Reddit’s World News moderators have censored a story about a German woman who didn’t report her rape due of fear of inciting “racism against refugees” while allowing the posting of a story about a young girl lying about about a refugee sex attack.
The story of the German activist and leader of left wing German youth movement Solid lying about the identities of the men who raped her was reported on by The Washington Times. The article was removed from /r/WorldNews under the belief that it did not constitute worldwide news and was marked as “local news”. ‘
However, a story about police claiming a young 13 year old girl lied about her sexual assault at a swimming pool in Austria, which resulted in a ban on asylum seekers, apparently constitutes world news and has been allowed to remain on the subreddit.
Archived versions of the thread relating to the rape of the German activist show the comments section being critical of her decision to lie about her rape to protect her political agenda. The highest rated comment before the thread was deleted was posted by user /u/Rambo1stBlood who said “You really have to be an absolute waste of a human being to lie about being raped. There is no bigger insult to victims of actual rape than doing shit like this”.
This is far from the first time that mods of /r/News or /r/WorldNews have been accused of censorship, particularly in relation to Islam or migrants in Europe. Following the Orlando shootings at Pulse nightclub, /r/News moderators deleted threads about the shooting as they seemed to believe the comments contained islamophobic speech. Archiving sites however show that one of the main comments deleted was actually giving users information on how to donate blood.
Reddit users are becoming more aware of the censorship that has become common on their website, communities like the anti-censorship gaming hub /r/KotakuInAction regularly point out these incidents and entire subreddits have been created dedicated to monitoring censorship on the website.
It’s quite clear at this stage that moderators of /r/WorldNews and /r/News have a particular agenda that they’re attempting to push. A liberal narrative won’t allow for any news stories, no matter how true they may be, that paint migrants or Islam in a negative light.
Reddit users, however, are becoming aware of this fact and taking steps to bring these news stories and their subsequent censorship to light.
Lucas Nolan is a Journalism and Media student at Dublin Business School and a regular contributor to Breitbart Tech. He can be contacted via Twitter here: @LucasNolan_
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