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ActivismPlease email podcasts and journalists you admire to encourage them to COVER THE SUPPRESSION OF FEMALE SPEECH ON REDDIT. Podcasts and journalists, it is time to cover the suppression of female speech on Reddit.
The situation for women on Reddit is diffuse, complex, and genuinely challenging to report, but public opinion is shifting and the mainstream is ready to hear this story. I also suspect dozens of us would bend over backwards to help put the pieces together. There is more jaw-dropping content on this topic than you can shake a stick at.
The voices of women on Reddit are subordinated to the feelings of male people who identify as women at almost every opportunity, and those priorities are strictly enforced…especially and often exclusively in lesbian and women’s spaces. The same policies are not enforced on men’s spaces in any comparable way.
Journalists are missing out on a truly astonishing, deeply entrenched sexist scandal that has been documented on Ovarit for years. The censorship is so effective that many Redditors do not believe it is taking place at scale, and comments are quickly deleted for pointing it out at all.
Nothing we say here or there will change Reddit, but they are now a publicly traded company. Public pressure and public outrage can absolutely move the needle.
There is an outrageous amount of content to report on the state of woman-hate on Reddit:
A trans- identified male who goes by Kuberr lied about being an intersex Desi female in a wheelchair to manipulate his way into moderating positions in subreddits like Cisbians. Ovarit has the receipts.
It would appear that many mods in the most restrictive women’s and lesbian spaces are trans-identified males, and the same may be true of Reddit admin. This likely explains why policies are targeted to protect the feelings of trans women above any other interest group.
r/ActualLesbians has its largest user overlap with r/MtF. They post and upvote content about loving your dick, surprising lesbians with dick, and celebrating girldick while banning female lesbians who dissent.
r/ActualLesbians, r/ActualLesbiansOver25, r/lesbianfashionadvice and endless other women’s subs make it a bannable offense to mention “genital preference:” that is, to talk about female homosexuality or antipathy to dick.
Genital preferences ARE allowed on porn subs like r/lesbians and r/degradingholes (“True Female Purpose”). Female discussion spaces are treated as transphobic while female porn is fine.
Attempts to prevent lesbians from expressing disinterest in male partners is enforced for female users. Gay men in spaces like r/AskGayBros firmly reject pressure to treat trans-identified females as indistinguishable from gay men.
r/TwoXChromosomes banned a link to a UN Human Rights Commission statement on violence against women and girls because it distinguished between sex and gender. A trans-identified male mod there deletes comments for “using male or female in response to a gender-based issue” and asked if the post was made “out of fear for cis women or out of concern for trans women.”
The hugely popular r/ChangeMyView has a genuinely heartbreaking section on their FAQ explaining that admin refused to offer clear guidance on gender topics without putting a finger on the scale, so open discussion is banned even in formal debate subs with tight moderation and respectful standards.
Reddit also forbids critical discussion of Reddit, so these policies cannot be discussed anywhere on the platform and comments are shadow-banned regularly. I’ve posted my own history of deleted comments in the past.
Ovaries, add your own examples below.
Journalists, it is seriously time for someone to turn this into a public narrative that can actually reach people.
Blocked and Reported? Honestly with Bari Weiss? Unspeakable with Meghan Daum? Heterodorx? Triggernometry? Wherever you want to hear this subject covered, take a minute now before you forget, reach out, and ask them to cover it. Link this thread if you want.
I don’t want to believe they’d all sleep on this. Reddit still has cultural influence, and the depth of their moderation bias is a significant step backwards in free speech and sexual self-determination for women online.
Journalists who cover internet culture (and used to cover it and are now out of the industry due to lack of money) are/were completely captured by the ideology that takes for granted that women’s rights should be suppressed in favor of forcing women to “be nice” (submit) to male fakers who are antisocial towards women.
Reddit has managed to crawl under scrutiny for years. One of the ways they’ve done this is by appeasing their base audience, who are aligned with the journalist class on social justice issues, by sacrificing subreddits that were unpopular to that demographic, and making unclear rules for the remaining subreddits that make it impossible for users to contradict the sacred beliefs of those people.
The trans-obsessed social justice types who they are appeasing are their power makers. Reddit is for them, and everyone else gets to generate revenue for Reddit inc but only at the mercy of the power makers. The power makers, being the ones who seem to control the means of outrage production, determine which values are sacrosanct and which would-be scandals are ignored.
R/GenderCritical was one of the 500 most active subreddits, was one of the most active subreddits targeted to women. It grew exponentially every year, and had 65k subscribers when it was banned. And it was sacrificed to appease the power makers and it worked for them.
Reddit killed the internet of independent forums and then suppressed all communities that don’t align with a specific, extreme political ideology. They centralized the internet of long-form text conversations and then they controlled it, censoring and disallowing a significant realm of discussion that especially impacts women and children.
The state of journalism is IMO one of the reasons why. It’s not a coinciding coincidence. Reddit didn’t want scrutiny and getting rid of feminist communities that the journalist/activist/outrage class is disproportionately obsessed with gave them social credit.
