The Internet v Racism: How Reddit Mods 'Nuke' Hate Speech Against Roma

04 October 2023

By Alexandru Ghita

Reddit is a site known for its multitude of “subreddits” dedicated to just about every sort of subject possible: interesting videos, hobbies, TV shows etc. There are even subreddits for specific countries, one of which is r/Romania, dedicated to the country as a whole and useful for anyone visiting or curious about current news and discussion of Romanian issues with others.

Anyone familiar with country-specific subreddits may notice a certain kind of person who appears in the comments when a Romani person (or just someone who looks Romani) is the subject of the post. This type of person (as shown in the comments below) is usually not in any way concerned with attempts at humour but use straight-up derogatory remarks.

A good example of this is under a post entitled “Romanian lady accused of stealing a phone in the UK, despite not looking like the type to do such a thing”. The post contains a video of a lady crying with a caption explaining the situation. The comments, which were removed but can be seen by using a third-party application, say the following statements at her expense:

“One of the worst ideas in our recent history was for us to agree on calling Gypsies ‘Romani people’. They are not Romani, they are Gypsies. It’s not as derogatory a term as “Vlach” is (an archaic word for a Romanian).”

This comment has 138 points, meaning enough people agreed to not only let it have a positive score, but also give it half of the sum of those that upvoted (the equivalent of leaving a like) the post this is replying to. The comments also went on to argue in favour of using the word and the fact it is in the Romanian dictionary. One of the commentors noted that “if they say it’s insulting, then it is insulting and we shouldn’t use it”, which got -28 points, meaning it got a negative score overall (when the dislikes are more numerous than the likes).

A much more popular post, entitled “News Media in the UK” has received 4000 upvotes and one award (a perk given by a user, worth a certain number of Reddit Coins). The post captions a news article title from the UK which refers to the arrest of a Romanian national who was imprisoned shortly after stealing from a shop. The man in question appears to be a Romani person, so a lot of the comments refer to this fact and even make sarcastic references to how “Romanian” he looks. For example, one user comments: “I don’t think they need to show a photo for us to imagine this “Romanian” :)” with one reply saying, “Watch out, you are triggering the mods”. The replies to this also go on to use stereotypes about Romani people living in Romania, even going as far as to insult the moderators. Any comments trying to debate the racists was downvoted until they scored negative points.

The reply “Watch out, you are triggering the mods” needs a bit of context. On r/Romania, the moderators do actually do a good job of dealing with these comments (which is why a third-party app was needed to even see them). The practice of censoring forums for hate speech has given these mods a reputation for “nuking” (mass-deleting of comments) whenever someone says anything which goes against the rule of the subreddit.

Not only does Reddit have a policy against racism (it even being the first rule in their content policy) but the moderators of r/Romania make efforts to eliminate many of these discussions from ever even happening. They do this by censoring language which most platforms would not consider hate speech, merely racist speech. All subreddits must adhere to the general Reddit content policy, but also may have their own rules in addition. Moderators on r/Romania may moderate their own subreddit as they choose, which includes removing racist content and comments. This happens on r/Romania until a situation has arisen where the racists are wary that their comments will be swiftly deleted, and they will be removed from the page entirely. This leads to ‘dog-whistle’ comments to avoid ‘triggering the mods’.

Despite how widespread the issue of racism online can be, Reddit shows that it is possible to combat this problem. The comments appearing on r/Romania, a subreddit based on the country of the same name where many Roma reside, shows that racism is still a serious problem but that it doesn’t have to be welcomed online. At the moment, people are aware not to step out of line on this part of the platform and usually talk about politics or current subjects instead of demeaning an entire ethnicity. The community moderation of subreddits is what allows this to happen. When allowed to police their own community for hate speech, people surprisingly do a pretty good job. Other social media platforms, news pages, and forums could learn from this model and help make the internet a better place for Romani people.

This article was written by one of our Roma Rights Defenders as part of the ‘ERRC Newsroom’ project, bringing together Romani and non-Romani activists with an interest in journalism and human rights. The project provides volunteers with mentoring, copy-editing, training, and opportunities to pitch articles on Roma Rights issues for publication on ERRC News. If you are interested in pitching an article to ERRC News, or joining this volunteer project, send an email to news@errc.org.

 

This work was funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Correction: This article was amended to correct a technical note on how awards are granted on r/Romania. The previous version stated that such awards were granted by a moderator. Whilst Reddit did allow communities to set-up 'moderator only' awards, r/Romania has never made use of that functionality. The award given on this particular post did not in any way represent a reaction from the moderating team of r/Romania. This functionality has since been been disabled (from September 2023) and all award icons have been removed.