Reddit briefly blocked on university network

Social networking site Reddit was briefly blocked on a Washington, D.C. university’s networks last week in a move officials blamed on a routine scan for content that was quickly reversed.

The block came into effect over winter break at Catholic University, a college in the northeast of the city with around 5,000 students, prompting a furious response from some members of student government as they returned to class for the spring semester. In an email provided to Route Fifty from the university’s IT service desk, an employee said the platform was blocked because of “certain content on the platform” and because of “phishing and malicious links” on the site.

But a university spokesperson said there was “no decision” to ban Reddit, and instead an “automated monitoring system flagged Reddit.com during a routine scan as a popular site for viewing pornographic content.”

Catholic University has a strict ban on the top 200 pornography websites, which has been in place since 2019 after it passed the university’s Student Government Association and was signed by the then-student body president.

“Recognizing the legitimate uses of Reddit.com, access to the site has been restored to the campus network,” Catholic University spokesperson Karna Lozoya told Route Fifty in an email. “However, the University will continue to monitor the increased popularity of Reddit for viewing exploitative and degrading content.”

But the unexplained blocking of Reddit has some concerned about the free speech implications and may yet spark action in student government. Felipe Avila, a nursing student who serves as senator for the university’s Conway School of Nursing, said he intends to introduce a resolution in the next couple of weeks in the Student Senate to audit the university’s web filtering standards and ensure they are transparent, protect academic freedom and differentiate between security threats and user-generated content.

Such a block, even if it was inadvertent, cannot be allowed to happen again, Avila said.

“What we're hoping to get out of this resolution is to have greater oversight over the process that involves moderation of online content,” Avila told Route Fifty in an interview. “Our university already has one of the strictest bans when it comes to accessing pornography on the campus network. But to us, at least, it seems that we're now moving the goalposts. Whereas before it was censoring any content that was deemed to be obscene, now it's just flat-out information control.”

Reddit is a useful online community gathering-space, Avila said, including for students at Catholic University. Various subreddits exist, for example, to help computer science students with code debugging, to help nursing students prepare for their licensure requirements, and for engineering students to help with technical troubleshooting. The nursing subreddit alone contains more than 180,000 members, Avila added.

“I think the biggest thing we're seeing right now is with [artificial intelligence], it's really hard to find human advice now,” he said. “A lot of students are going to these platforms seeking genuine, authentic connections with other people, even if we don't know who they are. The fact that we're able to access these communities is really meaningful for our university here.”

Avila said he remains concerned that the university has not committed to not banning Reddit again, either intentionally or if it gets caught up in the existing content moderation dragnet. Both he and free speech advocates warned it could set a dangerous precedent.

“CUA says it is in the business of encouraging its students to engage with those on campus and across the world,” the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in a statement. “But once you start down the road of banning websites based on their content, you face the same slippery slope to censorship as always. If CUA must ban porn sites because of their content, well, Reddit has objectionable content too. Doesn’t it need to be banned? What about X? Facebook? There is no natural limit to this principle, only the preferences of those in power at the time.”

Avila said the pending resolution should bring some needed policy changes and discussions on campus about what it means to access information.

“The conversation that we need to have now as a university is what it means for us to have stakeholder input before any of these decisions are made,” he said. “We're tuition paying students. We should have a stake when it comes to the decisions that impact our ability to freely access information. We want to make sure that, first and foremost, students have a say when it comes to the content that is being filtered out, but more importantly, that we are notified of these changes in advance.”