Racist abuse online is ever-present and constantly growing on platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Many of the biggest social media companies have admitted that until recently, they put little to no effort into protecting people of color and women from an onslaught of racism and sexism.

Reddit is well known for being home to some of the worst racism and bigotry online. However, a group of Black people set off a media-fueled firestorm after new rules were passed to protect the forum from racist trolls.

Black People Twitter, which gives Black people and others a space to joke, share news and relay hilarious tweets from Twitter, is one of Reddit's most popular forums. It was started in 2014 by a white Reddit user, but quickly became a home for many of the site's most avid Black participants.

There are almost 170,000 threads on Reddit, most of which are populated by the platform's mostly white male audience. Racist trolls decided to intrude upon the Black People Twitter forum and overrun it with racist messages meant to troll actual Black people.

In addition to the trolls, it became clear there were dozens of accounts pretending to be Black while sharing conservative views, hoping the posts would be better liked coming from a Black person.

The moderators of the forum decided to pass new rules to protect Black participants and prioritize their voices. In 2018, they said their rules had been abused by white Reddit users, forcing them to make drastic changes.

"The BPT Mod Team has decided to update our Bad Faith Participation rule. While most of you visit the sub for comedy, issues of race will always be below the surface simply by virtue of the name of the subreddit," the post said.

"We are using a [Black] frame of view for most of these examples, but the reverse is also disallowed," the post continued.

In addition to the new rules, the moderators said nonwhite members of the forum would be given priority over others. To prove a member was not white, they had to send the moderators a photo of their forearm with a time stamp.

Moderators said once they have verified a user is Black, they will receive a Black checkmark next to their name on all posts. They noted that other nonwhite participants can be verified as well but they do not get a check.

The new rules were heavily criticized by white participants who thought the group should allow white people to dominate the forum.

According to The New York Times, the moderators said they received a message with a photo of two Black people hanging from a tree with nooses saying, “Let me and my brother in we are both [Black].”

In a post explaining the rules further, the moderators said they wanted to ensure Black people had a place to express themselves without the onslaught of white backlash.

"Over the past few months, we have received many complaints from [Black] users. They feel as if whenever a political topic comes up, white users discredit our experiences or downvote them because reality is too uncomfortable for memes," the moderators wrote in a post in March.

"Hopefully these checkmarks will remind you that you are replying to someone who is actually [Black] instead of someone performing digital blackface. BlackPeopleTwitter is not just tweets for you to laugh at. We are so much more than that. BPT has continued to make changes towards being an inclusive space," they added.