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by stopcodon 4298 days ago
And they do this while putting out a doublespeak public statement saying they don't do things like banning subreddits (but reserve the right to), and were not legally required to in this case.

Read it here: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f...

Here's the comments from their blog post: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_re...

The admins are getting called out in nearly every top-level comment for folding to media attention and celebrity lawyers, when other objectively worse subreddits are actually granted the "hands-off" approach the site claims to use. Presumably because the victims can't afford legal teams or make headlines like celebrities can when their privacy is violated.

The leaks were despicable and I understand any business taking steps to avoid involvement in their distribution, but you can't expect a user-base like reddits to tolerate the administration saying one thing and doing the exact opposite in certain cases where there's bad press involved.

Edit: Here's a follow-up post from the sysadmin alienth in response to the backlash from their decision: http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_t...

2 comments

You should read the update here

http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_t...

which explains the decision in greater detail. I think the reddit team is being held to an unreasonably high standard here. The subreddits were banned for generating a huge amount of legitimate DMCA takedown requests and not correctly moderating child pornography content, not because the subjects in the posted images were celebrities with money. There is a correlation, but not a causation. It's hard to run a media enterprise with millions of users, and I think reddit's ambition to be as hands-off as possible is almost unique and commendable.

From what I understand, Reddit admins were getting tonnes more takedowns than usual (for underage pics etc), which was becoming a cat-and-mouse game, and took the pragmatic approach of just banning the whole subreddit.

The Reddit communities reaction this whole thing has been pretty sickening - enough for me to block it in my hostsfile. This was just the law straw I guess.

Prior to this, I've also seen them take down specific subreddits that linked to CP, so I don't think this purge is that out of the ordinary for them.
Jailbait was alive for a long time...