Reddit restricts access to controversial pro-Donald Trump subforum
Reddit has quarantined a controversial subforum about Donald Trump. The subreddit /r/the_donald is said to incite violence and thereby violate the rules of the social network. A quarantine is not the same as a ban, but it does make the sub more difficult to find.
Since Wednesday evening, The_Donald has only been accessible to users with a verified email address, and only after they have been warned that the subreddit may contain offensive content. The sub has over 750,000 users.
The subreddit has been quarantined for allegedly breaking too many rules in recent months. The voluntary mods would not have intervened enough and left too many posts that go against the rules of Reddit. The last straw appeared to be posts calling for violence against police officers in Oregon.
A quarantine is not the same as a ban. The_Donald can still be visited, but only if users explicitly search for it. Also, users must be logged in to view the subreddit, posts will not appear in search results, and founders will not be able to monetize the sub. Normally, quarantined subreddits also don’t appear in the News Feed on the Reddit homepage, but in the specific case of The_Donald, they didn’t. Mods from the subreddit had set it up so that only upvotes and no downvotes could be given, so the posts almost always appeared on the front page. Reddit adapted its algorithm so that the posts no longer appeared there at all.
The_Donald was the largest pro-Donald Trump subreddit on the site for many years, and even one of the largest on the web. Memes about the US president were constantly being shared on the forum, and it is one of the platforms alongside 4chan that allowed the controversial symbol Pepe the Frog to grow into an alt-right symbol. Also, the counterfeit video of Donald Trump beating a man with a CNN logo for his head came off the subreddit. It was approved by the president at the time put it on Twitter myself. Trump himself once did an Ask Me Anything on the site.
Reddit has struggled with the controversial subreddit for years. Where the social medium regularly bans or quarantines other subreddits, the site The_Donald always wanted to ‘keep giving a voice’. Despite this, users on the subreddit regularly called for violence against minorities and often praised Nazi ideas.