Just days after an India high court had lifted a ban on the popular video sharing app TikTok, which had earlier been blocked on the grounds that it “encouraged porn,” as AVN.com reported, reports from around the world’s second most populous country now say that the online forum Reddit has been blocked by the country’s largest internet service providers.
Reddit is ranked as the 21st most heavily trafficked site in the world, according to SimilarWeb data, with 1.6 billion visits in March of 2019 alone.
The self-described “front page of the internet,” Reddit has 330 million users spread across 217 countries, according to the business statistics site DMR.
“Users of Vodafone, Jio, Hathway, as well as a number of local ISPs around the country are reporting that Reddit is inaccessible,” India Times reported on Monday, naming three of the country’s largest online access providers. “The r/India subreddit on the site is already full of confused and angry users demanding how this is allowed.”
“A number of ISPs are banning #Reddit across India, because somewhere on that site, someone found something objectionable. Idiots,” wrote one Twitter user who had spotted the apparent Reddit ban.
Reddit, of course, is one of the few remaining major social media platforms that does not ban porn, and according to the India Times report, that is likely the reason why the Indian ISPs would block the discussion forum site.
A nationwide ban on porn sites took effect late last year, with Reliance Jio—the low-cost ISP and wireless company that is often credited with igniting India’s online porn boom—leading the way. In fact, after Jio blocked its more than 200 million subscribers from accessing 827 online porn sites, the carrier’s overall traffic dropped from an average of 11 gigabytes per month to 10.8 per customer, as AVN.com reported, likely indicating that a large number of Jio’s customers used the service to access porn on the internet.
But the ban did not cover social media platforms that allow porn uploads by users. The vast majority of Reddit’s 150,000 “subreddits” have nothing to do with porn.
“It’s far too tough for the government to block only the NSFW subreddits, so they've instead opted for a site-wide ban,” India Times reported. “Mind you, that's again with absolutely no announcement, clarification, or justification given to the public. It's a violation of Internet freedom at its finest.”
Photo By Alexo88 / Wikimedia Commons
