (although they are implicitly supported by ad revenue generated by other subreddits). The quarantine policy was announced soon after Pao left the company in mid-2015. At the same time, a number of subreddits affiliated with the racist community /r/coontown were finally banned. Unfortunately, /r/coontown was banned not because it broke any new or existing rules, or because it was virulently racist (which it most definitely was), but rather because it represented, according to one user, part of “a handful of communities that exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else.”37 Many users were chagrined, some because they felt these actions did not go far enough (asking, for example, why other racist and misogynistic subreddits were not banned), while others argued that it was censorship and limited their “free speech” rights.
This becomes part of a troubling pattern wherein Reddit administrators introduce new content rules only when forced (usually by unfavorable media coverage), and often the rules are vague and not applied consistently. There is also the troubling reality that by not allowing advertisers to monetize quarantined subreddits, the rest of Reddit essentially bankrolls their existence through advertising on other subreddits. And quarantining a subreddit does nothing to prevent those users from interacting in other subreddits, and creating a toxic atmosphere across the platform.
Toxic geek masculinity pervades Reddit, from activist movements like #Gamergate to the “manosphere” and its undercurrent of violent misogyny, to the “alt-right” organizing of /r/The_Donald.38 While reflective of larger cultural dynamics, Reddit has created a space where individuals affiliated with these groups not only feel welcome, but have a platform to recruit and spread fake news, conspiracies, and rumors. Under the guise of supporting unrestricted “free speech,” administrators refuse to take a stand against these toxic elements and continue to suggest that if they are ignored, they will go away. This despite numerous examples of these groups breaking Reddit’s own (very minimal) conduct and content rules. Unfortunately, the platform’s technical affordances serve only to weaponize their speech under the guise of a “democratic” voting system that is easily gamed. And waiting for harassing speech to spill over into “behavior” works to create a platform where marginalized populations feel increasingly unwelcome.
1. Alexa, “Top Sites in United States,” 2018, http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US.
2. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Alt-Right,” 2018, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right.
3. Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
4. Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Anirudh Srinivasan, Adam Glynn, Jacob Eisenstein, and Eric Gilbert, “You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined through Hate Speech,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, no. 2 (2017): 1–22.
5. Nathan Jurgenson and P. J. Rey, “Liquid Information Leaks,” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2651–2665; Paulina Borsook, “Cyberselfish: Ravers, Guilders, Cyberpunks, and Other Silicon Valley Life-Forms,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 3, no. 1 (2001), http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjolt/vol3/iss1/1.
6. Redditlist, “All Subreddits | Redditlist.com—Tracking the Top 5000 Subreddits,” 2018, http://redditlist.com/all.
7. Alex Leavitt and Joshua Clark, “Upvoting Hurricane Sandy: Event-Based News Production Processes on a Social News Site” (paper presented at the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction [SIGCHI] Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Toronto, April 26–May 1, 2014); Michael Barthel, Galen Stocking, Jesse Holcomb, and Amy Mitchell, “Nearly Eight-in-Ten Reddit Users Get News on the Site,” Pew Research Center, 2016, http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/02/PJ_2016.02.25_Reddit_FINAL.pdf.
8. Barthel et al., “Nearly Eight-in-Ten Reddit Users.”
9. Adrienne Massanari, Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).
10. R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–859.
11. Lori Kendall, “Nerd Nation: Images of Nerds in US Popular Culture,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 260–283; Lori Kendall, “ ‘White and Nerdy’: Computers, Race, and the Nerd Stereotype,” Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 3 (2011): 505–524.
12. I am using the terms nerd and geek interchangeably for convenience.
13. Kim Kunyosying and Carter Soles, “Postmodern Geekdom as Simulated Ethnicity,” Jump Cut, no. 54 (2012), https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc54.2012/SolesKunyoGeedom/.
14. Joseph Reagle, “Nerd vs. Bro: Geek Privilege, Idiosyncrasy, and Triumphalism,” First Monday 23, no. 1 (2017), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7879/6629.
15. Christopher A. Paul, The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 14.
16. Maria Glenski, Corey Pennycuff, and Tim Weninger, “Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit,” IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 4, no. 4 (2017): 196–206.
