Not because they agree, but because they have to maintain ignorance of the contents of the site.

Case law in the Ninth Circuit -- where Reddit is chartered -- maintains that employees of ISPs (and Reddit is a user-content-hosting ISP) which have legal agency and employee responsibility to make "moderation" decisions on content, also have legal agency and employee responsibility to make decisions on copyright violations.

If Reddit gets sued for hosting copyright-violating material and the complainant can prove that Reddit had employees who were sifting through content pro-actively, then they can prove that Reddit had employees who could have (and therefore should have) exercised agency w/r/t copyright.

Well -- Reddit's not a copyrights clearing house, and there is no such entity in existence. Reddit (and every other user-content-hosting ISP in the Ninth Circuit -- i.e. 99% of the world's social media) relies on maintaining "agnosia" of the copyright disputation / status of content they host, until and unless they receive DMCA takedown / restoration notices.

In short: If Reddit had employees that policed racism and extremism, or even technology that proactively helped them independently moderate racism and extremism, then someone would sue them about why they don't have policies and practices to do that to enforce it against piracy.

And then they'd lose DMCA safe harbour, debtors would scrap the company, and AOL / Time Warner / Facebook / Google would buy the intellectual property of the site and this place would go the way of Digg and Slashdot and Gawker.

All of that is why they've shifted the responsibility for first-line reporting, and therefore the legally-cognisable exercise of agency, onto moderators and end-users -- because they have to maintain "agnosia" of the contents of the site, until and unless someone reports harm from specific items.

That is why r/AgainstHateSubreddits exists. That is why our automoderator generates a report decision matrix on posts here that link to hateful comments and posts.

Not because "the admins agree" with hate -- but because they are unable to proactively address it.

They need our help.

For everyone arriving here due to someone screenshotting this comment and posting it snarkily to Twitter with the equivalent of "Press X to doubt":

I am drawing on the opinions of experts w/r/t the applicable law, Mavrix Photographs v. LiveJournal, Inc. --

Among them :

MAVRIX V.LIVEJOURNAL:UNSAFE HARBORS IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Katharine Burkhart, J.D. Candidate, 2019, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38ZS2KD15

Wherein she write in the opening thesis of her work

In Mavrix v. LiveJournal, the Ninth Circuit reasoned that the central inquiry for safe harbor analysis was the nature of the relationship between a social media network and the individuals screening that network’s content.2 If moderators work on a social media network’s behalf, the Ninth Circuit contended, that network may incur liability for infringing material that is ultimately published.

"Moderators" here being not a title, but a pronoun -- the case makes a functional definition for what constitutes a "moderator", so even if an ISP employee has another title, if their primary job function comports with what the Court functionally recognises as a "moderator", that opens liability for them.

This is not my analysis / opinion. This is, as I understand it, the prevailing reading of Mavrix v. LiveJournal.

For several years now.