Let Extremists Stay and Everyone Else Leaves

Tom Scott, a British science communicator with a popular YouTube channel, was describing what happens to an online forum that decides to allow anything the law allows. He calls the pattern the Nazi bar. Leave the worst participants alone, in his telling, and calmer people drift away until the discussion swings toward the extremists.

His example was Reddit, the large American discussion site organized around topic forums. In his telling, it began as a haven for unrestricted expression, where posts stayed up if they were legal in the United States, on the assumption that stronger arguments would prevail and harmful speech could be answered with more speech. Then, he said, the Nazis arrived, and he meant actual present day neo-Nazis, not merely conservatives. Scott noted that their racist organizing was permitted because the United States, unlike many European countries, has no law against incitement to racial or religious hatred.

What followed was a cycle. The presence of extremists made cautious users uncomfortable, so some left. Their departure tilted the discussion further toward the remaining hardliners, prompting more moderate users to leave, and on it went. Reddit acted against the most openly racist forums only after advertisers grew uneasy. Scott quoted one of Reddit's co-founders explaining the ban in practical terms: "We didn't ban them for being racist. We banned them because we have to spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with them."

Scott pointed to a 2015 Reddit survey that found the number one reason users did not recommend the site to others, even when they used it themselves, was that they did not want friends stumbling onto hateful posts.

In Scott's analogy, the dynamic resembles a local pub that allows Nazis to gather in the basement. In his words: "You're not gonna want to go in there. Or at least you're not gonna tell your friends you go in there."