The most heated comment threads, they announced, would give priority to nonwhite participants. So they decided on a bold change, one that has unleashed waves of outrage across Reddit for months. The moderators found themselves shutting down dozens of conversations each week. The forum grew rapidly to become one of the 50 most active on Reddit, according to Pushshift.io, with tens of thousands of weekly participants and more than half a million readers a day.īut by last spring, it was having increasing problems with violations of its “ bad-faith participation” rules. Like all Reddit moderators, they perform tasks like approving posts and banning users they work without pay, in exchange for mostly free rein to run their subreddit. These days the subreddit is run by a multiracial group of more than two dozen moderators, many of whom are black. The first moderator of Black People Twitter was a white Reddit user who had become enamored of the candid perspectives on culture and current events that were circulating among black Twitter users and started posting screenshots of them in late 2014. “It was like a constant form of gaslighting,” said Wesley Moreno, 30, a black information technology professional who until recently served as a moderator of the forum. In the case of the Reddit forum, which was called Black People Twitter, some of the comments appeared to be more an attempt to mock black culture than to appreciate it.Ī discussion meant to be a respite from the racial tensions out in the world began to mirror them. It also encourages hate speech, detractors maintain. That can be a boon to free speech, say proponents of the policy. Its several hundred million users are known to one another only by their screen names, without the profile pictures and biographies that are typical of other social media sites.

It can be difficult to tell a person’s race on Reddit. As one of the forum’s moderators recalled, the thought was that the white users who held sway in nearly all of Reddit’s 157,100 other communities, known as subreddits, would see no need to dominate this one.

Given that the vast majority of Reddit users are white, no one seemed to be under the illusion that only black people would weigh in. Conversations about topics in the news and personal encounters with racial bias were interspersed with sometimes off-color humor about sex, romance and lifestyle advice. A post parodied the discomfort many white people seem to feel with the phrase “black lives matter.” Participants riffed on the rapper Kanye West’s suggestion that slavery had lasted too long to have been involuntary. The forum, one of the many on Reddit, featured a feed of jokes and memes and commentary circulated on social media by black people, and comment threads where discussions could unfold. It was meant to be a destination on the internet where black people could let down their guard.

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