On Monday, Reddit announced that it would ban around 2,000 subreddits including supporters of Donald Trump Reddit community r/The_Donald, in a bid to cleanse the popular forum of hateful conduct and sage-out the bad juju.
While there are many concentric layers to the Reddit onion, promoting hate speech and bigotry is not one of them.
“All communities on Reddit must abide by our content policy in good faith. We banned r/The_Donald because it has not done so, despite every opportunity,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a post to Reddit on Monday.
Frolicking amongst its trollish tone, the subreddit and its more than 750,000 subscribers, the community was a notorious meeting hub for conspiracy theories ahead of the 2016 election and was embraced by the Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump goons Brad Parscale and Dan Scavino were reportedly frequent visitors of the community, who’s memes and videos from the board occasionally found their way to Trump’s Twitter feed.
In 2019, Reddit placed the community under “quarantine” due to repeated violations of rules, including the “encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon.”
Amid the impending doom of the 2020 US election, The Trump-focused Reddit community was met with empty seats, as users were told to flee to a pro-Trump site called thedonald.win; a clone of Reddit that promises more lax moderation.
The announcement coincided with actions by Twitch, Snapchat and Twitter to temporarily ban Trump and address “hateful conduct” and rhetoric the president uses on their platforms.
In May, Twitter labeled one of Trump’s tweets for containing voting misinformation and hid a tweet threatening violence against people protesting about the alleged police murder of George Floyd.
It’s a sign that social media platforms are banning together to take moderation of content on their platforms a lot more seriously, while Facebook remains to be hands-free on the discussion.
