Reddit.com has compiled a list of banned domains that reportedly are secret. The site is a user-contributed link aggregator and the list includes reputable sites such as Business Week, PhysOrg, The Atlantic and ScienceDaily. A user and moderator for Reddit, violentacrez, wrote a post titled, “Reddit is now banning entire high-quality domains, using an unpublished list.” In that post it says, “reddit admins enabled a new feature where links from domains on a secret list cannot be posted, even by moderators, even in their own reddits.”
Reddit claims to be all about online transparency and democracy but this act of censorship has caused a wave of opposition that continues to grow rapidly. An admin from reddit, spladug, wrote:
“Some domains are not allowed on any part of reddit because they are spammy, malicious, or involved in cheating shenanigans. Attempting to submit a link to one of these domains will now fail with an informative error message.
We’re initially rolling this out for link shorteners which have long been discouraged on reddit as they conceal the true destination of the link.”
A major reason why the censorship is taking place is the fact that the staff at reddit does not view this action as censorship. The domains banned by reddit include sites that reddit users have been accused of ‘gaming the system’ with because they have financial ties to them or they are ‘spamming.’ The GM for reddit, Erik Martin said, “You can’t have democracy if people can rig the ballot box.”