Condé Nast's Reddit Still Filled with Rape, Nudity and Dead Babies

Reddit, an online platform owned by Condé Nast, continues to be flooded with threads dedicated to dead babies, rape and violence, despite earlier reports of excessive controversial content on the site.

Some of the subreddits in question include /r/picsofdeadkids  and /r/beatingwomen.

Condé Nast, which acquired Reddit back in 2006, publishes leading magazines including Wired, The New Yorker and Vogue.

In regards to the subreddit /r/picsofdeadkids, "That's obviously a reddit that is very offensive to a lot of people and those images are things I can't look at," Reddit General Manager Erik Martin tells LAUNCH. "They're really terrible images, but those images themselves, what most of them are are autopsy photos. These are medical photos for the most part."

Reddit administrators intervene if something is illegal, otherwise, it's left up to the moderator, Erik says (whoever creates a subreddit automatically becomes the moderator). Also, Erik points out that these controversial threads are tagged "Not Safe For Work" (NSFW) and are age-gated, meaning that users must confirm that they are at least 18 years or older.

"The only way you'll see it is if you go directly to /r/picsofdeadkids or if you sign up and are logged in and subscribe to it," Erik says. "A general person browsing Reddit would not see it."

On Wednesday, Reddit administrators banned the subreddit /r/jailbait, which featured controversial pictures of "jailbait." While some Reddit users accused the site of censorship, Erik says that a power struggle between moderators led to the removal of the subreddit and not censorship.

"We are a free speech site," Erik says. "We don't want to be in a position of deciding what is and isn't offensive, nor would we be capable of deciding what's offensive and what's not."

Reddit has 19M unique visitors monthly, according to Google Ad Planner statistics. The reddit with the most unique visits is /r/reddit.com with more than 3.6M per month, followed by /r/AskReddit with more than 3.4M per month.

The most popular NSFW subreddit, /r/gonewild, ranks 11th on the overall list with over 737K unique visits a month, according to Reddit data. It features numerous images of naked women, ranging from a "naughty intern" to a 30-year-old wife looking for "some sexy feedback."

"Compared to a lot of things online, [/r/gonewild] gets a significant amount of traffic," Erik says. "It's a fair amount of traffic but it's not a big chunk for us."

Erik says that Reddit started as a way for people to share news but has evolved as the community sees fit. There are subreddits dedicated to videos that are safe for children, but also subreddits that are not safe for children or anyone, Erik says.

"It's impressive that people are passionate enough about Reddit to be sharing naked pictures of themselves," Erik says. "It's not something we anticipated but it is its own community. It's a very interesting and kind of unique space."


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