(Photo: Imgur)

It’s no secret that Reddit, the link-sharing site that members tout as a bastion of free speech and creativity, also serves as a seedy showcase of the sexism, racism and misogyny that’s always existed on the web. Reddit has a long history of publicly grappling with its dueling reputations: on the surface, it's a knowledge-sharing platform that even the President has deemed worthy of his presence.

But the site has also battled to suppress some of its more hateful communities while toeing the free speech party line. Last year's Violentacrez scandal, in which Gawker outed one of the site's most notorious trolls for moderating the controversial subreddits r/Jailbait and r/Creepshots, exposed much of what Reddit admins gloss over in favor of inspiring "free and open Internet" rhetoric. In short: Reddit, much like a lot of the Internet, is still a pretty difficult place to be a woman.

Communities like r/Doppelbangher don't make it any easier. The subreddit, which has over 8,000 subscribers, allows users to submit photos of celebrities and--more typically--users' friends so that others can find their porn star lookalikes. It seems kind of harmless at first: sure, we totally get why it might be funny in a weird way to find your porn doppelganger. But the majority of photos appear to come from male redditors looking to find porn lookalikes for women they know, whose photos they've used without their permission. Creepy.

Of course, like most of Reddit, the subreddit discourages the outing of personal information. "If you are going to post a Facebook pic make sure the girl in the picture can't be traced back," reads the subreddit's sidebar. But just because the women in the photos are anonymous, doesn't mean they appreciate cropping up on a subreddit like r/Doppelbangher.

One female Reddit user found her photo on the site and was so incensed she created a throwaway account, "wtfisthisbull," in order to respond. In response to the post, "[REQUEST] Friend from high school," which asked for users to submit porn lookalikes for her photo, the woman posted a photo of herself holding up the sign, "You're disgusting." The user deleted his original post, but not before being shamed out of the subreddit.

Vengeance is sweet, sure, but the existence of r/Doppelbangher speaks to a deeper pattern of casual misogyny and disrespect that permeates the site, one so obvious that even former Starfleet captains take issue with it. "I am apalled [sic] by some of the immature, horrifically racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnic… etc.. posts that are just ignored [on Reddit]," William Shatner wrote in a post to r/StarTrek this weekend. "Reddit has been the first ‘mainstream’ site that I have been to that actually appears to allow racists and other hate mongers to group, congregate, incite and spread their hatred. There’s entire subreddits that allow it."

(Photo: CNN)

Last night, the now-notorious Reddit troll Violentacrez, whom Gawker recently exposed as a 49-year-old Texas-based programmer named Michael Brutsch, appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 for God knows what reason. In the painfully awkward two-part interview, during which Mr. Cooper thankfully gave us a commercial break to collect ourselves and tweet our thoughts, Mr. Brutsch invoked every possible excuse to justify his poor behavior, which includes creating controversial subreddits like PicsofDeadKids and Jailbait.

Throughout the interview, Mr. Brutsch referred to his Reddit username Violentacrez in the third person, echoing other statements he's made about Violentacrez being a character he played and attempting to distance himself from taking personal responsibility for his actions. He also admitted that his sole purpose for creating racist and misogynistic subreddits was to get a rise out of people (he bragged he has a "gift" for it) in order to accumulate "meaningless internet points."

Shortly after the interview aired, Mr. Brutsch again took to Reddit under his clean handle "mbrutsch" and admitted that appearing on CNN was a "huge mistake, which I will not repeat." He also agreed with users who alleged that Reddit's statement given to CNN is actually riddled with factual inaccuracies. "It was suprising that the admins straight up lied about banning VA multiple times," one user wrote. "Didn't surprise me at all," replied Mr. Brutsch.

Still, it was rather shocking to witness Mr. Brutsch's willingness to completely throw Reddit, a platform he has essentially dedicated his life to for the past five years, under the bus in order to save his own neck. Though he was once a Reddit power user, tapped by administrators to wrangle the darkest subreddits and keep illegal content from cropping up on them, he has continually called Reddit admins out for lying and for not having his back.

"Reddit encouraged and enabled this kind of behavior," he said last night on CNN. Even Redditors whose inconsistent "free speech" logic (keep Jailbait, but block Gawker links) put them in allegiance with Mr. Brutsch probably won't appreciate hearing him blame his trolling on Reddit, both as a platform and community.

