Out of Sight: How Reddit Became a 'Safe Space' for Hate in India

It’s only now that the needle has turned to the ‘front page of the Internet,’ asking questions that were long due.

Reddit operates on the most formidable recipes today to spread hate speech, and demean and derogate people.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

When news of the Bulli Bai app broke earlier this month, there was clamour around hate speech, which was directed concertedly towards Muslim women, on social media platforms – be it Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. People questioned the measures these platforms had taken to curb such instances.

Reddit’s name was the last to appear in this order. This despite the fact that some of the most vicious abuse was witnessed on the platform.

On Reddit, too, large groups of people from across the country exchanged photographs of women, laced with remarks that were vehemently objectifying. Communities the likes of r/chodi and r/DesiMeta are also known to engage in open calls for 'Muslim genocide,' indicating the unbridled hate that runs on the platform.

The scale of these exchanges is huge, with the member count of such hate groups running in thousands in most cases.

Some examples of hate-filled subreddits.

Courtesy: Screenshots from Twitter

Reddit’s woes extend to countries like China and Portugal, too – the former a witness to the freehand it gives to the hate speech against Uyghurs and other minorities, and the latter to the anti-immigrant sentiments prevailing in the country.

Surprisingly, however, a lot of these groups had been in place for a long time, without any action being taken against them. It’s only recently that the needle has turned to the ‘front page of the Internet’ – as Reddit has oft been labelled for its all encompassing nature – asking questions that were long overdue.

Understanding Reddit, Its Operations in India

Reddit had 3.57 million users in India, till 2020, as per the user database Statista. This, however, is only a fraction of its fellow platforms Instagram and Facebook, used by a staggering 349 million and 201 million, respectively.

India contributes the largest share of the user-pie for Instagram and Facebook, while remaining a distant third in case of Reddit. This, perhaps, is the reason why Reddit has gone locally unscrutinised so far.

The functionalities of Reddit are minimal, as it only asks for one's email address before letting the user enter different communities on the platform, and engage via text or audio-visual content.

Multiple communities on Reddit routinely indulge in sharing lewd comments on the photos of women within themselves. Their targets in most cases are public personalities, from women in Bollywood to Muslim women.

Having been called out on Twitter recently, some of these communities have now gone private. This means that one can participate only with the permission of the moderators of the said community, turning them into virtual locker rooms.

The ‘moderators’ of a Reddit community work like administrators of that space, setting guidelines, and monitoring posts for violations, among other things.

They are responsible for their maintenance, and act as interlocutors between the Reddit back-end and a community member, making Reddit a highly decentralised virtual space.

What do the Moderators Say?

The Quint reached out to the 'mod' (short for moderator) team of r/India with 7,04,000 members – one of the largest subreddit on themes pan-India – to understand their experiences with the platform.

A common concern amongst the moderators, who agreed to speak to us on the condition of anonymity, was the ineptness of the Reddit administration to understand the abuses or comments made in languages other than English.

Speaking to The Quint, one of the moderators highlighted how the detection mechanism is lacking for Indian languages and most of the times even reporting them yields no result at all. "You get an automated response at best,” the moderator said.

Pointedly, the surge in the lashing against particular groups – Muslims, Muslim women, Dalits, and Sikhs – was also a part of their recent reporting experiences of the moderator team.

Another moderator said “quite a few communities have cropped up in the last few years which focus their hate on minorities, primarily Muslims. Flagging of such Islamophobic content has increased in our subreddit, r/India, as well.”

Similarly, another moderator told The Quint that Reddit doesn’t "de-platform porn unless any legal complications ensue."

“Allowing porn also results in it being used in confluence with other aspects of life such as politics and religion, which is what is happening with subreddits which are propagating sexual fantasies featuring Hindu deities or sacred Muslim figures or rituals or featuring real-life Hindu or Muslim personalities.”

A mod who spoke to The Quint on condition of anonymity

Anonymity at the Fore

Professor Anubhuti Yadav, head of the New Media Department at Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, emphasised “how Reddit has been able to achieve what other platforms couldn’t: a true sense of community and anonymity."

Yadav said that Reddit gives the users a host of communities to choose from, with each of the communities possessing a reward-based backbone. These rewards come from posting on a thread or commenting on pre-existing posts.

Upvotes, the most popular of these rewards, adds to the credibility of a user, making them more visible.

These active users are also rewarded with personalised taglines and 'awards,' further incentivising them to post and comment more. For the most part, people are free to upload any sort of content under an anonymous alias with the platform stepping in only when push comes to shove, Yadav added.

Almost all the moderators of r/India The Quint spoke to agreed on anonymity being the bane of the well-meaning moderators on the platform, so much so that users on Reddit were encouraged by the general environment of the platform to adopt a non-recognisable identity.

The administration of Reddit, while not being very receptive to the reports on non-English content, is known to take cognisance of such reports in the English medium, albeit sporadically.

In the past, allegations have also been levelled, by different communities, on Reddit outsourcing the report handling to smaller third-parties, as opposed to developing a self-check mechanism.

The priority order of what is and isn’t objectionable in Reddit’s framework is also unclear.

Away From the Public Discourse

Despite being in use for so long, Reddit has largely stayed out of the discourse on social media in India.

Akriti Gaur, a resident fellow in the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School, points out that “Facebook and Twitter are used in a wide variety of ways by users — consumption of news, daily conversations, publishing, and sharing media, among others. This leads to wider, and, perhaps, more visible user engagement as compared to Reddit. Further, the conversations around platform accountability in India are mostly ruled over by the speech harms arising out of Facebook.”

The 'front page of the Internet', however, as a moderator mentioned, is only a mirror to the larger world out there, more so than Facebook or Twitter.

“When mods raise issues on content that seems to be obvious hate content, shared and discussed in other communities and it's not actioned, there is not much more we can do. Who knows, maybe Reddit doesn't think this is hate speech, maybe Reddit doesn't have the bandwidth, who knows – we can only speculate,” he added.

The Quint reached out to Reddit for a comment, but didn't receive any response. The article will be updated as and when they respond.