An entire Reddit sub-community entitled "The Fappening" quickly became the files' bridge to a more mainstream audience when it was passing around the big celebrity naked picture hack.

The subreddit has since been banned by Reddit administrators. Reddit CEO Yishan Wong has said: "In accordance with our legal obligations, we expeditiously removed content hosted on our servers as soon as we received DMCA ( Digital Millennium Copyright Act )requests from the lawful owners of that content, and in cases where the images were not hosted on our servers, we promptly directed them to the hosts of those services. While current US law does not prohibit linking to stolen materials, we deplore the theft of these images and we do not condone their widespread distribution."

"You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere - not because we don't care, but because we care that you make your choices between right and wrong." Wong wrote.

"They know that this website has been used to host pictures of women without their consent for years but they do nothing," one Reddit user described.

"They're doing the exact same thing they do every time there's bad press. Deal with it at the last possible moment once there's bad press forcing them to do so. Then they play it off like some moral revelation and use free speech as the reason why it doesn't set a precedent. It is identical to what always happens."

Wong replied that: "I did not say 'we won't ban any subreddits ever.' I said that we don't ban subreddits for being morally bad. We DO ban subreddits for breaking our rules, and one of them is repeatedly and primarily being a place where people post copyrighted material for which valid DMCA requests are being received."

"Not mentioned in this post is that we do ban subreddits and content for plenty of other reasons - reddit is not lawless, it is merely that we draw a distinction between the enforcement of our laws (both the laws of the US, which we must follow, and the rules of reddit) and exercising restraint in using our enforcement power to ban things just because we don't like them."