Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/ZUMA
On Friday, Reddit banned r/donaldtrump, its major online hub for grassroots Trump fans, for inciting violence and glorifying the armed attack his supporters carried out on Capitol Hill.
“Reddit’s site-wide policies prohibit content that promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals,” a Reddit spokesperson told Axios, noting that the company was “reaching out to moderators to remind them of our policies.”
The spokesperson empathized the messageboard’s ban was due to “repeated policy violations in recent days regarding the violence at the U.S. Capitol.”
The ban also follows Mother Jones’ October reporting on how users of the subreddit were flouting Reddit’s ban on r/The_Donald—a similar, earlier iteration of the board that had been banned earlier in the summer. In private Discord chats, moderators of r/donaldtrump bragged about being former moderators of r/The_Donald, and touted r/donaldtrump as a replacement to the banned subreddit.
Well before this week, the group ran afoul of Reddit hate speech and violence policies by advocating for violence and posting racist messages—content that often went unmoderated.
In other posts on r/donaldtrump, users have justified killing innocent children caught in the crossfire of America’s Middle Eastern military interventions, praised ICE for allegedly serving pork to Muslim detainees, posted content lauding Kyle Rittenhouse’s killing of protesters, called for “ending the riots with excessive force,” and spread baseless conspiracies about antifa starting wildfires in Oregon.
Friday’s removal of the group follows earlier steps by tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter. to restrict Trump’s own ability to post and spread falsehoods about his election loss or encourage further violence.
