26 ms·

The_Donald

216 points by hih0 7y ago

rofo1 7y ago
From what I gather, the reason was that there were calls to violence that weren't deleted sufficiently fast by the mods. Someone correct me if this is wrong. This seems like it would be easy to replicate this on any subreddit, doesn't it? Get a group of people and deliberately target subreddits in various hours of the day with calls for violence, and then report them to the admins of reddit. Wouldn't this, in theory at least, quarantine any subreddit? Something doesn't add up here.
- equalunique 7y ago
  The Against Hate Subreddit orchestrated similar false-flag attacks last year and successfully shut down many other subreddits. During 2016 on Facebook, similar spamming tactics were used to shut down many pages promoting Bernie Sanders. If it really were something orchestrated by users of T_D, then why would they report it to reddit? It's more likely that outside forces had a hand in this.
  - rofo1 7y ago
    Maybe it's unclear from my post, but I don't think T_D users did this, or even deserve this. I was merely commenting how easy is to do this to other subreddits, so any subreddit can get banned etc. So maybe Reddit should reconsider their position on banning solely because of this, if this is in fact the only reason they quarantined T_D.
    - equalunique 7y ago
      So I think we're on the same page. Not sure why you got downvoted, but that wasn't me. I was only trying to list a couple of examples that might add to your theory.
- sawjet 7y ago
  Media Matters a Political action group with the mission of "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." posted this[0] article just 2 days ago. I'm pretty sure this same source has been banned from the politics subreddit for self-promotion and astroturfing comments but I can't find the source. Amusingly, all of the wayback archives for the r/politics blacklist have been purged from existence. [0]https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump-subreddit-is-full-of-calls-for-violence-in-support-of-Oregon-Republicans/224018 https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...
- ng12 7y ago
  Judging by the fact that there are multiple watchdog-style subreddits dedicated to policing Reddit content (Against Hate Subreddits, Top Minds, SRS, plus others) I wouldn't be surprised at all.
- Can_Not 7y ago
  I look forward to any supporting evidence for your conspiracy shower thought.
  - rofo1 7y ago
    Interesting :) What part of my post do you find it to be 'conspiracy' ? That's the reason they stated for the quarantine - that's official and confirmed. I quote: “encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon” [0] Since they remove all such posts from there (also can be proved by searching through the subreddit), that must mean that the speed of removal was the ultimate reason, right? The mods said something similar I believe: “It would seem they’ve set up an impossible standard as a reason to kill us before the 2020 election.” [0] I think "impossible standard" means that nobody can delete the posts faster than that. If you accept all of this on face value (guy posts on subreddit, mods don't react "quick enough", subreddit gets quarantined - end of story), then good for you! I've got a bridge to sell you :) [0] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/26/reddit-the-donald-trump-quarantined-subreddit https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/26/reddit-the-d...
malvosenior 7y ago
That's pretty ridiculous (and I'm sure counter productive). If you look at /r/politics, it's as bad as The_Donald yet remains a default sub. https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/
- wyldfire 7y ago
  I rarely drop in on T_D but when I last looked it was kinda ludicrous. I had a head-scratching Poe's law moment with most of the comments. /r/politics does have some unreasonable frothing-at-the-mouth comments but not ones that seem like they're trolling.
- spamizbad 7y ago
  /r/politics isn't threatening to murder police offices unless you think "ACAB" and "40%" memes constitute threats of violence.
- lukifer 7y ago
  /r/politics has become a race-to-the-bottom of polarization, but it's nowhere near as bad as T_D; a civil defense of Trump on the former will be tolerated (even if downvoted/flamed), whereas any anti-Trump sentiment on the latter results in an instant ban. One could perhaps attribute to the difference to a supposedly neutral framing vs. an explicitly partisan one; but much of the opposition to Trump (including from conservatives) has to do with flaunting democratic norms and other such "meta-politics", rather than policy positions, which I think is certainly fair game for the /r/politics hivemind to have an explicit opinion on.
  - sawjet 7y ago
    users get rate-limited on r/politics if their comment is downvoted too far, effectively silencing anyone who doesn't go along with the hivemind.
  - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
    >/r/politics has become a race-to-the-bottom of polarization, but it's nowhere near as bad as T_D; a civil defense of Trump on the former will be tolerated (even if downvoted/flamed), whereas any anti-Trump sentiment on the latter results in an instant ban. The problem is /r/politics pretends to be a general politics subreddit, while /r/the_donald is explicitly just for Trump supporters.
mdorazio 7y ago
I feel like reddit ends up playing whack-a-mole with toxic subreddits because it's not like the problem users disappear - they just move onto another subreddit and slowly turn it into some flavor of the place that got banned/quarantined. This might be an unsolvable problem long-term without something like real IDs tied to user accounts, which brings its own slew of problems.
