Reddit Failed to Remove Apparent Suicide Video For 9 Hours Before it Went Viral
A video depicting a man appearing to take his own life went viral on Reddit after a link to it was left on the social media platform throughout most of Thursday morning — potentially allowing millions of daily users to view the graphic footage.
Site moderators only removed the apparent suicide video after it made headlines and reached the top of r/Drama, a popular subreddit with over 50,000 subscribers. The controversy arrives a time when Reddit is under fire for its infamous issues with content moderation.
The video — first reported by the tech and science site Motherboard — breaks the platform’s link posting rules, which prohibits “content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people.” Motherboard’s Managing Editor Emanuel Maiberg reported it was originally uploaded to YouTube, before being removed almost immediately and later posted to another video platform, Sendvid.
The authenticity of the video could not be immediately confirmed.
CEO Steve Huffman admitted Reddit has had issues quickly removing content that breaks its own rules, vowing to confront the problem in November of last year. Reddit has been shutting down a bounty of subreddits and threads known to spread hateful and violent content in recent weeks.
Other social media platforms have announced major plans to take action against the spread of inappropriate content online, with Facebook and YouTube hiring content moderators and ramping up their rapid response efforts.
“For a while, we called ourselves the front page of the Internet,” Huffman said about Reddit in the March 19 issue of The New Yorker. “These days, I tend to say that we’re a place for open and honest conversations — ‘open and honest’ meaning authentic, meaning messy, meaning the best and worst and realest and weirdest parts of humanity.”
Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is suffering from suicidal thoughts or self-harm please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255.
[image via screengrab]
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