(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons )

 

BY SAMANTHA KUBOTA

ANCHOR TOM MARTIN


The popular user-generated, content aggregation website Reddit, is bowing to public pressure.
Reddit agreed Sunday to ban the posting of suggestive or sexually exploitative images of children.

Gawker reports "The change comes after Reddit was faced with ... outcry over the pedophile subsections that users kept creating on the site, with administrators' passive consent. This time, it was "preteen_girls," which featured images of 11 year-old girls in bikinis.”


The Daily Dot reports   “Within hours administrators shut down the section and announced a major policy change on the company blog that said “suggestive or sexual content featuring minors” is now explicitly banned from the site.”

In the past, Reddit has actually avoided shutting down subsections of the site that often provoked public disgust. But that began changing a bit after CNN’s Anderson Cooper, did a story last September, criticizing Reddit’s lack of moderation in a different subsection. That section, known as “jailbait,” was shut down soon thereafter.

“What’s more, Reddit is totally uninterested in stopping them, even though it boasts on it’s corporate blog the good it’s doing for the world.”

New York magazine notes that one of reddit’s co-founders defended the site after Cooper’s attack. The magazine paraphrases him, saying  “...Reddit ‘doesn't host’ the material, that the website is merely a repository of links.”

But this time around, things were different. The Daily What says. ..  “The new ban may have been inspired by a campaign started on the SomethingAwful forums, encouraging SA members to contact media outlets about Reddit ‘actively trading child pornography.’”

The Observer mentions  “Reddit’s new policy–as stated–appears to be the site administrators’ most aggressive effort to address the issue so far.”

But it wasn’t an easy decision for the site administrators. In the blogpost that announced the change , Reddit Admin say  “We understand that this might make some of you worried about the slippery slope from banning one specific type of content to banning other types of content … However, child pornography is a toxic and unique case for Internet communities, and we're protecting Reddit's ability to operate by removing this threat.”

Monday night, only 51 percent of redditors “voted up” the blog post announcing the change.