- msbarnett 7y ago
  > I feel like reddit ends up playing whack-a-mole with toxic subreddits because it's not like the problem users disappear - they just move onto another subreddit and slowly turn it into some flavor of the place that got banned/quarantined. On the contrary, at least one study found that what you describe does not happen. Rather, a quantitative reduction in hate speech was observed when Reddit banned a number of toxic subreddits in 2015. Inhabitants either moved off the platform entirely (accounts that frequented those subs ceased to be active) or those that stayed appeared to modulate their behaviour to conform to the norms of less-toxic subs. http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
  - creaghpatr 7y ago
    The dynamics may be different with 750,000 subs (on T_D) compared to ~20,000 in the ones mentioned in the study. Political-related speech won't disappear from Reddit, especially with an election year coming up.
    - msbarnett 7y ago
      > The dynamics may be different with 750,000 subs (on T_D) compared to ~20,000 in the ones mentioned in the study. They may be, they may not be. So far we have evidence that, in general, banning a sub doesn't result in it simply diasporaing into other subs. "Something different will happen this time because I feel like it will" isn't a terribly compelling counter-argument in and of itself. Absent new evidence, and given the evidence already in hand, this seems like a reasonable move to me. > Political-related speech won't disappear from Reddit, especially with an election year coming up. I don't think Reddit is attempting to "eliminate political-related speech" in general so much as the "I'm ready and willing to put a bullet in an Oregon cop's skull" speech that was being given free-reign in this subreddit?
empath75 7y ago
About time. I am looking forward to the drama.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  Perhaps we can anticipate an angry tweet from the White House about this.
deleted 7y ago
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empath75 7y ago
https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2019/06/25/you-cant-offer-to-murder-cops-on-reddit-unless-youre-on-r-thedonald/ https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2019/06/25/you-cant-offer-to-... This article is probably what triggered it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- egwynn 7y ago
  Interestingly that article continuously refers to the sub as ‘r/TheDonald’ (which is about Donald Glover) instead of ‘r/The_Donald’ (which is the sub that’s been quarantined).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - sdinsn 7y ago
    Looks like it's been corrected
    - egwynn 7y ago
      Hmmm mostly yeah. The title + 4th from last paragraph still have it wrong though.
      - bduerst 7y ago
        Probably auto-formatting that removes underscores.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    It also refers to two posts on a thread which are impossible to find, because it doesn't reference user names, and the posts are apparently deleted now, and were not captured in the google cache of the page, or common reddit archiving sites(ceddit/removeddit). What if those two posts referenced in the article were written by the same person, and generally downvoted?
LandR 7y ago
Why? I don't like Donald Trump, so I don't go to Donald Trump fan sites. Can't people that don't like the content just not read it?
- criddell 7y ago
  The subreddit was in violation of Reddit's rules. I can only guess that they finally did something because the mods were too slow to respond this time.
- nlh 7y ago
  Read reddit’s linked description of what a quarantined community is - it explains the answer to your question. It’s not about people who want to go to fan sites (or don’t want to go) - it’s about misinformation / inappropriate content leaking out to folks who might inadvertently view it and not understand the rat hole they’re about to go down. Putting the subreddit into the quarantine just means that there’s an extra disclosure and opt-in before viewing content from that subreddit (and content won’t be shown in popular, /r/all, etc.)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
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- sdinsn 7y ago
  The problem is that they violated Reddit's rules by posting threats of violence against Oregon police & public officials.
- StellarTabi 7y ago
  That would be nice, but they come into normal subs with detached from reality troll comments and disturbing "opinions".
