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On Monday, Elon Musk spoke at a televised inauguration rally and threw a Nazi-style salute to the adoring crowd not once but twice. Brushing off the widespread outrage with the help of his sycophants, he has declined to clarify just what he meant by that gesture. Meanwhile, German officials and journalists, Jewish American activists, and white supremacists have all agreed that, whatever the intent, the salute was a meaningful callback to one of the darkest chapters of modern history.
Still, the all-powerful Musk continues to evade accountability, while those who publicly denounce the gesture—including a Milwaukee meteorologist who got fired for criticizing the Tesla CEO on her personal Instagram account—may fear retribution. Thus, the activism turns to anonymous online spaces, as members of one of the internet’s largest networks band together to call Musk out.
#Resistance, thy name is Reddit.
On Tuesday, members of major sports-centered subreddits, like r/hockey, started asking their moderators whether they would consider banning users from sharing links to Elon Musk’s X, the Nazi-infested social platform formerly known as Twitter. The momentum took off across hundreds of other subreddits, their respective posts citing the myriad Redditors who’d been discussing bans. Many of these spaces, including the fan communities for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the Real Housewives, Transformers, and the tabletop game Warhammer, don’t tend to be openly political. Nevertheless, they’ve chosen to bar X links and stand by the decision.
Some mods are acting unilaterally; others have been thinking through all the implications of such a blackout; still others have put the matter up to community polling. The overseers of the popular Formula 1 subreddit are doing a trial run, “with the intention to make this ban permanent,” in which all X links and screenshots will be forbidden “with the only exception of screenshots of relevant posts by teams, drivers & F1 that are not available on any other platform.” Although the initial burst of momentum has slowed, various Redditors are still deliberating and deciding on the question, with r/ChicagoSuburbs finalizing its ban on X, Facebook, and Instagram links (though not screenshots) on Friday afternoon.
Others are also going beyond X links. The r/StLouis subreddit deliberated on whether to similarly ban TikTok videos. The feminist and pro-transgender “X Chromosomes” communities are banning links to X and to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, citing the newly relaxed hate-speech standards announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The NBA subreddit confirmed Wednesday that it would do the same and, as with the World of Warcraft subreddit, go so far as to block even screenshots of X posts. The notorious r/antiwork space barred all those sites, along with any videos from the Chinese-owned apps TikTok and RedNote.
Still, just as Reddit wasn’t unanimous in determining the extent of these bans, its moderators didn’t universally decide to ax X links. R/Seattle is going to do so, but r/SeattleWA isn’t, with moderator u/AllThisIsGoodForYou stating that “you are all capable of choosing to click or not click on something” and that “if you find this position to be intolerable then you can just not participate here.” (Another mod followed up with a poll asking if dissenting users would be selling their Teslas in protest.) A moderator for the Red Sox subreddit posted on X about their controversial decision to “refuse to ban X links,” explaining that “regardless of what your feelings on Elon or this site are, tons of primary sources for sports reporting” are available only on X. They repeated the r/SeattleWA justification that “people who don’t like X can just not click the links,” but they also went on to decry the protesting Redditors, writing, “This is a vocal minority of people coordinating a movement to get X banned on as many subs as possible. It’s activism, not organic.” (A poll of community members later found that the majority of voters supported an X-links ban.)
Moderator u/JonathanDHalvorson lodged a similar allegation in r/OptimistsUnite, referring to the outrage as “an organized political censorship campaign” for which “it appears bot accounts are being used.” Unlike the other dissenting mods, Halvorson defended Musk himself, claiming that “there is no chance this was intended as a Nazi salute” and chalking the gesture up to the Tesla CEO’s “being an enthusiastic spaz.” Some commenters supported the decision while objecting to Halvorson’s excuses for the salute. Another pointed out that Halvorson owns a Tesla.
I reached out to one user who responded to Halvorson with disappointment over the salute defense—though not necessarily the stance against link bans—and agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. “I’m just sick of people pretending that obvious things aren’t obvious,” they wrote to me over the site’s chat function. “Musk has been radicalizing in real time before our eyes and getting more and more far right each month. … I have to believe that the truth still matters and there are people who will understand once the facts are laid out before them.”
