Another example is a 2022 study revealing an abundance of unsourced and potentially harmful medical advice for urinary tract infections, such as suggesting fasting as a UTI cure. A 2021 letter from the United States Senate to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman expressed concern about the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on the platform.

Much attention has been focused to the issue of potentially harmful medical misinformation. Reddit communities exhibit the echo chamber effect, in which repeated unsourced statements come to be accepted among the community as fact, leading to distorted worldviews among users. It has been suggested that those who use Reddit should exercise caution in taking user-created unsourced content as fact. Misinformationĭue to Reddit's decentralized moderation, user anonymity, and lack of fact-checking systems, the platform is highly prone to spreading misinformation and disinformation. Since 2018, subreddits are allowed to appeal their quarantine. In addition, quarantined subreddits do not appear in non-subscription based (aggregate) feeds such as r/all in order to prevent accidental viewing, do not generate revenue, and their user count is not visible. Visiting or joining a quarantined subreddit requires bypassing a warning prompt. In 2015, Reddit introduced a quarantine policy to make visiting certain subreddits more difficult. Adrian Chen wrote a Gawker exposé of one of the subreddit's moderators and identified the person behind the account, starting discussion in the media about the ethics of anonymity and outing on the Internet. In 2012, the subreddit r/Creepshots received major backlash due to being a subreddit for sharing suggestive or revealing photos of women taken without their awareness or consent.

After commenters were seen asking for nude photos of underage girls, and under significant external scrutiny, Reddit shut down r/jailbait. Reddit rose to infamy in October 2011, when a report by CNN showed that Reddit was harboring the r/jailbait community, which was devoted to sharing suggestive or revealing photos of underage girls. In 2008, subreddit creation was opened to all users. Subreddits were created later, but could only initially be created by Reddit administrators. When Reddit was founded in 2005, there was only one shared space for all links, and subreddits did not exist. Controversial Reddit communities sometimes receive significant media coverage. List of known controversial communities on RedditĬontroversial Reddit communities are communities on the social news site Reddit (known as 'subreddits'), often devoted to explicit, violent, or hateful material, that have been the topic of controversy.

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