The social news site Reddit staged a mini-rebellion Friday, deciding to run ads for a pro-marijuana legalization campaign for free after Condé Nast executives ruled against taking payment for the ads.

The ads from the Just Say Now group support passage of California's Proposition 19, which would largely legalize the use of marijuana. After inquiries from the group, Condé Nast executives ruled against running the ads on the user-driven Reddit, a tiny unit of the Condé Nast publishing concern (which also owns Wired magazine and Wired.com). Condé Nast is best known as the publisher of magazines such as the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue.

According to a statement published on the Reddit blog, Condé Nast declined to run the ads from the Just Say Now group because the company "does not want to financially benefit from this issue."

Reddit's users revolted at news of the rejection, and Reddit's employees took the extraordinary step of airing their grievances publicly (not unlike what happened with a similar situation last year when Condé Nast management ordered Reddit to remove a user posting at the behest of Sears.)

The reddit admins were just blindsided with news that, apparently, we’re not allowed to take advertising money from sites that support California’s Prop 19 (like this one, for example). There’s a lot of rabble flying around, and we wanted to make some points: This was a decision made at the highest levels of Conde Nast. reddit itself strongly disagrees with it, and frankly thinks it’s ridiculous that we’re turning away advertising money. We’re trying to convince Corporate that they’re making the wrong decision here, and we encourage the community to create a petition, so that your anger is organized in a way that will produce results.

After getting an official reason for the rejection, Reddit's admins decided to run the ads for free.

Reddit, a Y-combinator-funded start-up acquired by Condé Nast in 2006, has struggled to bring in advertisers, despite a rabidly loyal user group, and recently asked users to sign up for "Gold" memberships so the site could hire another engineer.

The rejection comes just two days after Facebook rejected similar ads from the Just Say Now campaign, saying the pot leaf violated its terms of service, a situation covered by this blog.

Just Say Now argues that these rejections amount to censorship of their political message, which they say isn't about promoting marijuana use. They point out, for instance, that more than half of those in federal prison were convicted of drug offenses. They've asked their Facebook fans to change their profile pics to the banned image, and will be using self-serve Reddit text ads to promote their decriminalization platform.

Wired.com asked Reddit's business manager and a Condé Nast spokesperson for comment late Friday night and will update the post if we get a response.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also: