Reddit is a social networking platform divided into “subredits” where individual posts receive “upvotes” and “downvotes” and the most highly voted posts are featured on the main front page of Reddit itself. It’s a huge online community of only a handful paid staff and volunteer moderators that keep the flow of content constant and legal, if not always ethical. Like any community, there are complexities of power relations that sometimes push ethics to the wayside. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is a subreddit known as “creepshots” in which photos of underage girls were posted for the enjoyment of men, without the knowledge or consent of the underage girls in question. This created an ethical outcry which popularized the subreddit, in turn bringing traffic to Reddit as a whole and causing its creator, an active volunteer moderator, to create additional and increasingly controversial subreddits, all in the name of “trolling”. Recently, reddit has been forced to change their policies and discontinue these controversial at best and dangerous at worst subreddits. However, the ethical issue at hand is in what happened afterwards. A man at a news site wrote a report which published not only the real name of this moderator, but details of where he lived and his family’s internet handles. The controversy that rages now is less about the original content that has since been banned, but if the journalist was wrong to expose the man behind the moderator.
As an intersectional feminist and decent human being, I have some strong opinions about the content of not only his initial subreddit but the troll subreddits that he created for traffic subsequently. I find the fact that his actions were not illegal personally appalling, as condoning behaviors like harassment, sexism, and later, mockingly, racism and domestic violence, is where I draw the line at values of free speech. The basic tenant of a spirituality that influences mine is “an it harm none, do as ye will.” And I believe this man was doing harm by creating this content. Regardless of his intent, his content was deeply harmful and a symptom of some of the worst ills of our society. That said, the question here is not about the actions of the subreddit moderator, but of the journalist that exposed him, and the morality of that action. While I have enough anger at society as a whole for condoning this sort of thing that having a scapegoat feels amazing and I am willing to say that this man has brought any ill resulting from this on himself… I have to question that. Because like it or not, I do not believe in mob justice. Even criminals are held in jail for their own protection as much as to protect others from them. People are angry at a community that allowed horrible things to be said and done within it, and a journalist gave us a villain. More then that, he gave the villain’s private information, which could put a, like it or not, human being, in physical jeopardy. Men like this moderator are not the problem, and attacking him only gives the real problem, the mass of societal construction justifying his actions, a martyr; and nothing scares me more then the bad guys having a martyr.
