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Reddit politics moderators ban Huffington Post, Fox News Nation

Reddit's volunteer moderators on the subreddit dedicated to politics have greatly expanded their banned links list to include liberal sites such as The Huffington Post and Mother Jones and conservative sites like Fox News Nation* and National Review.

In a post on Tuesday, moderators of the highly trafficked website's '/r/politics' page said the goal is “to reduce the number of blogspam submissions and sensationalist titles" and to avoid sites that provide lots of “bad journalism."

Only the politics subreddit has banned these links; they are still allowed elsewhere on the site. But the politics vertical is very popular, with some 3.1 million subscribers, and like many items on Reddit, what gets posted there often goes viral.

Slate's Will Oremus raises some concerns:

[I]f the goals are admirable, some of the moderators’ choices as to which sites to ban appear to border on arbitrary. Does the Huffington Post engage in a good deal of what the moderators might call “blogspam”—i.e., “quoting other articles to get pageviews?” No doubt. But it also won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for a 10-part series on the struggles that wounded U.S. military veterans endure when they come home. Does Salon sometimes appeal to its readers’ liberal ideological bent to stir up their emotions? Sure—but so do plenty of other outlets that lack half the intelligence and insight of some of Salon’s best writers.

Redditors aren't holding back in their criticism of the banned sites, posting thousands of comments the subreddit's talk page.

Mother Jones' co-editor Clara Jeffrey said in an interview with NPR's "On the Media" on Thursday that she finds it "mystifying" to ban "a fairly haphazard list of publications that do really great reporting around politics, from left right and center."

"Particularly for something that’s entire ethos is about openness and user-driven conversation, right?" she asked. "It’s not something you expect in a free society, and especially for something that prides itself as being at the bleeding edge of user driven content and First Amendment principles."

On Friday, "On the Media" posted that their interview with Jeffrey keeps getting deleted from the politics subreddit. No one is entirely sure what's behind the changes on the subreddit. Some are saying it's an idealogical coup, but many are saying the intense negative reaction to the censoring will cause a change.

*This post has been clarified to note that only a portion of the Fox News website, Fox News Nation has been put on the banned list.