It’s with a heavy heart that I have to say Reddit suspended my account, False1512, permanently. Unfortunately, I will not be able to reach as many students because of this, but I will continue to offer my services. For a full explanation, please keep reading. If you’re not very familiar with Reddit, some terminology may seem foreign and that’s okay, Google is your friend!
Please note that I did not get an official explanation from Reddit, so report on this is the best explanation from the facts I know to be true or have been reported from trustworthy, but not official sources. So any analysis on reasoning is educated conjecture, but may not be the true reason. If Reddit ever responds to my requests, I will surely update this post.
Firstly, Reddit did not like my account. We all know that large social networks do censor their users to preserve their image. It is well within their legal right and in some cases justifiable (i.e. hate speech). Other times, it can be more of a grey area depending on your views, cultural perception, experiences, etc. This happened to Alex Jones. In my case, I had advocated for communities to toggle NSFW in order to cut Reddit out of some ad revenue according to their policy. This was to solve the problem of ‘promoted’ posts that look very similar to real content which is a horrible thing for a website to do.
Second, I had received a temporary suspension before. The reason was totally unrelated to my permanent one, but it does count as a strike against me. For a research project I was doing for someone, I constructed 30 bot accounts and a separate subreddit and followed all the rules of Reddit’s security team. I set out to prove how easy it was to manipulate other users temporarily by using “influencer’s.” To prevent real harm, I made the subreddit private and only allowed view access to a focus group. Unfortunately, Reddit’s inquiry team (who I informed of the experiment) did not communicate with the security team. However, once I verified all the info with the security team, they unsuspended me before my temporary suspension was even over. I do not know if this contributed at all to the permanent one, but it may have.
Thirdly, I had received many DMCA (Digital Media Copyright Act) requests from Chegg to remove my content from Reddit. Even though Chegg’s legal standing was very iffy, Reddit removed the content out of Liticaphobia (fear of lawsuits). It’s very reasonable as a large company. Google, Facebook, etc. all have similarly overly-cautious processes. At least a dozen of my posts were taken down which I believe was another strike on my record.
Finally, Reddit did not like a post I approved on one of my subreddits (r/redditbay was a fantastic sub but I’m not sure about the direction it is heading in now). Reddit sent modmail to my sub warning me that approving a post selling likes and followers on Instagram. I would’ve happily removed the post at their request because it is their website after all. However, I was extremely ill at the time and had no capability of using a phone, tablet, computer, or any other device in my condition. Once I got back to healthy enough, I worked from the hospital bed to appease my customers and before I had a chance to look through modmail, I was suspended. According to another moderator of the subreddit, they threatened to suspend me over it. And later, they did.
TL;DR: Reddit suspended me for approving a post against their content policy. I was given a warning but was too sick to act on it before I lost everything. I have attempted to contact Reddit and have received no response.
