BikiniBottomTwitter is a large community on Reddit which provides one stop shopping for memes from the hit Nickelodeon show Spongebob Squarepants. While Spongebob may be a kids show, the humor on the subreddit is certainly adult.
However, a moderator at BikiniBottomTwitter, hasn’t been taking too kindly to jokes making fun of the disabled and decided to ban them outright, receiving much backlash from the over 100,000 subscribers. The subreddit does still allows jokes about the holocaust, 9/11 and having sex with dead people.
The mod Astronomer_X made a heavily downvoted post explaining the action:
Following a conversation in the Mod chat, we’ve decided that were banning posts that have their punchlines based off of the autistic child or Tard child, because although people on reddit tend to tolerate posts like this, at the end of the day, it’s a joke making fun of people with disabilities or on the spectrum and acts as though they’re all like that stupid ‘REEE’ post from 4chan.
While jokes about mentally disabled people can be offensive, Redditors as a whole usually prefer a free speech approach to their communities and do not like when moderators dictate what they can joke about. This is a constant tension on Reddit between user bases who want more freedom and moderators who want more control.
“Why should it be up to you whats gets posted if people upvote?” one user asked. “This is just a fucking meme sub dude it seriously doesn’t matter lmao.”
