The Day That Reddit Moderators Took An Active Role in Disrupting Response to a Terrorist Attack WarOfTheFanboys Follow Sep 28, 2017 · 2 min read

June 12, 2016 marked a tragic day in American history as our country watched the reports coming out of Orlando, Florida. We saw bloody, senseless acts of killing, and much has been written about the killer and his motives. The shooting has since been confirmed as the deadliest in America history, but what makes America so strong is a willingness to immediately band together and give aid when terror or other disasters strike.

I love Reddit. I’m there surfing and upvoting nearly every day. The website has a great community and they’ve come together to do a lot of wonderful things. They’ve sent birthday cards to sick children, pizzas to the hungry, and money to all number of charities. They helped elect Donald Trump president. It was no surprise then, in wake of a domestic terrorist attack, that members began coordinating and organizing blood donations. Users aggregated a list of donation locations and contact information, and tried to keep others updated on which sites needed donors, and which were currently overwhelmed with people waiting. The effort was well needed, with more than 50 injured in the mass shooting.

Then something strange started happening. Most discussion coordinating help was focused in r/News, Reddit’s news section, which made sense considering the topic was the largest active news story in the country. Suddenly, posts and comments began disappearing. Not just one or two, but hundreds and possibly thousands. Every post about blood donation was targeted, even after organizers began pleading with and begging the moderators to submit links with relevant information. It was terrible to see the r/News moderators effectively prevent help from reaching Americans who desperately needed it.

An entire day passed before the moderators finally relented and allowed the blood donation posts. The question many were asking was why did some members of the r/News moderation team feel it was appropriate to stifle this information in the wake of a terrorist attack? In the digital age, many people rely wholly on the Internet to bring them news. With the rise of Netflix and Hulu, people are cancelling their cable subscriptions entirely. Reddit has over 35 million users, and for many of them, is their only portal to the rest of the world. Without giving users access to vital information, Reddit endangered lives that day.

Many users of the website were outraged by these actions. Calls were made to site administrators asking for those that deleted the donation posts to be removed as moderators. Some have gone so far as to accuse the team of having an anti-homosexual agenda, as their behavior negatively impacted the homosexual community directly, and speculated that it was with absolute malice that the discussions were removed. Others called them terrorist sympathizers.

The questions were never answered. The Reddit administrators, who also reengineered the site’s algorithm to try and influence the 2016 US elections, were resolutely silent. Thankfully, the users fought to offer whatever help they could, showing the admins what true patriotism looked like.