Reddit Bans 'Men Going Their Own Way' Forums for Violating Hate Speech Rules

Reddit banned the notoriously anti-feminist "Men Going Their Own Way" subreddit forum Tuesday, as well as their backup forum, Men Going Their Own Way 2, for violating rules about inciting violence or promoting hate.

After roughly a decade of Reddit user complaints against the group for inciting violence or promoting hate, the MGTOW group, which has been called "the toxic male separatist movement," was banned, leaving some people to wonder, what took so long?

"Reddit's site-wide policies explicitly prohibit content that incites violence or promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability. The subreddit in question was banned in accordance with these policies," a Reddit spokesperson wrote in an email to Newsweek.

Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOW, whose members many say have joked about violence against women and rape for years, has been connected with the online "manosphere," a sub-culture group made up of mostly "men's rights activists" and "incels," short for involuntary celibates, who want revenge, sometimes violent revenge, against the women they believe wield sexual power in society.

A now widely-circulated January 2020 scholarly report written by a group of computer scientists framed the "manosphere" as a movement growing in troubling ways, showing how it has been concretely associated with acts of domestic terrorism.

This report showed that the MGTOW group specifically had been linked to multiple occurrences of "online harassment and real-world violence." It pointed to a frequent visitor to the MGTOW community: Christopher Hasson, a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant, and a self-identified "White Nationalist" who was sentenced to 13 years in prison for stockpiling unregistered gun silencers, stockpiling weapons as an addict of a controlled substance, and possession of controlled substances.

Prosecutors said his computer search history was riddled with phrases like "kill as many people as possible," and "killing school," as well as bomb-making guides, manifestos of mass-bombers, and "tens of thousands" of visits to the MGTOW subreddit, according to a report from the Department of Homeland Security.

After this article came out, Reddit placed the MGTOW group "under quarantine," according to The Daily Dot.

That means the subreddit wouldn't appear in searches, recommendations, and would show a warning before one could enter. Still, the group was allowed to stay while it continued to violate Reddit's clearly stated policies on promoting hate.

The Reddit spokesperson declined to comment further when repeatedly asked why MGTOW was only just being banned after having reportedly violated these stated policies over a period of several years.