The social news site announced that it would be banning subforums dedicated to a single topic, if those allow the communities to harass people when moderators don’t take action. Reddit clarified that the company is banning behavior, not ideas.

5 subforums were banned: 2 dedicated to hating overweight people; 2 targeting the gaming community; and the one with racist ideas. All of them were fairly small threads: the largest had about 5,000 subscribers.

The statement was published to the r/announcements subreddit, clarifying that any subforums can exist so long as they did not actively harass or bully people. It should be noted that subreddits are very insular communities, full of in-jokes and stories, but they can contain material on the edge of free speech. Actually, in the past some of them have been banned for organizing unauthorized activity or distributing illegal content. Apparently, racism, misogyny, and other kinds of hate speech will still be present on Reddit, if they don’t involve direct harassment of individual. However, this decision of the site operators frustrated some of its users.

In the meantime, it turned out that Reddit moderators would not target subforums devoted to making fun of them personally. A good example of this may be Pao’s pursuit of legal action against ex-employers at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (a lawsuit she lost), which together with her recent ascendancy at Reddit has made her the target of criticism including on subforums devoted to maligning her. In response, Pao and others remained unintimidated. While saying that she does not always agree with the material published and views expressed on Reddit, she does recognize the right of people to express their views.