My (37f) son (14M) has been using Reddit for a few months now. I have, until, recently, been monitoring his posts and comments. The last week or so I haven't checked them (until today) as he was always polite and good-natured towards other people, and I figured I could trust him. How wrong I was.

He messaged me this morning (he's at his dad's until tomorrow) that he got banned from a sub, so he's now angry. I did a little digging and found a whole collection of comments he's made in the last week where he's swearing (we've tried to raise him to never swear, and he's told us before that he doesn't see the point in using bad language), called one person 'very f***ing ugly' and even told one person to 'shoot yourself'. I'm absolutely disgusted.

I feel like I should mention that my son has ASD, but I don't think this is relevant to this situation. I spoke to his dad and his attitude towards it has been along the lines of 'I didn't want him on social media anyway, Pandora's box is open now'. FWIW, my son does not have any other SM accounts, such as Insta, FB, TikTok etc. Reddit is the only one.

I'm so angry. I've tried to raise my son to be a good, kind, polite person and this is showing a whole other side of him. I'm thinking of taking away ALL his tech (phone, tablet, PC, PS5). But I'm getting a nagging feeling this would be the nuclear option. I can't tell him he's in trouble while he's at his dad's, or he'll refuse to come back to mine (his dad and I don't drive, my son takes the bus between our homes). Also, if he gets angry (which is go-to emotion) with the way I'm handling it, he'll just walk out the door and go back to his dad's. I'm not sure how far I should go in terms of how to deal with this. I've always been the type of parent to sit him down and talk to him to explain why this or that should or shouldn't be done, but I don't feel that would be enough this time. But that could just be the anger in me doing the talking.

So WIBTA if I went ahead and took away my son's tech?