Petition is successful with 3,589 signatures
To: Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon/Donald Katz, CEO of Audible.com
Don't Fund the Next Dylann Roof: Dump Reddit!
This campaign has ended.
Dear Messrs. Bezos and Katz,
Please make a public commitment to cancel your advertising on Reddit as soon as possible. Your advertising dollars help the site maintain its echo chambers of dangerous white supremacist ideology, and having the support of mainstream advertisers like you validates both Reddit and the hate speech it hosts.
Why is this important?
Online hate speech leads to violence in the real world.
Just last month, nine people were killed as they worshipped at a historically black church Charleston, South Carolina. The young man who murdered them did so as a result of his indoctrination by various websites espousing racial hatred. The website Stormfront has already been linked to more than 100 murders. Reddit's largest "subreddit," or forum, dedicated to anti-Black racism is one of its fastest growing, and is on track to surpass Stormfront in traffic this summer (if it hasn't already). It is only a matter of time before Reddit's white supremacists begin taking violent action as well.
Reddit validates hate speech by giving it space on one of the largest, best-known websites on the web. White supremacist groups have also recognized the site as a fertile breeding ground for their ideologies, and have provided a template for using Reddit to recruit new blood to their cause. The "containment" strategy that Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced earlier this month is not keeping hate contained; racist content shows up all over the site, and subscribers to hate subreddits on Reddit continue to harass other users, particularly users on Black-interest subreddits.
Reddit has repeatedly shown that it will not act to protect women or people of color without public and financial pressure to do so. Child porn and other forms of non-consensual pornography, such as revenge porn, were only recently banned, and only after a barrage of negative media attention and celebrity involvement. Despite publicly announcing a crack down on subreddits that harass others and promote violence, Reddit continues to look the other way as subscribers to its racist subreddits harass users of color, celebrate violence against black and Jewish people, and call for racial holy war.
Reddit needs to see that they cannot hide their hate problem; if they do not address it head on, their advertisers will face a consumer backlash that will force them to #DumpReddit.