Reddit, the link-sharing and discussion board network known for its influence on online meme culture, has blacklisted one of the first online organizing hubs for pushback against wokeness, the “Tumblr In Action” board, as well as its sister community, “Social Justice in Action.”
Reddit is a network made up of user-run message boards. Any user can create a new message board around a new topic, and appoint volunteer moderates to enforce Reddit’s sitewide rules and the particular rules of the message board. The boards are called “subreddits.”
Tumblr In Action was created in the early 2010s, based on a premise similar to the Twitter account Libs Of TikTok. Reddit users would browse the blogging network Tumblr, which was then infamous for hosting content from the early woke left, and repost the content on Reddit.
In those days, the term “woke” was not in wide usage. The budding movement of far-left activists who pushed pronouns, censorship, and “gender fluidity” were generally referred to as “social justice warriors.”
Tumblr In Action became one of the first organizing hubs for millennials who were amused, exasperated, or alarmed by the rising tide of social justice politics, with its seeming disregard for reality and obsession with censoring the internet, including Reddit. The subreddit quickly accumulated hundreds of thousands of subscribers. At the time of its blacklisting by Reddit, it had over 450,000.
Little is known about the founder of the subreddit, who handed control of Tumblr In Action to new moderators and deleted his Reddit account around eight years ago.
Despite the founder’s departure, Tumblr In Action continued to have a wide influence on the pushback against early 2010s wokeness, spawning various spinoff subreddits including Social Justice in Action, which was also banned by Reddit this week.
Perhaps the most influential of those spinoffs is Kotaku in Action, which has, so far, survived Reddit’s purges and remains active.
Kotaku in Action was set up in 2014 as an organizing hub for the GamerGate movement, one of the most effective and impactful campaigns against wokeness, which drew large numbers of millennials away from leftism.
Smeared by the media as a sexist harassment campaign, GamerGate’s real enemy was wokeness and bias in the media, and the ideologically-driven censorship of video games.
“Kotaku” is a once-popular video games news website that was owned by Gawker Media, and drifted to the extreme left in the early 2010s.
Gawker, one of the first media companies to embrace what would later be known as wokeness and cancel culture, was one of the top targets of the GamerGate movement.
Following the company’s bankruptcy due to the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s high-profile defamation case against it, a former Gawker editor-in-chief admitted that the gamer movement had been the “most effective” enemy of the media company.
By banning Tumblr In Action, Reddit erased a major part of the history of millennial anti-wokeness this week: a history that the media would prefer to forget or misrepresent.
Breitbart News has reached out to Reddit for comment.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @LibertarianBlue.