With nearly four million subscribers, Black People Twitter is one of the few large, public online discussion forums about black American life, and its moderators had instituted a policy that was drawing criticism from Reddit users across the political spectrum: On heated threads, they had announced, participation of white users would be limited.Īs part of an ongoing effort by The Times’s National desk to explore how technology is shaping our interactions around race, and vice versa, I reached out to the subreddit’s moderators - using, at first, various forms of text messages. Nor could I be sure I wasn’t falling for a devious scheme by the subreddit’s volunteer moderators to certify white users as black. Few users of the one I was writing about, Black People Twitter, would disclose their real names, so I couldn’t search the web for a picture. Reddit is home to thousands of topic-based communities, or “subreddits,” where privacy is held sacrosanct and pseudonyms are the norm.