The Story of Jailbait

In 2006, Condé Nast, home of The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair, bought Reddit, a content aggregation website run by a small staff and fuelled by a loyal fan base. A sizable portion of whom are pretty excited about underdressed underage girls.

To be clear, Reddit’s community are largely benevolent. They’ve raised money for disaster funds, and when the neighbors of Kathleen Edwards, a seven-year-old girl dying of Huntington’s disease, publicly mocked her, Reddit users cheered her up with a shopping spree. “Redditors” are mostly nice people.

These days Reddit, with its billion hits a month, is the jewel in Condé Nast’s digital crown. Though, you can’t help wondering what they think of Reddit’s ‘/Jailbait’ section.

Every media brand has its iconic franchises. Within the Condé Nast family, Brides Magazine has its monthly ‘Idea List,’ with tips for a unique wedding. Architectural Digest has the ‘Celebrity Living’ section, this month starring Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne. Teen Vogue have their retail store ‘Haute Spot.’ And Reddit has, among other things, ‘/Jailbait’; a community of nearly 18,000 “ephebophiles,” who exchange: NON-NUDE pictures and videos of teenage girls and boys who are possibly below the age of consent.

The ‘/Jailbait’ ‘franchise’ is a subreddit group – a user-created page for people with similar interests – and it’s not the most disturbing subreddit in existence (reddit.com/r/picsofdeadjailbait probably takes that prize). But while that is a tiny niche group, according to Alexa.com, ‘/Jailbait’ represents a small but significant portion of Reddit’s traffic.

Like all functioning communities, the people of ‘/Jailbait’ abide by a set of rules. Here’s one:

This anti-tattoo stance caused a stir amongst the community when it was announced last year.

‘hfwinkler’ is equally unimpressed by the severity of the tattoos stance, but then he has a creative mind which probably doesn’t react well to being caged or controlled.

Someone brought up the point that you might as well ban earrings if you’re really trying to filter out the young tail, but ‘Tailorseim’ was having none of it. Do that and you risk discriminating against some perfectly good thirteen-year-old girls!

Eventually a couple of people with some sanity popped in to say hello.

This is just one tiny example of the content on the ‘/Jailbait’ forum. Though a couple of business blogs have wondered if the seedy pics may have prompted Condé Nast to distance themselves from Reddit, it hasn’t had any mainstream coverage. Which is weird, because the fact that the company that owns Teen Vogue also owns forums on which people sexualize the Teen Vogue target audience, sounds like Mailbait (zing!).

I guess it’s another infuriating case of dickheads ruining it for the rest of us. You want free speech? You’ve got to put up with Nazis. You want free press unimpeded by super injunctions? You’ve got to learn to accept tedious gossip. You want a free internet, where information can be shared across the globe? Annoyingly, you might have to put up with some pervs. However, were this to surface as a mainstream news item, I’m sure some guy from Condé Nast would soon be sitting before Paxman smiling awkwardly in a suit.

DIM REAPER