Reddit
has finally banned r/greatawakening, the main QAnon subreddit, and then
it banned /r/The_GreatAwakening, the backup subreddit where users fled.
QAnon, the web of conspiracy theories — which involve Donald Trump,
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and politicians and government officials
stretching all the way back to Kennedy era — originated on 4chan through
Q, an anonymous person purporting to have a high-level security
clearance. It then quickly spread to Reddit, Facebook, and eventually offline.

A spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that
r/greatawakening was banned for violating Reddit’s policy against
“inciting violence, harassment, and the dissemination of personal
information,” while r/The_GreatAwakening was taken down for inciting
harassment.

The takedowns come on the heels of banning of
r/MillionDollarExtreme earlier this week, the community belonging to
alt-right comedy troupe of the same name led by Sam Hyde, Nick
Rochefort, and Charls Carroll. r/MillionDollarExtreme and associated
subs /r/BillionShekelSupreme and /r/ChadRight were banned from the site
on Monday night, a Reddit spokesperson confirmed to The Verge,
citing violations of the company’s most recent content policy update.
Per the postings left in the place of the subreddits, MDE and ChadRight
were banned for violating the forum’s violent speech guidelines, while
BSS was taken offline for ban evasion.

While previous Reddit bans have come about mostly as a
result of external pressure, these are the first higher-profile bans
directly tied to Reddit’s new, more explicit content policy, which was rolled out in October 2017. After years of inconsistency
from the company’s leadership, the site’s handling of this set of bans
suggests a more codified strategy being implemented across the board for
policing toxic users.

Reddit’s MDE ban follows a similar decision by YouTube in
May to ban the group for content violations. Their comedy is what some
would describe as edgy: racist, sexist, and homophobic. Adult Swim,
which hosted the group’s first show, Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, reportedly
had to strip out swastikas and coded racist messages before the show
aired. Likewise, the QAnon community is well-known for its connection to
high-profile figures like Roseanne Barr, the former star of her
eponymous show who lost her job after she tweeted a racist remark about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in the context of a larger Q-related conspiracy.

Since its founding in 2005 as a home for interesting links, Reddit has long defined itself as a space that values nearly absolute freedom of speech and expression.
“We’re a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal
info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like picsofdeadkids
or morally questionable reddits like jailbait are part of the price of
free speech on a site like this,” then-general manager Erik Martin said in one of the site’s popular Ask Me Anything threads in 2011.

Reddit’s QAnon ban points to how it’s tracking toxic communities