First YouTube purged gun videos and now Reddit is following suit:
Reddit’s bid to clean up its communities now includes what those communities trade. The social site has updated its policies to ban the trade of firearms, explosives, drugs (including alcohol and tobacco), services with “physical sexual contact,” stolen goods, personal info and counterfeits. Accordingly, Reddit has shut down numerous subreddits that either directly traded in these goods or were clearly meant to enable those exchanges, including r/gunsforsale, r/stealing (yes, it existed) and r/darknetmarkets.
One of the victims of this policy change was the great /r/gundeals subreddit. /r/gundeals was one of the best aggregators of firearm related deals on the Internet and while its content didn’t technically run afoul with the letter of Reddit’s new policies, it did run afoul with the spirit of Reddit’s new policies, which was to further tighten the noose around the site’s gun owners’ necks.
Once again gun owners are being taught a lesson about the risks of moving firearm related content to websites owned and operated by individuals who are opposed to gun rights. Hopefully the lesson will be learned and content will return to websites that are owned and operated by advocates for gun rights.