Written by Gunay Hilal Aygun   

Following the shocking mass-shooting in a Charleston Black Church that left nine African-Americans dead, a number of racist fan pages appeared on the Internet dedicated to 21-year-old Dylann Roof, the suspected perpetrator of the massacre. Such hate-promoting pages were almost immediately shut down by the service providers or social media platforms they were created on. However, a Reddit user, who goes by the nickname "rahowa1488" with a racially offensive label (N…s Aren’t Human), managed to keep their group that they describe as “The only fan club for Dylann Storm Roof on Reddit,” for two months now. “An Unlikely Hero” the user’s first post read, along with a picture of the mass murderer giving a cold look to the camera. “Our hero, lookin’ cool” another message accompanies Roof’s infamous picture, in which he is holding up a Confederate flag.

The Reddit user even argued that Roof should be “found innocent due to this technicality: The definition of murder is the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. I believe all of his targets were black. Therefore they are not human beings. Accordingly, Dylann did not commit murder. At the very worst, it was misdemeanor animal abuse.” In response to his/her own question “If you had to pick three people for your team in the Zombie Apocalypse, who would you pick?” the Reddit user said “I'd go with Dylann Roof, Anders Breivik, and George Zimmerman. Three of my top heroes, all good with guns, all survivalists. I think we'll make it through.”

Despite receiving no response from other Reddit users except for a denouncing comment, the person who started the group did not give up and posted another message last week, asking whether anyone has pictures of the black people “that Dylann Roof took out on the Day of the Cleansing.” The person added he wanted to post the pictures to another Reddit group, opened for sharing photographs of “dead black people” and had already been banned by the Reddit for violating the website’s content policy. However, the “Dylan Roof Fan Club” currently does not seem to be violating any terms of Reddit.

In fact, this is only one example of Reddit’s high tolerance to hate speech, which has led to the recent Twitter campaign #DumpReddit, where people are called for signing a petition entitled “Don’t fund the next Dylann Roof: Dump Reddit!” started on “iam.colorofchange.org.” Having gathered over 53,000 signatures in a month, the petitioners call on Reddit advertisers to withdraw their ads from the website. “Online hate speech leads to violence in the real world,” the petition says, citing the case of Roof, who was encouraged to carry out a mass killing reportedly after engaging in various websites that incite racial hatred.


Reddit on August 5 banned a number of controversial forums such as /r/Rapingwomen and /r/Coontown, following public criticism. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman explained the reason of the ban in his announcement as such communities “existing solely to annoy other Redditors.” Along with the early August statement, Huffman updated the Reddit criteria for banning content or an entire subreddit as: illegality, involuntary pornography, encouraging or inciting violence, threatening, harassing or bullying, or encouraging others to do so, personal and confidential information, impersonating someone in a misleading or deceptive manner and spam.

#DumpReddit campaigners accuse Huffman of downplaying the racist content on the website by saying it is just a cause of “annoyance.” They argue that despite banning CoonTown, “Reddit didn’t articulate a clear hate speech policy and made no moves to stop the anti-black racism that dominates the site.” According to the petition, Reddit still hosts tens of thousands of white nationalists and other racist activists in the many subreddits that remain. Reddit has even began outpacing the notorious white supremacist organization Stormfront in terms of subscriber growth and page views, the petition says, adding that a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center showed “more time spent on hate websites was a common characteristic of those who went on to kill.”