Following the mass censorship by moderators of the Reddit community /r/News in relation to the Islamic terror attack in Orlando, Florida, one moderator of the subreddit has been discovered to have told a user to “kill themselves” after he called them out on censorship.

One Reddit used came across a comment by /r/News moderator “/u/SuspiciousSpecialist” where the user responded to criticism of his moderating skills. You can read the exchange in full here.

Ironically the mods response seemed to prove the commentators claim of acting childishly to be true. Another Reddit user, Jeffrey Minter, was banned from the /r/news subreddit for linking to a recently created subreddit called /r/Full_News. When Minter questioned the /r/News mods as to why he was banned he was told that linking to this new subreddit was considered “witchhunting”, mainly due to the list of /r/News moderators compiled by the /r/Full_News subreddit.

Other subreddits such as /r/The_Donald and /r/Full_News provided evidence of censorship by /r/News, with posts about censorship quickly rising to the top of Reddit’s front-page rankings. Although a megathread was created by /r/News mods, it turned out quite similar to other threads discussing the shooting, with tens of thousands of comments deleted by moderators.

An attempt at damage control was also made by the mods, blaming the comment lockdown and censorship on “hate speech”. They did apologise for the comments made by /u/SuspiciousSpecialist but continued to ban anyone who posted the above image or referred to him by name.

Some users have called for a complete replacement of /r/News mods and judging by a comment from Reddit admin /u/Sporkicide where he describes /r/News mods as “tired, frustrated and overwhelmed”, users may be right in saying that some fresh blood is needed in the /r/News modding community.

This is far from the first Reddit censorship scandal. Only last week Breitbart reported on claims of censorship in Reddits /r/Politics subreddit. Reddit users are increasingly concerned about censorship being enforced by Reddit moderators using the excuse of “hate speech.”

A confidential source within the Reddit community believes there to be a lot of in-fighting between moderators of many of Reddits political and news based subreddits, often due to the issue of censorship or actions of certain moderators. Breitbart will be keeping a close eye on Reddit – the self proclaimed front page of the internet – and how it continues to silence and censor its users.

Lucas Nolan is a Journalism and Media student at Dublin Business School and a regular contributor to Breitbart Tech. He can be contacted via Twitter here: @LucasNolan_