Banning the Alt-Right: A Reddit Case Study

• In Event: Information Diet and Its Effects

Abstract

Reddit and other social media companies have long faced criticism for inadvertently providing a platform for far-right groups and misinformation. Alt-right subreddits gained outsized notoriety during the 2016 election, causing journalists and other Reddit users to raise concerns about the normalization of extreme ideologies. The problem of extremist groups forming on otherwise harmless social media platforms is unlikely to go away soon. However, blindly encouraging social media companies to perform mass censorship runs a number of risks, including worsening the problem.

This project interrogates the censorship tactic Reddit employed to oust alt-right members from its platform in 2017: outright banning of the r/altright subreddit. Advocates of this tactic believe that banning offending communities is the only way to remove a noxious presence and protect Reddit’s other users from doxing or harassment. However, theories of online censorship observe that successful censorship of information or ideas is nearly impossible as users can reroute information networks around the obstruction. Additionally, other forms of censorship such as quarantining may be more effective tools in the fight against radical social media communities and the spread of misinformation.

Capitalizing on a natural experiment formed by Reddit's ban of r/altright in February 2017, I test users' willingness to reroute following the ban, as well as their propensity for chilled or backlash posting behavior. I find that thousands of users did reroute to a similar far-right subreddit, r/The_Donald, and that the most active users were most likely to take the leap. I also find that rerouted users displayed backlash behaviors by posting even more often after their banning experience. These results suggest that censorship tactics like banning should never be employed as blanket solutions, as in some circumstances they can worsen the state of political dialogue on social media.

Author

• Vivian Ferrillo, Texas Tech University