Reddit is censoring certain groups on the site after national governments threatened to ban the site entirely, the company has confirmed.
Reddit groups r/rudrugs, which focuses on growing psychoactive mushrooms, and r/WatchPeopleDie, which shows people being murdered, are no longer accessible in Russia and Germany respectively, Business Insider reports.
In both cases, Reddit acquiesced to government demands to remove those communities from local use or face a national ban.
Reddit posted a statement on r/ChillingEffects:
This week, Reddit received valid legal requests from Germany and Russia requesting the takedown of content that violated local law. As a result, /r/watchpeopledie was blocked from German IPs, and a post in /r/rudrugs was blocked from Russian IP’s in order to preserve the existence of reddit in those regions. We want to ensure our services are available to users everywhere, but if we receive a valid request from an authorised entity, we reserve the right to restrict content in a particular country. We will work to find ways to make this process more transparent and streamlined as Reddit continues to grow globally.
Earlier in the week, Russia banned and then unbanned Reddit from being used in the country altogether.