17. Massanari, Participatory Culture, Community, and Play.
18. arabscarab, “(Orange)Red Alert: The Senate is about to vote on whether to restore Net Neutrality,” Reddit, 2018, https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/8i3382/orangered_alert_the_senate_is_about_to_vote_on/?st=jiuh32ev&sh=5fc5c6c5; trevorEFF, “One year ago today, you help us beat SOPA. Thanks Reddit. This is Eff, Ask Us Anything,” Reddit, 2013, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/16tu47/one_year_ago_today_you_help_us_beat_sopa_thanks/?st=jiuh2imb&sh=6e3bea51.
19. Gawker Media has since collapsed, due in significant part to the bankruptcy caused by a lawsuit brought up by former wrestling star Hulk Hogan, which was secretly backed by billionaire Facebook investor (and Trump supporter) Peter Thiel. Kotaku is now owned by Univision Communications. Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker,” New York Times, May 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html.
20. Adrienne Massanari, “#Gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures,” New Media and Society 19, no. 3 (2017): 329–346.
21. Bari Weiss, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” New York Times, May 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html.
22. Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #Gamergate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 59, no. 1 (2015): 208–220; Torill Elvira Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate,” Games and Culture 13, no. 8 (2018): 787–806.
23. Katherine Cross, “We Warned You about Milo and You’re Still Not Listening,” The Establishment, October 9, 2017, https://theestablishment.co/we-warned-you-about-milo-and-youre-still-not-listening-947dad4a8400.
24. Barthel et al., “Nearly Eight-in-Ten Reddit Users.”
25. Redditlist, “All Subreddits,” 2018.
26. Rishab Nithyanand, Brian Schaffner, and Phillipa Gill, “Online Political Discourse in the Trump Era” (preprint, submitted November 14, 2017), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.05303.
27. Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, “On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities” (preprint, last revised September 22, 2018), https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12512.
28. DubTeeDub, “Reddit admins have confirmed they are comfortable with T_D and other altright subs engaging in a harassment campaign attacking survivors of the Parkland school shooting,” February 22, 2018, Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/7zgo1c/reddit_admins_have_confirmed_they_are_comfortable/?st=jixmxa4o&sh=9efae7f0.
29. spez, “In response to recent reports about the integrity of Reddit, I’d like to share our thinking,” Reddit, 2018, https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_response_to_recent_reports_about_the_integrity/dv824bf/?context=5&st=jixne4wl&sh=9a183ffb.
30. Issie Lapowsky, “Russian Propaganda Remains on Reddit,” Wired, March 9, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-russian-propaganda/.
31. Tim Squirrell, “Opinion: Reddit’s Advertising Strategies Still Hide Hate Speech,” Quartz, April 6, 2018, https://qz.com/1246087/opinion-reddits-advertising-strategies-still-hide-hate-speech/.
32. Reddit, “Removing harassing subreddits,” 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/cs21aj4/?st=jixkz3fk&sh=e52f8c2f.
33. Ellen Pao, “Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet,” Washington Post, July 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-cannot-let-the-internet-trolls-win/2015/07/16/.
34. Adrian Chen, “Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, the Biggest Troll on the Web,” Gawker, October 12, 2012, http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-the-web.
35. Rebecca Greenfield, “Redditors Stand Up to Gawker to Protect Child Pornography,” The Atlantic, October 11, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/redditors-stand-gawker-protect-child-pornography/322479/; /r/politics moderator, “An Announcement about Gawker Links in /r/politics,” Reddit, October 10, 2012, https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/119z4z/an_announcement_about_gawker_links_in_rpolitics/?st=jivtz3kk&sh=91f7f751.
36. Nathan J. Matias, “Going Dark: Social Factors in Collective Action against Platform Operators in the Reddit Blackout,” in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM Press, 2016), 1138–1115.
37. spez, “Content Policy Update,” Reddit, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3fx2au/content_policy_update/.
38. Debbie Ging, “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere,” Men and Masculinities, May 10, 2017, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1097184X17706401.