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Reddit’s social-justice trolls wage war on creepy Facebook stalkers

R/FacebookCleavage meets r/ShitRedditSays.

 

Fernando Alfonso III

IRL

Posted on Mar 17, 2014   Updated on May 31, 2021, 3:10 pm CDT

Warning: This story contains sexually explicit material that may be NSFW.

Reddit’s r/FacebookCleavage, home to suggestive photos of women taken from Facebook without their consent, has been defaced.

Sometime around 5pm ET, r/FacebookCleavage’s front page had every single image of a woman in a revealing top replaced with photos of the asses of hairy, overweight dudes.

You probably know these pictures. A Magic: The Gathering player went to one of the biggest tournaments ever and posed for photos with every exposed butt crack he saw. He’s now facing an 18-month ban from competing.

Who’s behind the butt-crack raid? That’d be r/ShitRedditSays, or SRS, a Reddit watchdog community where users publicly shame other redditors for posting misogynistic, racist, or creepy content, and r/circlejerk where users devote themselves to mocking popular trends in Reddit culture. 

The defacement also includes a background photo of what looks like a gold-plated penis with wings.


 

A post in r/SubredditDrama, home to all meta-Reddit discussions, included screenshots of the new r/FacebookCleavage moderators banning users from the forum.

 


 

Since the Daily Dot published its story exposing r/FacebookCleavage, the year-old subreddit has captured the attention of media organizations like the Telegraph, Huffington Post, and Jezebel, which described it as “your new least-favorite scummy Internet dump.” 

What is particularly disturbing about r/FacebookCleavage and its sinister sibling, r/candidfashionpolice, where users critique photos of women taken in public as if they were hosts on TLC’s What Not to Wear, is how they skirt the line of Reddit’s rules against spreading personal information.

These rules have allowed both subreddits to balloon to more 37,000 subscribers combined. 


 

Both subreddits are spawns of r/creepshots, which was essentially r/candidfashionpolice—minus the schtick.

In the fall of 2012, r/creepshots sparked a public relations nightmare for Reddit administrators after a substitute teacher was fired for taking upskirt photos of some of his underage students and posting them on the site.

In the wake of articles from the Huffington Post, the Daily Mail, and more, hundreds of thousands of people came to check out the subreddit. The negative attention forced administrators to ban r/creepshots and at least four of its clones.

Since it was started in September 2010, r/SRS has been widely controversial in its own right. Its purpose—“bullying the bullies” on Reddit—has resulted in communities like r/jailbait getting shut down. But r/SRS is widely derided across the site for its trolling tactics, such as flooding subreddits and comment threads with mass downvotes.

An attack on r/FacebookCleavage is long overdue. But it should have come from administrators, not Reddit’s merry band of crooked cops.

Photo by Dan Taylor/Flickr | Remix by Jason Reed (CC BY 2.0)

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*First Published: Mar 17, 2014, 8:14 pm CDT