Reddit pulls plug on /r/TheFappening, but the reason why might surprise you
More than a week after it was first created, Reddit officials shut down /r/TheFappening, the popular but controversial subreddit that served as the go-to location for the hundreds of leaked photographs of celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and others. The forum wasn’t shut down over objectionable content, according to Reddit administrators, but because it violated the site’s rules.
Reddit appears to be okay with publishing the content, which was taken from the cloud accounts without the celebrities’ permission. On Saturday, CEO Yishan Wong said that free speech is a key tenet for the company.
“We uphold the ideal of free speech on [Reddit] as much as possible not because we are legally bound to, but because we believe that you—the user—has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that is your responsibility to do so,” Wong wrote.
Moments after the blog post was published, however, it was amended to inform that Reddit had shut down /r/TheFappening, a move that seemed to contravene Wong’s and Reddit’s stance on free speech. A day later, Reddit systems administrator Jason Harvey explained in a lengthy note that the administrators were forced to shut the down the subreddit because they were receiving numerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices. Under the DMCA, sites are legally required to remove content that’s been published without the copyright owner’s permission. Once the photographs were removed, however, users would re-upload them, causing what Harvey called “a game of whack-a-mole.”