THE social news website Reddit is in damage control after it was discovered that the site’s moderators have been censoring any posts that include popular terms such as “NSA,” “Snowden” and “Bitcoin”.

Users discovered the glitch when they tried to submit stories that mentioned any of these words or a long list of others in the /r/technology thread which is followed by around five million Reddit users. The story would be removed without notification within minutes of it appearing on the site.

Reddit admitted to the BBC that the reason for the disappearing posts was due to moderators of the section who placed a filter which automatically deleted posts with the banned words because they didn’t want to deal with the amount of stories submitted on the controversial topics.

Because of this, /r/technology has been downgraded which means it will no longer be a default subreddit and posts won’t appear on the site’s homepage. It’s a measure put in place that’s intended to shame the moderators and force them to fix up the problems they have caused.

Talking to the BBC, Reddit’s communications director Victoria Taylor explained that “the moderation team lost focus of what they were there to do: moderate effectively.”

Ms Taylor also informed news.com.au that Reddit is “currently in the process of figuring out the best course of action,” which could mean that the current downgrade may only be temporary.

A former moderator of /r/technology has since posted his own version of the situation blaming the issues on a lack of moderators for such a massive list of topics.