Reddit communities dedicated to PC gaming, Nintendo, and Destiny have decided to blacklist links to X (formerly Twitter) due to owner Elon Musk’s recent Nazi-like saluting at an inauguration rally for President Donald Trump as part of a growing movement by users of the social media site to distance themselves from the controversial billionaire. All have millions of members and rank within the site’s top 500 pages.
Similar bans were also noticed by GameSpot on subreddits for the Steam Deck, Monster Hunter, and World of Warcraft.
Speaking with Polygon, r/pcgaming mod Shock4ndAwe pointed to the slow degradation of X since Musk purchased the site as well as Musk’s own behavior as major factors in their team’s decision to blacklist links to X.
“We’ve all seen the hate and the toxicity rise,” Shock4ndAwe said, speaking on behalf of the subreddit’s moderation team. “The constant attacks and vilification of people who aren’t straight, white, and male. The usernames and profile statuses denigrating and belittling folks who simply want to exist. Good moderation practices being done away with. New rules requiring a user to login to view content which creates a bad experience for users that either don’t have an X account or aren’t logged into one. We’d be lying if we didn’t also include Elon’s actions. This is the billionaire owner that creates sock puppet accounts to defend himself in public. He suspends journalists who criticize him. He made a Nazi salute at a presidential inauguration.”
r/nintendo mod razorbeamz provided a similar, if more succinct, response: “We felt it was the right thing to do after Elon Musk performed a Nazi salute on stage.”
Other gaming subreddits in the top 500 for Fortnite, The Legend of Zelda, Apex Legends, and Super Smash Bros. are currently having open discussions about banning X links as well. Opinions on blacklisting vary depending on the community, ranging from broad support to the asinine “keep politics out of it” refrain that’s all too common in both gaming and other online communities. And while Reddit itself has promised not to interfere with subreddits that choose to ban X links, Shock4ndAwe believes the movement is important to improving Reddit as a whole.
“We want to be very clear in saying that Reddit isn’t a perfect platform either,” the r/pcgaming mod said. “Reddit allows communities to exist on their platform that spread hate, sexism, racism, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry. This affects our community so much that we’ve had to take the extraordinary step of banning people from specific subreddits preemptively. So it’s even more important that when other subreddits decide that X needs to be banned that we join them. Because Reddit the company doesn’t care.”
The response from the r/nintendo community has been “overwhelmingly positive,” razorbeamz explained, apart from a few outside agitators lodging complaints despite never posting on the subreddit. We heard the same from Shock4ndAwe, who said the r/pcgaming community is fine with the decision, while non-members have taken to participating in brigades — organized attempts from outside entities to disrupt normal discussion — on the forum and threatening the moderation team and their families. One of the offending messages provided to Polygon calls the mods “raging f4gys,” incorrectly states there are only two genders, and signs off with “Epstein yrslf.”
“This was reported to the Reddit admins who informed us that the threatening posts do not violate site rules and no action was taken on the offending account,” Shock4ndAwe said. Polygon asked Reddit for comment on the situation but had yet to hear back at the time of publishing this story.
What exactly Musk meant by striking his chest and extending his arm straight out continues to be a baffling debate among unserious people in mainstream media and conservatives who refuse to acknowledge the openly fascist goals of President Trump’s inner circle for what they are. A group of elected Jewish officials from New York, however, was very blunt in a Jan. 22 statement on the matter, saying:
On January 20th, we saw Elon Musk give what appeared to be two Nazi salutes — otherwise known as a “Sieg Heil” or a “Roman salute” — at an official presidential event, from a podium that bore the presidential seal. As Jewish elected officials committed to combating antisemitism in New York, we unequivocally condemn this action and the lack of apology. Given that Elon Musk has repeatedly pushed the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory and endorsed the Nazi-supporting AfD party in Germany, it is not hard to imagine that he knew exactly what he was doing.
Among many other sweeping executive actions taken on day one, President Trump pardoned hundreds of January 6th rioters, including one who notoriously wore a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt to the Capitol insurrection. Thousands of people will be materially harmed by the administration’s sweeping actions on day one, and we stand in solidarity with those New Yorkers.
It should not be hard to call any of this out. Any organization or leader that purports to combat hate against Jews and other minority groups must do so loudly and clearly. There is no room for ambiguity when it comes to Nazi symbology. The time is now to protect ourselves and our neighbors, not to normalize hate.
With all that in mind, we had one more question for our Reddit mods: What needs to happen for X links to be reinstated in their communities? Both were less than hopeful of that ever being a possibility, but mentioned Musk divesting from the platform as being a good start.
“Realistically?” Shock4ndAwe said. “I don’t think there’s anything X can do that will make us comfortable linking to them in the future.”