This r/OptimistsUnite community member, who has been on Reddit for more than a decade, pointed to a few reasons why the site is one of the last social networks amenable to protests of this nature. “Reddit as a whole is pissed at mainstream media capitulation to Trump and the excuse-making,” they wrote. “There are right-wing pockets that love it but Reddit tends to skew techy, liberal to libertarian, and educated. All of those demographics revolt at the idea of sanewashing Trump and his major boosters like Musk.”
Indeed, users from staunchly right-wing spaces on Reddit, like r/conservative, are complaining that the anti-X campaigning is “spamming” the site with “leftist propaganda,” calling for Reddit’s corporate higher-ups to “take back control of the website.” However, Reddit’s leadership seems content to let things stand: A spokesperson told USA Today that “Users can and are able to modify or issue their own rules within their respective forums.”
How are those rulemakers faring? I spoke with two longtime members of the r/NBA moderation team (who also preferred to remain anonymous) about their wide-ranging decision to block X and Meta from the subreddit. They’ve had ample experience with Reddit protests: In 2020 they teamed up with the team overseeing r/AskHistorians to implement a blackout in protest of George Floyd’s murder as well as hate speech on the platform. They also joined in the 2023 blackouts against Reddit’s decision to charge third-party systems for access to Reddit’s API. In both instances, they said, moderators earned more decisionmaking power as well as guidance and tools—in other words, they know that protests can work.
But did they think this round would also lead to substantive changes and healthier communities? They were a little skeptical of that. “Since Elon took over Twitter, we’ve seen a number of changes on that platform,” they noted, citing the inability to view posts and replies without logging in, blocked access to Twitter’s API, and issues with spam and fake news. “All of these were issues that have come up in the community over the past couple of years”—not a small thing, considering how central NBA Twitter once was to keeping abreast of league news and games. “We heard complaints in terms of visibility when tweets were linked—people couldn’t see replies and stuff if they weren’t logged in. The Meta platforms had the same issue: With Threads, you have to log in.”
It was the overarching concern over user friendliness that, for the moderators, even trumped the inciting event. “None of us are endorsing Nazi symbolism, and if it were just based on that, it would have been cut-and-dry,” they explained. “We know that a lot of other subs will follow if we do something, so we have to make decisions carefully, and what we were hearing most from our users was the lack of accessibility with the new Twitter.”
Accessibility issues were also mentioned as the reason subreddits for the video game Baldur’s Gate 3, the anime One Piece, and the state of Georgia have banned X links. Many other moderators have, likewise, cited an overall plunge in Reddit posts/comments linking to X content ever since Musk’s takeover. “We did consider [a ban] but discovered we only had 8 posts from Twitter in 2024, and a whopping 12 posts in 2023,” wrote a r/Lego moderator. “We get so little traffic from Twitter.” An r/Utah moderator similarly noted, “Very few people submit X.com links … to begin with.” The site formerly known as Twitter was no longer driving these conversations, and it was hardly practical to pretend like it still could. For r/Lego, it was so middling that a ban would seem pointless.
For many communities, the reasons also extend to the harmful and dangerous content on X. The r/Georgia subreddit cited the reinstatement of “accounts involved with posting” child sexual abuse material. R/Atlanta had already been removing X links over the past year “due to the rampant abuse and impersonation taking place on that platform,” which made it impossible to “verify that a post is legitimate,” according to moderator u/SDrawHCab.
The trends are clear: For Reddit, X/Twitter had been dying for a long time, and Elon Musk’s latest move is merely hastening its demise. As other institutions increasingly back away from X, they may find that the platform has long been withering away all on its own. X was run incompetently and shedding users long before Elon made that little salute—and that move just served to clarify why that is. Now various major subreddits, with total followers numbering in the tens of millions, are making it plain that they don’t even want to see stuff from X anymore. Seems clear Musk did not see that coming.
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