A Reddit bug is allowing slurs to get added to Reddit URLs — and those URLs occasionally appear prominently on Google.
Content warning: the following story includes mentions of a slur.
Here’s what we’ve observed. While Googling something related to a lighthearted debate in The Verge’s Slack, one staffer found that some of the Reddit links that surfaced had a subdomain with unexpected characters and a slur before reddit.com: https://2goback-[f-word].reddit.com/r/[rest of the URL]. Despite the additional characters, the link points to Reddit (though the page had the Old Reddit layout).
The slur didn’t just appear for that query. A Reddit site search on Google for the subdomain reveals a bunch of links from different subreddits that have...