Posts that were deleted from /r/news.
If you browsed Reddit Sunday, you would have noticed that the top news on one of the United States’s largest websites wasn’t the mass shooting that left at least 50 people dead in a gay nightclub in Orlando. Instead, the community’s attention was focused on how moderators of the site’s /r/news subreddit handled the event. Once again, discussion and information dissemination was drowned out by Reddit’s internal drama.
As you might expect, there’s a lot of history and layers to all of this, so I’ll just give you the topline notes: In the hours after the Orlando mass shooting was reported, moderators at /r/news banned comments in the most popular thread about the shooting, then removed many additional links to other news reports about the story. The moderating team eventually created a “mega thread” to discuss the shooting, but deleted thousands of comments in it and banned many of the users who posted in it.
Screenshots show that people were banned or muted from the subreddit for posting links with new information and some people were also banned for posting information about where people could donate blood to the victims. One of the /r/news mods responded to one commenter with “kill yourself,” for good measure.