Reddit is taking steps to remove some vitriol from the Internet by banning several of its more hateful threads. Some horribly titled racist, homophobic, and transphobic subreddits were taken down along with the thread r/fatpeoplehate, the most widely-read of the bunch with over 150,000 subscribers, reports The Guardian.
The removal of the subreddit "fatpeoplehate," which existed purely to mock people for being overweight, has caused the most outrage among the online community. Since the announcement, Reddit's interim CEO Ellen Pao has received a fair amount of hate herself from users who see the ban as an act of censorship. The outspoken community responded to the ban by flooding the site's most-upvoted page with posts about physical and verbally abusing Pao, asking for her to be fired, or simply just repeating "FUCK ELLEN PAO."
"We’re banning behavior, not ideas," Pao said via a statement. "We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals." While Reddit still has a long way to go in fully cleaning up its boards—Twitter users have pointed out that deeply unsettling anti-Semetic subreddits are still out there—this is a good first step.
You can see how some Reddit users responded to the most recent ban below.
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