Reddit shuts down 'harassing' forums

The decision to ban some Reddit forums was criticised by many users

Social news site Reddit has shut down five of its forums because they were being used to "harass individuals".

The closures follow an announcement in May, when Reddit said it would be enforcing its anti-harassment policy more vigorously.

More closures of other chat forums, or sub-reddits, would follow if they too were abused in the same way, it said.

The action has been widely criticised, with some saying it marks a significant policy shift for the site.

Many Reddit members responded by flooding the site with images related to the banned forums or directing abusive comments to the site's administrators.

Banning behaviour

The closures were announced in a post placed on Reddit, saying the sub-reddits had been banned because they had broken community rules on harassment and the forum's volunteer moderators had not taken action to stop the behaviour.

The sub-reddits directed abuse towards overweight, black and trans people as well as gamers.

The post said Reddit's operators wanted as "little involvement as possible" in overseeing what people said to each other on the site.

However, they said they would intervene when privacy and free expression were threatened or if people suffered abuse.

In a separate explanation, Reddit added that the sub-reddits had not been banned because of the opinions expressed within them.

Instead, it said, those forums had been used to recruit gangs of people who had then subjected someone to sustained harassment.

And this "brigading" had affected the lives of people being picked on, who "worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on Reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day".

"We're banning behaviour, not ideas," it said.

Other forums that people found distasteful or annoying would not suffer bans unless they too prompted offline action against people, Reddit said.

It encouraged Reddit users to report sub-reddits engaged in sustained abuse.

The announcement and bans sparked a huge debate on the site, with the main discussion thread garnering almost 25,000 comments.

Reddit members who commented said the ban was "horrible", "not well thought out" and a "bad business decision".

Others argued that it was better to keep a "bigoted community" in a separate sub-reddit because shutting that down would mean the abuse would then spill over into other forums.

Commentators pointed out that similar decisions to ban discussions by social news site Digg had started an exodus from that site and ultimately led to its demise.