A popular subreddit dedicated to “those who want to end work” has gone live again after shutting down in response to a Fox News interview.
The Reddit forum /r/antiwork shut down Wednesday evening after a moderator was interviewed on Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime Tuesday night. The interview drove a surge of downvotes and posts that were beyond the moderators’ capabilities.
“We’re a movement where we want to reduce the amount of work people feel they are forced to do,” the moderator, 30-year-old Doreen Ford, told host Watters after she was asked about why she liked staying home while getting paid. “We want to put in effort, put in labor, but we don’t necessarily want to be in a position where we feel trapped.”
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Watters accused Ford and the subreddit of encouraging people to be lazy.
“It’s good to have rest. That doesn’t mean you should rest all the time or not be putting time into things you care about,” Ford responded.
The interview drew ire from the forum’s members, who accused Ford of not being prepared or knowing anything about the ideas behind /r/antiwork.
The interview appeared to cause a surge of “brigading,” a practice in which users continuously downvote select posts to censor them. The rise in downvotes led the forum to shut down temporarily due to a lack of moderators.
“We’re closed while we deal with the cleanup from ongoing brigading and will be back soon,” the moderators said in a statement on the forum.
Hours later, the site was back up with a new statement on the subreddit’s front page. The moderators said they would not do any additional interviews with journalists, barring those already recorded. This decision angered several of the subreddit’s members, who were angry they had acted as a spokesperson for the subreddit without speaking to the rest of the group.
Several posters accused the moderators of “dishonest, narcissistic leadership” who do not listen to its users, failing to make a substantial statement on what /r/antiwork’s ideas stood for.
The /r/antiwork subreddit initially started as an anti-capitalist forum but saw significant growth during the pandemic. The group grew 279% in subscribers and is one of the most popular subreddits on the website at 1.7 million members, according to a Reddit spokesperson. The forum’s content has since shifted to become a platform for those who wish to talk about bad bosses, stagnant wages, and labor rights for those in lower-income employment, according to the BBC.
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The site was recently implicated in a hack on business receipt printers to insert pro-labor messages.
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Fox News referenced the extremely high ratings for Watters’s Tuesday show. Roughly 3.6 million viewers watched Watters’s show that day, according to Nielsen Media Research.
