One of the most popular discussion/message groups on the social media platform Reddit was shut down by the company today. The channel had over 790,000 subscribers before it was dismantled for frequent rule breaking, and not meeting the company’s “expectations.”
r/The_Donald was what is called a “subreddit,” group where people discussed and posted funny memes in support of President Donald Trump. But it was a rough-and-tumble neighborhood on Reddit, created in June, 2015 immediately after Trump announced he was running for president. When it was shut down this morning, it was one of the most active forums on the Reddit platform.
Reddit describes itself as the “front page of the Internet.” The company in June of 2019 had quarantined the forum and required users to click an opt-in button before showing it. It also prevented advertising that Reddit allows on other forums.
According to Wikipedia, the r/The_Donald subreddit had a lengthy documented history of hosting conspiracy theories and content that was racist, misogynistic, islamophobic, and antisemitic.
Social media companies are taking a more active role in policing hate speech online, as advertisers have pulled their ads off of pages such as Facebook and Twitter because of what they see as hate speech.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced in a post that r/The_Donald channel is just one of about 2,000 newly banned subreddits, including at least one prominent liberal group, “Chapo Trap House,” which has about 160,000 regular users and which was a pro-Bernie Sanders group. Most of the groups banned were dormant.
The website posted the following explanation:
“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. The community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average (Rule 1), antagonized us and other communities (Rules 2 and 8), and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations. Until now, we’ve worked in good faith to help them preserve the community as a space for its users—through warnings, mod changes, quarantining, and more.
“Though smaller, r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned for similar reasons: They consistently host rule-breaking content and their mods have demonstrated no intention of reining in their community.”
The new Reddit rules are as described here:
- It starts with a statement of our vision for Reddit and our communities, including the basic expectations we have for all communities and users.
- Rule 1 explicitly states that communities and users that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
- There is an expanded definition of what constitutes a violation of this rule, along with specific examples, in our Help Center article.
- Rule 2 ties together our previous rules on prohibited behavior with an ask to abide by community rules and post with authentic, personal interest.
- Debate and creativity are welcome, but spam and malicious attempts to interfere with other communities are not.
- The other rules are the same in spirit but have been rewritten for clarity and inclusiveness.
If you’ve been ever been on r/The_Donald, you’ll know that this is total BS. Spez (Reddit Head) has been trying to ban TD for years, and only finally succeeded under the guise of anti-BLM sentiment. The mods at r/The_Donald has bent over backwards over the years to keep things safe and running. They’d been prevent from linking or directly mentioning any other subreddit, had shown that Spez was secretly altering comments, changed the front page algorithm to block any content, as well as changing the upvote ratios to further suppress the subreddit.
After r/The_Donald was quarantined this last year (for alleged anti-cop sentiment, which is a joke compared to the now mainstream posts about murdering cops), they finally put the nail in the coffin a few months ago by blocking any non-mod posting after Spez replaced the mods with his own selected list of mods. They lost 5 years of memes, infographs, articles, even a presidential AMA with Trump himself.
Luckily, the mods that were replaced worked hard and have had a replacement website up for a few months that is growing fast. thedonald.win is now in the Alexa top 9000 websites. Go check it out, especially if you never got a chance to check out r/The_Donald. It’s not a cesspool of hate and white supremacy or whatever else they call it.
To re-iterate, the new website is thedonald( .)win.
NotKaren: Thank you for a look at from inside the group. Interesting details. – sd
Controlling speech is a fundamental part of the Communist play-book, and coming up with conspiracy accusations is a standard tactic. When the USA liberated Paris in August, 1944, the only organized group ready to step up to take over was the Communists. After all, the in-place French government had collaborated with the National German Socialist Worker Party (aka Nazis) and therefore were discredited and going into hiding as much as possible. The exiled French government had no ability to form a government as it was still hiding in London and Algiers (except for one tall, loud Frenchman with a big nose, who was so obnoxious that even the French found him so) . The Communists had been a minor but recognized part of the resistance; but the bulk of the resistance was anything but organized, and once the Germans were gone the authentic resistance focused on black market trading and settling scores with collaborators. French Communists seemed to have forming a new French government to themselves, and the Russian government sent training resources to help. Then French people who had been sent to slave labor camps in Germany during the war started returning to France as they were liberated by the Americans, and they advised caution toward Communism. Those returning French people told of atrocities committed by the Russians, forced labor being shipped to Russia from parts of Germany under Russian control, etc. To discredit them the French Communists, unable to murder enough of the returning French telling these accounts, spread conspiracy stories. The press helped with that because the French Communist press had Russian money enabling it to get ahead of other media recovery. There is much of this BLM movement and situation that reminds any student of history of the National Socialist German Worker Party and the Russian and French Communist Party, two different sects of the same religion. Controlling speech, tearing down monuments, spreading conspiracy theories, discrediting the US Constitution, and demeaning institutions of long standing seem to be key to accomplishing what the BLM has in mind for the United States of America. Controlling Joe Biden should be very easy for these people, but first they have to make sure he is elected, and you can be sure they have tactics planned for that.
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