Reddit hasn't banned a racist group supporting Dylann Roof

Reddit r/coontown
(Image credit: Screenshot/Reddit)

People are tweeting concern and threatening to boycott Reddit until they shut down r/coontown, a racist subgroup of about 15,000 people. Users in the group, created last year, have recently posted endorsements of suspected Charleston shooter Dylann Roof and his purported white supremacist manifesto discovered Saturday, after Roof allegedly fatally shot nine people in a historically black church Wednesday.

Earlier this month, Reddit banned a number of groups for harassing people, but not r/coontown.

"We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don't take action," Reddit's statement on the bans read. "We're banning behavior, not ideas."

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Reddit has not yet commented specifically on complaints about r/coontown.

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Julie Kliegman

Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.