Here's how a Fox News interview forced a popular Reddit page to go private

A large subreddit has been forced to go private after one of the moderators appeared on Fox News.

Subreddit r/antiwork on Reddit closed to ward off the “ongoing brigading” after the longest serving moderator of the forum was interviewed by Fox’s Jesse Watters.

The subreddit is home to discussion around exploitative workplaces and poor working conditions.

During the interview, Watters appeared to laugh at moderator Doreen Ford, 30, several times as she explained the values of the subreddit.

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Ford explained that she works between 20 and 25 hours a week as a dog walker, but aspires to teach philosophy one day.

She said: “There are some misconceptions about the movement. We want to still put in effort. We want to put in labour, but we don’t want to necessarily be in a position where we feel trapped.

Jesse Watters asked if she was encouraging people to be lazy, Ford said: “Laziness is a virtue”.

Jessie Watters takes on the one who operates the Anti Work Groupwww.youtube.com

In an r/outoftheloop thread following the interview, one Reddit user explained that the moderator’s “disheveled” look and “untidy” room painted those in the movement as “lazy [and] unmotivated”, “looking for a handout”.

Meanwhile, people who are invested in the movement feared the interview will damage perceptions of the community.

Despite the Fox interview, there have been plenty of times r/antiwork members - including Ford - have managed to explain what the movement is all about without backlash.

Speaking to the Financial Times she previously said her experience of work was “degrading, humiliating, and exploitative”.

"I think there's a lot of positions that just don't make any sense, that do not have to exist.

"You're just pushing around papers for no good reason. It doesn't really help anybody.”

She told Bloomberg that at the centre of the movement, there is a wish to “subvert capitalism”.

She said: “The point of the movement is not to tell everyone to go quit your job immediately and don’t think about the economic impact on yourself or your family — that’s definitely not the message.

“The central aim of our mission is to undermine and subvert capitalism as much as possible and make it so that people don’t have to rely on their jobs as much to pay rent.”

Previously speaking to The Independent, a moderator said: “Anti-work is a philosophy that is a radical one, that tries to strike at the systemic issues within capitalism – but I think that intuitive thing, where a lot of people are trying to do work-life balance, a lot of people are quitting their jobs, a lot of people are fed up with how their companies may been handling Covid and stuff like that”.

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