Edit: Should have begun with “this is a beautiful analysis of this situation.”
I do agree, but I genuinely don’t think a podcast like Blocked and Reported, for instance, is ideologically resistant. I suspect their excuse is that they have a thriving subreddit…which indeed circles back to your point.
Block and Reported covered the Atlantic’s hit piece on Ovarit and the Reddit bans on gender critical feminist communities a little bit - if you can call it coverage. They didn’t do any real research or digging, and considering that the hit piece basically manufactured a fake narrative about Ovarit, merely commenting on the hit piece and the drama without noting the misinformation kind of just extends the misinformation. Blocked and Reported is more commentary than reporting. They do their reporting separately, and they both seem to want to cover this stuff as little as possible because they don’t actually want it to be what defines their careers.
Feminists, especially the “mean” ones, are the last people anyone is going to stick their necks out for.
Edit: I don’t mean to sound entirely negative. I would love to see people try to get this commented on the public discourse. It’s been very depressing how little anyone cares - especially when the chattering class makes such a big deal about Twitter, which I think actually has a lower impact than Reddit does. Reddit dominates search results, Twitter is basically only consumed by Twitter users (not actually that many people) and Twitter posts are far more ephemeral than Reddit posts which can be read by significant numbers of people for many years. Reddit has also been used a great deal to train large language models (AI) so the moderation and censorship on Reddit has impacted AI more than we can probably know.
Reddit has also been used a great deal to train large language models (AI) so the moderation and censorship on Reddit has impacted AI more than we can probably know.
This. It is astonishing that there hasn't been any in-depth reporting on this alone. The "socially acceptable" front page of Reddit papers over a deep cesspit of abusive porn and misogyny. And now AI developers are using it as a source.
If no news media would cover it, can we do it ourselves?
I've been wishing our WAHF Substack could do a full disclosure of:
How Reddit's women, lesbians, and feminist subs had been taken over by trans, and the moderators' iron-fist censorship of women's voices. I have also heard that the head moderator of r/feminist is a self-avowed MRA, no joke. He also moderates some MRA subs??
The ban of r/GC (and r/SuperStraight) while allowing tons of violent porn subs, plus allowing them to be trans exclusive
Current situation and censorship of women's dissenting voices.
Two obstacles in the way are:
(a) We do not have evidence and records of everything that went down in the past. Our team AFAIK were not super active Redditors or even Reddit users. I'm not sure if any of us are using it now since the r/GC ban. (I quitted after the ban.) So our knowledge of the history of everything is limited. We're not professional reporters and we don't have sources we can go to for digging things up from the past. We also have limited knowledge of what's happening on Reddit now. If we're just making allegations without evidence, Reddit can sue us personally for libel.
(b) It would be a pretty big project and time commitment.
OTOH, our Substack is growing steadily on Substack. Our new subscription rate has been exceeding our expectation given we haven't actively promoted it. So we know there's a lot of interest out there. We also have very active GC Substacks following us, recommending us, and restacking things we publish, which are what led to more and more people subscribing to us. So if we do a Reddit exposé, the word will get out.
One way we can do it is, instead of a news report, we can do anonymous testimonies by individual women here about what they personally experienced on Reddit as to censorship and other women suppression problems. Of course we would still have to verify that the individual's testimony checks out. But that would be a lot less risky than publishing an actual new report.
Another thing we can do is publish an article by Ovarit admins that would be their testimony of what happened to r/GC with the ban. But I know you all are already extremely busy and burdened running this site. So this may not be something any of you want to pursue.
In any case, I would like to ask::
Does anyone on Ovarit have records (eg screenshots, etc.) of what went down with the ban wave, as well as trans takeover of the subreddits serving women, and moderators censoring women? And would it be possible to gather info from Ovarit members on all the shenanigans going on over on Reddit?
Are there anyone here with much better knowledge of what has happened and what is happening on Reddit who would be willing to volunteer write articles about this?
An attempt was made:
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/ovarit-a-web-of-our-own/
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2021/01/11/the-witches-web/
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/redditors-vs-predditors
Does anyone on Ovarit have records (eg screenshots, etc.) of what went down with the ban wave,
There was nothing to screenshot. There was no warning or communication. One second things were normal and the next the subreddit was replaced with a ban message. They didn’t answer our questions.
Wasn't there a bunch of posts that were falsely reported for cp or gore or something, which wasn't an unusual tactic for getting rid of unwanted subs? Though I'm not sure if that actually had something to do with GC being banned for "promoting hate" or whether reporting random posts was just something they did for fun.
I was recently browsing the archive of r/gc and found this post from the day before we were banned - back when it still seemed completely impossible and incomprehensible that they would actually ban a sub without any forewarning.
(I completely forgot that r/LGBdroptheT was a thing. It all seems such a long time ago)
On GenderCritical we got spammed with false reports all the time. Trolls posted fucked up images but we had auto mod pull all images for mod review so they would never get through and no one could use that as leverage. It was part of the hostility of reddit, but I wouldn’t attribute bans by the admins to false reports. That makes it sound like some social media moderation blunder and it wasn’t like that. They made a very deliberate decision.
