We reached out to AltRight several times to attempt to cure the issues that we saw there. In the end, it was clear that they would not be willing to operate that community in compliance with Reddit’s rules, and so we were left with a choice: allow that community to ignore the rules, or admit that we had irreconcilable differences. There really wasn’t much disagreement about the eventual outcome.

As one of the moderators at the subreddit, I would say we are pretty vigilant about trying to abide by Reddit’s terms of service by removing “hate” speech such as slurs or taking down material that is proliferating personal information of people i.e. “doxing.” In fact, we were purposely hyper-vigilant by having absurd warnings like NSFW tags on posts and an age restriction warning on the subreddit just to inform readers that they were entering a “dangerous” part of the internet.

The only incidence where our subreddit may have violated these terms of service was promoting the WeSearchr bounty that was looking to bring justice to the masked man who assaulted Richard Spencer, President of the National Policy Institute and Editor of Radix Journal and AltRight.com. This would not be the first time someone has been removed from a social media platform for promoting WeSearchr. I should know because I was banned from Twitter for promoting that exact WeSearchr bounty. Twitter informed me I was taking part in “targeted harassment” and then had my appeal denied. Apparently, trying to identify a criminal is now considered “doxing” but I digress.