Issues Database

The r/SilkRoad subreddit served as a public discussion hub for users of the Silk Road dark-net drug marketplace; when the FBI seized Silk Road and arrested Ross Ulbricht in October 2013, moderators briefly took the community private over identity-exposure concerns before reopening it.

Gawker's Adrian Chen identified Reddit's most notorious moderator, 'Violentacrez', as a 49-year-old Texas programmer — igniting a fierce debate over anonymity, doxxing, and moderator power.

r/CreepShots hosted secretly-taken sexualized photos of women and girls in public without their consent. After a Georgia teacher case and Gawker's October 2012 unmasking of moderator 'Violentacrez' (Michael Brutsch), the subreddit was shut down.

After science communicator Rebecca Watson mildly described an uncomfortable late-night encounter, a backlash dubbed 'Elevatorgate' spread across the online atheist community — including Reddit — and escalated into years of misogynistic harassment, rape and death threats.

In October 2011 Reddit shut down r/jailbait, a community built around sexualized images of minors, after a CNN 'Keeping Them Honest' segment and an incident involving solicitation of illegal images — the platform's first major child-safety reckoning.

For roughly three years Reddit hosted r/jailbait, a community trading sexualized images of underage girls, before public pressure forced its closure in October 2011.