Social Justice Warriors once again took it upon themselves to attack a company that isn’t aligned with their values after a Reddit AMA with Imgur’s creator flared up some old grievances.
A rival image hosting service to Imgur, called Slimgur, was taken offline after it was inundated with uploads of pornographic images of children following the AMA with Alan Schaaf on October 21st.
The Slimgur image-hosting service was set up in the aftermath of Imgur repeatedly removing images from the r/fatpeoplehate subreddit. In retaliation, the moderators of that subreddit posted photographs, taken from the Imgur About page, in their sidebar pointing out that many of the company’s staff were overweight themselves. This, along with then Reddit CEO Ellen Pao making a pledge to commit to “safe spaces” on the site, saw the subreddit banned and the moderators shadowbanned. Any attempt to revive the subreddit was shut down instantly. When it was shut down, the subreddit was in the top ten active subreddits on the site.
At the time, Schaaf had reached out to the subreddit in a bid to try and quell hostilities. In a private message sent to the moderators. he claimed that the subreddit was not being singled out and cited their terms of service as forbidding the images from the subreddit being submitted to the community. As long as the images being submitted weren’t published to the Imgur community it was claimed the site would still host them without incident.
Many pointed out the financial ties between Imgur and Reddit, with Reddit having made a monetary contribution to the site’s funding in April 2014. The service was originally conceived as a “gift to the Reddit community” when it was launched in February of 2009. It is also worth noting that Slimgur links were set to be auto-filtered if posted to Reddit, meaning they had to be manually approved by moderators. This was never publicly communicated.
During the AMA many people brought up the banning of r/fatpeoplehate and Imgur’s role in it. Multiple comments were deleted by Reddit moderators, however one of the few that remained was addressed by Schaaf. He responded by saying, “[I] don’t know too much about it specifically,” adding, “aside from the fact that our employees were being harassed and that was a huge bummer. I only found out about it after the fact, and then before I knew it the subreddit was banned.”
When asked to clarify what constituted harassment, Schaaf responded, “Our employees were receiving hate email addressed personally to them with photoshopped pictures of hateful things. They also posted our employees pictures in their sidebar.” No evidence of individual harassment has ever been publicly provided by Imgur to substantiate these claims. Equally, Reddit didn’t ever publicly acknowledge that the images posted on the sidebar contributed towards the banning of the subreddit, but based on the comments from Schaaf and his assertion that hosting already public images is “harassment,” it’s hard to believe the pictures didn’t play a part.
In the thread several users turned up to speak out against the banning of the subreddit and once again raise concerns about Reddit’s commitment to free speech. A Reddit user called BigBonesDontJiggle, who based on their name was most likely a frequenter of that subreddit, posted the following in response:
The only thing that FPH did was post this photo of Imgur being fat.
This was in response to Imgur actively censoring their FPH content while leaving far more vile stuff up like hardcore white supremacy stuff, but obviously when you’re nearly all fat and white the FPH stuff seems worse if you’re only interested in yourself.
No doxxing, no organised harassment, just a photo of them from their own about page. Any other harassment that occurred would have been individual efforts and certainly wasn’t organised through FPH and any attempts to do so would have been instantly deleted.
The mods followed the anti-doxxing/anti-brigading rules far more strictly than a lot subreddits do. If you’re ashamed of how fat you all are and don’t want a photo of you all being fat in the public domain, maybe don’t put that photo in the about page of your own website in future. Just a thought.
In the resulting arguments about whether or not the banning of the subreddit was fair, several people attacked those who championed FPH for “body shaming,” among many other newly invented SJW crimes. Those speaking out against the ban were downvoted and subject to abuse of their own.
However, it didn’t end there. With talk of the Slimgur service being brought up and argued about between advocates of free speech and social justice warriors on Reddit, coincidentally indecent images of children were uploaded en masse to the service. After links were posted in the AMA, the service received a massive influx of traffic that the servers couldn’t cope with. When the site didn’t return, the creator of Slimgur contacted his hosting service. He was told on Friday 23rd October that the site was offline due to multiple reports of child pornography being uploaded.
Breitbart reached out to the creator, who calls himself Technician90, who explained the situation to us:
Around 3PM on Friday I received an email from the Arvixe hosting company that my site had illicit images of children on it and my account would be terminated and that I would not be given any access to the site whatsoever and no backups would be provided.
My site has always been very closely affiliated with the “fat people hate” community. In fact it was created as a direct result of the censorship of FPH content on imgur. This obviously makes me a target because the FPH community is very polarizing and people either fall into one of two camps “free speech” or “safe-space.”
The site was back up and running within a few days of the attack, however they had to move to a new domain, sli.mg.
“Arvixe has locked our slimgur.com domain and slimgr.com domain,” he continued. “They are not making the transfer easy. When they terminated the account they have stopped forwarding emails from the registrant email to my personal inbox and I cannot confirm a transfer to a new domain registrar. I really just want to stop doing business with them but for some reason they’re making it incredibly difficult to sever ties.”
The Slimgur community is now mostly based over on Reddit rival voat.co, which has reiterated its commitment to free speech on multiple occasions. Voat can also have sympathy with the plight of Slimgur after they too were taken down for being falsely reported for hosting child pornography by SJWs.
“I’m fortunate that my community is very supportive and that I can easily reach them through the voat forum,” concluded Technician90. “Without that avenue of communication this would almost certainly have been a death-blow to my operation.”
The defiant relaunch announcement of Slimgur can be read over on Voat.
Follow Richard Lewis on Twitter @RLewisReports.