Can you link me to the archive? Or are you manually searching links on the wayback machine?
We need to send them screenshots of the staggeringly large amounts of comments taking about raping and assaulting women for simply not wanting penis. Show how reports made about women and violence are never considered deletable or punishable, yet saying you do not like penis can lead to a full account ban. How gay subs can say whatever they want, yet every women's sub is censored to the point we can't even use our medical terms without punishment and threats. How the tras can have preferences and say they won't date other tras and it's go girl, but if a woman says it she is punished and threatened.
Spam everyone terf is a slur.
right on! I saw someone post about there being some pedophile enabling sub in there the other day. wtf. Seriously what is going on with them?
What's going on with wikipedia too? There must just be bedrooms full of TIMs on a hair trigger to delete anything that questions them..
Excellent idea!!!
Do you happen to know how to send these messages?
I am a big girl and can do my own research
I’ve never sent fan mail before
But if you happen to have some links I’ll send there first
Reasonable! A few I mentioned:
Blocked and Reported: BlockedAndReportedPodcast@gmail.com
Bari Weiss: general@bariweiss.com
Triggernometry: triggernometrypod@gmail.com
Meghan Daum and the Unspeakeasy: https://www.theunspeakeasy.com/contact
I can’t find an email for Heterodorx but with due respect, I believe Nina and Corina are plenty online. 😂 Somebody who Twotes can Tweet them.
I wonder if Megyn Kelly would cover it
Why focus on Reddit? I don't think they are different than the other big social media companies except Twitter. TikTok and Meta are bigger than Reddit and are just as captured by TRAs as Reddit from what I see.
Meta hasn’t banned all gender critical groups or the expression of beliefs that contradict trans ideology. Neither has tik tok as far as I know. Reddit has. You can’t say that trans women aren’t women on Reddit, at least not if the reporting hoard thinks anyone hears you.
Unfortunately because I’ve been on Reddit - in all its terrible glory - in some form or another since it was new.
I have as much right to be there as the sexists and I don’t care to cede it to them in retreat…even thought they’re obviously winning. I remember the glory days of “free speech” and child porn, so I take particular eye-rolling offense to man-children who find my condescending long-form comments too hot to handle. (Grow a pair of anything, Reddit mods and admins: plenty of content you have censored is embarrassing for you and that’s why nobody is allowed to talk about it.) I see that the censorship there is opaque, subjective, and hard to appeal…but I also think a shit-ton of content is self-evidently ridiculous and beyond parody. I think the subreddit structure makes the subject hard to report on - because it is many small cultures all expressing male-entitlement policies at once -but also creates microcosms in which ostensible “women’s” spaces can be observed for their specific policies in action.
I don’t Meta or TikTok. I am sure they are worse.
Not related to gender issues per se, but since this is one issue that overwhelmingly affects one sex over the other--criticizing porn, or discussing porn addictions (and the trauma it causes to addicts' partners) is outright censored in a lot of seemingly "mainstream" subs like /r/sex or /r/relationship_advice. Not terribly surprising given that a large percentage of reddit's traffic is porn.
/r/sex will outright censor you for suggesting that porn use could ever be anything other than "sex positive". It absolutely kills me to see posters there earnestly concerned about their partner's total disinterest in sex with them when what they're describing are textbook signs of porn addiction, only for them to be gaslit in the comments about spicing things up with lingerie, or a bunch of BS about "performance anxiety". They have a rule about not "shaming" any sexual preferences, but in practice what this really means you're not allowed to criticize kinks and fetishes, whereas wanting a monogamous porn-free relationship is a bannable offense.
Even places like /r/pornfree very strictly forbid any discussion of porn being harmful for anyone other than a self-professed porn addict. Porn being bad for women, partners, society at large? BANNED for "shaming" porn addicts. Even when the addicts themselves cite this as a motivating factor to quit. I have a shitload of receipts for the main mod there, /u/foobarbazblarg, he's a pedo apologist in his 50's who thinks consuming CP isn't morally wrong "as long as you're not paying for it" and thinks supportive spaces for women to discuss their partners' porn addictions (like /r/LoveAfterPorn) are "hate subs" (meanwhile, addicts calling their betrayed partners "bitches" and "psychos" in his sub is totally chill). I went down that rabbit hole after navigating my ex's porn addiction (unbeknownst to me, he had been using that sub for many years on his own to try to quit on his own, which obviously didn't work lol, it's a literal circlejerk of men congratulating each other on 2 days of "sobriety") and what I found there was so horrifying, it's honestly more misogynistic than a lot of actual porn subs
The very few enclaves of actual feminist-supporting subs that exist have to constantly walk on eggshells to avoid triggering the admins. NEVER forget that jailbait and picturesofdeadkids (amongst others) used to be actively supported by the admins on "free speech" years ago and were only taken down once the site started getting more popular and those subs attracted negative press. The admins have always been sick misogynists from the site's inception.