Reddit, one of the biggest and most influential sites on the web, is at the center of yet another storm after appearing to leap to the defense of one of its most notorious moderators, who just days earlier exposed as one of the creepiest and most perverse internet “trolls” in the world.

The website has been thrown into turmoil by a bitter row that stems from its seedy underbelly – namely, several of its less-than-savory subreddits, which discuss topics such as ‘jailbait’ and ‘creepshots’ – in other words, sexy or revealing images, lifted from social media sites or sneakily taken out on the street, of underage girls and other, unwitting young women.

Following an outcry by sections of the media, Reddit reluctantly banned most of these subreddits, but that wasn’t justice enough for one journalist. Adrian Chen, of the website Gawker, took it upon himself to track down one of the chief instigators of these distasteful subreddits, interviewing him at length before finally publishing a long article “exposing” computer programmer Michael Brutsch as the man behind the notorious “Violentacrez”.

Chen’s expose of Brutsch labels him as the internet’s “biggest troll”, saying:

“If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His specialty is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit.”

To highlight the darker side of Brutsch’s personality, Chen goes on to list just a few of the subreddits that ‘Violentacrez’ is known to have started or moderated:

• Chokeabitch
• Niggerjailbait
• Rapebait
• Hitler
• Jewmerica
• Misogyny
• Incest

But rather than sparking off a mass witch hunt against ‘Violentacrez’, Chen’s article seems to have polarized the Reddit community, with hundreds of members appearing to leap to Brutsch’s defense.

Shortly after Chen’s story was published, there was outcry on Reddit, with numerous reports of users asking moderators to block all links to Gawker and its subsidiary sites. Users flocked to defend Brutsch, saying that the witch hunt against him was a violation of his privacy, something he was entitled to on a supposedly ‘anonymous’ forum. This in turn led to a further debate in the media about Reddit’s position on free speech, with the New Statesman claiming that it was actively supporting ‘creeps’ on the internet.

Now, according to a leaked memo, Reddit’s CEO Yishan Wong also ‘appears’ to be defending Brutsch, although he admitted that the site has found itself in a delicate situation all of a sudden:

“We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that’s the law in the United States – because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it – but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that’s what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn’t clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it’s just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).”

On the issue of banning links to Gawker, Wong explains that this was a mistake, and that doing so doesn’t make Reddit or its claims to free speech “look good”:

“Let’s be honest, this ban on links from the gawker network is not making reddit look so good.
While the ban was originally being discussed by mods, we were discussing it internally too. We even briefly considered the consequences of a site-level ban on the entire gawker network, and realized three things about it:

1. It would ultimately be ineffective at stopping off-site doxxing. People who want to go after someone off-site would still do it. They have plenty of other megaphones besides reddit.

2. It would definitely raise the profile of the issue with the general public, and result in headlines like “gawker exposes creepster; reddit engages in personal vendetta to defend pedophile.” This would hardly help us explain the problem of irresponsible release of personal information to the general public.

3. Practically speaking, it wouldn’t really deter or hurt gawker anyways. This is in contrast to domain banning spammers, where it is not just punitive, it literally stops the spam.”

Since the publication of Chen’s article, Brutsch has now been sacked from his job, and says that he has also lost out on his medical insurance:

“All my remote access has been disabled, my health insurance and FSA were cancelled immediately (so they had to drag someone in over the weekend to do that). At this point, if any of the dozens of death threats I’ve gotten were to make good on their promises, at least my wife would have the insurance.”

However, his supporters are staying resolutely behind him. According to an article in British newspaper The Guardian, a group of Redditors have since launched a campaign seeking to raise money and help Brutsch as he comes to terms with his new, unemployed status.