Photo by Stephanie McCabe on Unsplash

As social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter implement new policies to counteract white nationalism and racism, one social media site has been surprisingly quiet on the issue: Reddit.

The world’s twentieth-most-popular website, Reddit, is by far the most prominent platform for white nationalists to congregate and share their beliefs. Subreddits, or miniature communities within Reddit, like r/The_Donald, r/CringeAnarchy and r/KotakuInAction have long been known for their far-right content and aggressiveness towards those who disagree with them. However, one recently-formed white nationalist subreddit r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly is especially virulent in its attacks towards non-whites and its causal racism.

r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly was founded as a place for white redditors to gather in response to an April Fools’ joke played by the moderators of r/BlackPeopleTwitter. r/BlackPeopleTwitter, a subreddit for aggregating tweets authored by blacks, banned all users who could not provide proof via a picture of their forearm that they were black for three days. Angry white redditors flocked to r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly, a subreddit that required posters to prove their whiteness and whose stated goal was to provide “a positive and supportive community for White people.”

Predictably, things went off the rails.

Part I: The Posts

Initially, the subreddit’s users tried to at least mask their racism. This post by mature and politically unbiased user GlobalistSlayer420 states that “it’s okay to be white.”

Now, it’s apparent that this is just a racist dog whistle. It’s also one of the tamer posts you’ll find on r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly.

Another post veers into casual racism, alluding to common edgy jokes about a black father leaving his child and mocking the r/BlackPeopleTwitter, or BPT, ban on white users.

This post is clearly hate speech, and were it posted on other social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter would be removed as such. However, there’s at least a thin veneer of a joke for the poster to hide behind when they’re accused of racism. This “ironic racism” has become a go-to in the online white nationalist playbook.

Some posts skip the irony entirely. For example, this far-right image alluding to non-whites ruining the European Union.

These three images aren’t from the fringes of the community, either: they respectively have 241, 271, and 149 upvotes, the Reddit equivalent of likes. All three posts are among what the Reddit algorithm considers r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly’s most popular posts of all time.

In the comments section, though, is where the mask comes off entirely.

Part II: The Comments

First, a warning: these screenshots contain racist and homophobic slurs.

Some less-radicalized redditors call out r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly posters in the comments for the racist content they contain. Responses to those users show the subreddit’s true colors; in the comment section, the mask can be removed fully.

Here, a user asking Reddit owner Steve Huffman, or u/spez, to ban the community is given a warm welcome via racist claims and accusations of reverse racism:

Next, a user asks about the malicious purpose of the community. The less-than-kind response he receives reads, “Get out of here n — — — .”

Astoundingly, things go even further downhill from there. Here, three community regulars discuss their community’s rapid growth and reminisce about subreddits they used to browse like r/milliondollarextreme and r/stonetoss. Both alt-right communities were banned by Reddit for violent threats and targeted harassment.

Another user wanders in from mainstream Reddit and asks why members of r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly seem so racist. Along with the usual harassment and casual mockery of black people, he receives the response “What’s wrong with being racist?” Another response mentions “black fragility.”

Here, more criticism of the subreddit is taken well by the community. A frustrated user is asked to go back to r/AgainstHateSubreddits, another subreddit dedicated to compiling evidence of racist harassment on Reddit, and referred to as a “fragile f — ing f — — .”

These comments aren’t cherrypicked from a small section of the community. Every comment I showed calling out the subreddit’s racism was downvoted, Reddit’s equivalent of disliked, and every response was upvoted.

But the problem with r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly goes all the way to the top.

Part III: The Moderators

As long as subreddits abide by broad site-wide rules, they are generally allowed to set their own rules. r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly takes this privilege a bit too far.

Rule 1 is pretty standard. Rule 2, “No Hate Speech,” seems pretty good until the end, which clarifies that there should especially be no hate speech against “the White race.” Rule 3 is a clear alt-right dog whistle, alluding to common neo-Nazi terms like cuck and mentioning the rallying call of “anti-white racism.”

This doesn’t seem like a community for allowing users to speak their mind. This is a community for fostering alt-right neo-Nazi ideas and giving angry whites a place to unleash racist tirades against anyone they blame for their struggles. So why does such a popular website allow this filth on its platform?

Part IV: Reddit Doesn’t Care

Reddit doesn’t care. A surprisingly massive demographic of the site is composed of, if not full-on neo-Nazis, people sympathetic to their arguments. All the subreddits mentioned in the introduction as harboring far-right hate speech have upwards of 100,000 subscribers.

Reddit has already acted towards r/SubForWhitePeopleOnly — the subreddit was quarantined, or made more difficult to access. That’s right, instead of actually dealing with the racist vitriol, Reddit just made it a little bit harder to see. The subreddit visibly violates Reddit’s terms of service, pictured here, and should be banned entirely.

That’s a list of bannable offenses for subreddits. If those posts and comments don’t “encourage or incite violence” or “threaten, harass, or bully” then I’m not sure what does.

So far, the birth of Reddit’s newest Nazi outpost has gone uncondemned by site administrators. It’s been just the latest in a series of events where Reddit admins bend over backwards to make a space for white nationalists on their platform.