We've reached out to Reddit general manager Erik Martin to ask for comment on Mr. Brutsch's accusation and will update when we hear back. But it's true that Reddit administrators have been supportive of Mr. Brutsch's behavior in the past. Mr. Brutsch also brought along to the interview a gold-plated bobblehead that Reddit administrators gave to him for creating Jailbait, a subreddit where users posted sexualized photos of minors. The Atlantic Wire points out that the statue was given to Mr. Brutsch as a token for creating "Worst Reddit," which still seems like a knowing nod and thumbs up to his behavior on the site.

This reporter is a frequent user of Reddit, in both her personal and professional life, and a fan of the platform as a fount of information. At its best, it can be an open forum for thoughtful conversation, hilarious asides and friendly knowledge sharing. But this incident has shed new light on the dark underbelly of a platform that just recently hosted a Q&A with the President of the United States.

It may seem like cognitive dissonance for Reddit to host forums like RapingWomen alongside TwoXChromosomes, but the site is also a microcosm of the Internet at large: full of some of the most wonderful people, but also some of the worst. Still, the laissez-faire attitude of Reddit admins towards the sexist and misogynistic content is concerning at best and borderline-disgusting at worst. As Anil Dash put it, "Reddit does many good things, but is also a horrendously sexist culture."

Of course, this realization is nothing new--the MensRights subreddit has been around for ages, and the internet as a whole has long been a complicated place for women to exist. But the Violentacrez scandal, coupled with that of Creepshots and Predditors, has put the conversation about Reddit's attitudes towards its female users at the forefront.

At least one woman we know, an active Redditor who has attended meetups and accrued a fair amount of "meaningless Internet points," has shut down her account in response to the recent news. "[Violentacrez] is the catalyst, yes, but the general culture of casual racism and misogyny as well," she tweeted.

Through its handling of the Violentacrez crisis, as well as last year's Jailbait scandal, Reddit has emphasized time and time again that it wants to be a platform that embraces free speech, right up to the line of illegality (but never crossing it). This will turn off some users, and perhaps cultivate a culture rife with racism and misogyny, under the banner of free speech. It is not, however, somehow immune to the criticism these types of decisions will evoke from Redditors and the media alike.

As Ken at Popehat wrote in his excellent piece on Reddit, Gawker and anonymity:

Creepers and pedophiles and bigots make up only a tiny minority of Redditors; people angry that they are being criticized make up only a slightly larger minority. Comments from Reddit administrators in the wake of the child pornography outcry has made clear that Reddit wants to be a free speech site that permits everything that the law does not prohibit. That's fine. I'd defend Reddit's freedom to publish what the law allows. But Redditors need not be taken seriously to the extent they believe they have a protected right to be free of criticism and ridicule and inquiry. You can argue all you want that forums like — oh, say, the /r/BeatingWomen subreddit — should be free to thrive without criticism. Moderators can indulge your feelings by banning critics. Moderators can decide to ban links to Gawker on the theory that if you take pictures of children in public and post them for the sexual pleasure of misfit neckbeards, you have a right to privacy that should prevent anyone from identifying you. But Reddit administrators and moderators and Redditors can't stop everyone else from calling out their conduct and their oddly inconsistent philosophy. Private individuals decrying, ridiculing, and even using their skills to identify Redditors are using a classic "more speech" remedy to speech they don't like. It's a feature, not a bug, of free speech.

Of course, individuals on Reddit are also responsible for their own actions. No matter how much Mr. Brutsch claims Reddit "encouraged and enabled his behavior," it was still just a platform full of--as he says--"college kids," and it was ultimately his decision to dutifully play into their twisted tastes. Now, he's paying the price for that: he's lost his job and his health insurance and has ultimately become the face of Internet trolldom. Reddit's reputation will recover from this poor publicity fiasco, but the rep of its most notorious troll probably won't.

(Photo: Says-it.com)

If websites are one big dysfunctional family, Reddit and Gawker Media are the two drunken uncles who can't stop fighting over who has to pick grandpa up at the airport. Now, the two sites are preparing for a grueling "inter-website war" that threatens to rob netizens of wifi packet rations and provide hours of popcorn-eating fodder.

After news broke on Reddit that Gawker writer Adrian Chen was preparing to publish a post revealing the personal information of Reddit user Violentacrez, a moderator of the controversial subreddit r/creepshots, Reddit began to batten down the hatches. The politics subreddit, which boasts almost 2 million subscribers, announced that it will ban all links to Gawker Media properties--including Gawker, Jezebel and Lifehacker--in response to the news that Mr. Chen may be preparing to publish personal details about Violentacruz.

According to the post:

As some of you may know, a prominent member of Reddit's community, Violentacrez, deleted his account recently. This was as a result of a 'journalist' seeking out his personal information and threatening to publish it, which would have a significant impact on his life. You can read more about it here

As moderators, we feel that this type of behavior is completely intolerable. We volunteer our time on Reddit to make it a better place for the users, and should not be harassed and threatened for that. We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet if someone disagrees with you. Reddit prides itself on having a subreddit for everything, and no matter how much anyone may disapprove of what another user subscribes to, that is never a reason to threaten them.

As a result, the moderators of /r/politics have chosen to disallow links from the Gawker network until action is taken to correct this serious lack of ethics and integrity.

It's worth noting that--despite what was incorrectly reported in Politico--this is not a statement from Reddit administrators or officials, but instead from a Reddit moderator. Reddit moderators are volunteers and do not formally represent or speak for the website.

"Moderators are free to moderate their subreddits as they see fit," Reddit's general manager Erik Martin told Betabeat by email. "They can ban all usernames that start with the letter g if they want."

"The statement is from moderators, who are volunteers," he added, while declining to elaborate on Reddit's official stance on the move.

Other subreddits are following in r/politics's stead, including r/gaming and r/SubredditDrama. r/mensrights has also joined the fight, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Screenshots between Violentacrez and other Reddit users show that Violentacrez believed Mr. Chen was trying to publish an article about him because of his associations with creepshots, which was set to private before being banned, and r/jailbait, which Reddit admins shut down last year.

Creepshots was just banned, but new subreddits created to fill "the hole in reddit's seedy underbelly" have already begun to pop up. [Updated: Reddit has banned Creepsquad, a related subreddit.]

The feud etween Gawker and Reddit has been brewing for a while. Mr. Chen is vocal about his distaste for Reddit both on Gawker and on his own Twitter page. Last year, he was embroiled in yet more internet drama when he trolled Reddit into thinking he was behind LucidEnding, a user who faked having cancer for karma.

Recently, r/creepshots has been at the nexus of much contention between the two websites. Just yesterday, Jezebel ran a feature about the Tumblr "Predditors," run by a 25-year-old female Redditor, which publishes the personal information of those who post to the controversial subreddit.

"I think it's cute how Reddit's CreepShots apologists/Men's Right's activists/etc. think we care if they stop linking to us. And also indicative of their hypocritical obsession with privacy and control," Katie J.M. Baker, the Jezebel author behind the r/creepshots post, told Betabeat by Gchat. "It's okay for anonymous Redditors to post upskirt photo after upskirt photo, but a huge violation of privacy for a journalist to report on the men who post them? How does that make any sense? Plus, the information on Predditors (which is temporarily down) wasn't illegal--or difficult--for my source to track down."

Tumblr has since shut down Predditors. [UPDATE: Tumblr has reinstated Predditors.] A new thread on Reddit alleges that someone whose information was published on Predditors was violently attacked last night, but there is so far no substantial proof corroborating that claim.

Redditors themselves seem to be barely able to control their glee over the ensuing drama:

Now, I see before me the beginnings of an inter-website war, sparked by mass doxing, blackmail, the fall of one of reddit's legendary figures, potentially ruined lives, admins silently working in the background, and repercussions that will have devastating IRL consequences for those involved ...

I now stand before you on the precipice of the greatest shitstorm of our time. We have come far from our origins as a humble kernel, and if this escalates to the point where the entire site falls around us, I'd just like to say that it was an honor serving with you all aboard the USS Orville.

It is unclear whether Mr. Chen still intends to publish his post, rumors of which began this chilling war. For now, we can only wait as the sounds of furious keyboard clacking and the cries of rage grow ever closer to the heart of the mainstream internet.