deleted 7y ago
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amyjess 7y ago
According to the post about this in SRD [0], this was because of repeated calls to violence (something that has been well-documented), and the final straw was repeated incitements to commit violence over the situation in Oregon. The following is an excerpt of the message the Reddit admins sent the moderators of /r/The_Donald: (Edit: I originally posted an excerpt of the message from the OP in the SRD post. I've since found the full message in a comment [1], so I'll be replacing it here with that version. Of note is that the admins have disabled /r/The_Donald's ability to use custom styling, as they abused CSS to hide the report button in order to prevent people from reporting violent content to them. The comment also mentions that one of the moderators of /r/The_Donald was stripped of most of his permissions as well.) > Dear Mods, > We want to let you know that your community has been quarantined, as outlined in Reddit’s Content Policy. > The reason for the quarantine is that over the last few months we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community and an over-reliance on Reddit admins to manage users and remove posts that violate our content policy, including content that encourages or incites violence. Most recently, we have observed this behavior in the form of encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon. This is not only in violation of our site-wide policies, but also your own community rules (rule #9). You can find violating content that we removed in your mod logs. > As we have discussed in the past, and as detailed in our content policy and moderator guidelines, we expect you to enforce against rule-breaking content. You’ve made progress over the last year, but we continue to observe and take action on a disproportionate amount of rule-breaking behavior in this community. We recognize that you do remove posts that are reported, but we are troubled that violent content more often goes unreported, and worse, is upvoted. > User reports and downvotes are an essential way that Reddit functions to moderate content. Limiting or prohibiting them prevents you from moderating your community effectively. Because of this, we are disabling your custom styling in order to restore these essential functions. > As stated in our Moderator Guidelines, our goal is to keep the platform alive and vibrant, as well as to ensure your community can reach people interested in it. Accordingly, here are the specific terms of the quarantine and the next steps we are asking from you as a mod team to resolve this situation. > Quarantine terms: > Visitors to this community will see a warning that requires users to explicitly opt-in to viewing it. This messaging reminds users of the importance of reporting rule-breaking content. > Custom styling has been disabled to restore the report and downvote buttons. > We hope both these changes will help improve the signal around rule-breaking content and improve your ability to effectively address it. > Next steps: > You unambiguously communicate to your subscribers that violent content is unacceptable. > You communicate to your users that reporting is a core function of Reddit and is essential to maintaining the health and viability of the community. > Following that, we will continue to monitor your community, specifically looking at report rate and for patterns of rule-violating content. > Undertake any other actions you determine to reduce the amount of rule-violating content. > Following these changes, we will consider an appeal to lift the quarantine, in line with the process outlined here. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe_donald_has_been_quarantined_discuss_this/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe_donald_has_been_quarantined_discuss_this/es3sin0/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe...
hashberry 7y ago
Interesting, because the The_Donald has always been toxic, but now action is finally being taken. The narrative on The_Donald this week has been about Google's interference with the political process such as manipulating search results (e.g. the Project Veritas Jen Gennai video)[0], and why the media is ignoring this after obsessing over Russian interference. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c4miq0/insider_blows_whistle_exec_reveals_google_plan_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c4miq0/insider_...
- CapricornNoble 7y ago
  Your first sentence implies that the subject/content of your second sentence is somehow toxic or factually incorrect. Can you clarify what you mean? The last time I checked, (about 12 hours ago), MSNBC/CNN/NYT/WashingtonPost/Vox/HuffPo....not a single one had an article about this latest Google situation. There are Federal Senators and Congressmen grilling Google about this and issuing statements and NOBODY thinks it should even be worthy of public attention or discourse, except for Tucker Carlson on FOX and YT journalists such as Tim Pool (a center-Left Bernie voter)?!?!
- krapp 7y ago
  Referring to TLA, the rationale for quarantine may have been calls by T_D users for violence against police officers, not (if you're implying this) an attempt censor news about Google.
  - rhegart 7y ago
    r/politics is equally bad, seriously. Look through a police thread. r/chapotraphouse is insane, far worse than any subreddit today. Breaks every reddit rule.
    - krapp 7y ago
      Even assuming that were true for the sake of argument, it doesn't suggest /r/The_Donald shouldn't be quarantined. At best, it means other subs deserve to be quarantined along with it.
rhegart 7y ago
The perception of bias from liberal tech platforms will lead to a large group becoming “conservative” when in actuality they are just contrarian and go for the counter culture underdog side. It’s a real phenomenon. The artificial religious right in bush era constantly pushed in our faces led to liberal values completely dominating mainstream society partly because it all felt too fake and suffocating it forced average person to think and the right turned into a joke. I predict liberal values that are mainstream today will be met with the same fate. They are filled with as many fallacies if not more than the religious right and the more suffocating almost religion like feel they get when someone tries to argue against one aspect, the more people will rebel and fall into the arms of conservatives.
- bassman9000 7y ago
  Note you got downvoted, but not debated. Some of the liberal values will remain mainstream. Some of them will be abandoned as passing fads. I think people are not against, subconsciously, to the evolution of some of these values, but to the rate and way they're imposed onto society.
- mcphage 7y ago
  > when in actuality they are just contrarian and go for the counter culture underdog side I'm not sure why you think this is better. > the more people will rebel and fall into the arms of conservatives So they're not actually "conservative", but they will be? Sure. Unless of course, that already happened, and they actually are.
- 0815test 7y ago
  The values you are objecting to are not "liberal" values but radically collectivizing ones. Liberals value freedom and have always done so.
sawjet 7y ago
Interesting, I've saved multiple comments on r/politics that explicitly call for violence against trump supporters that I've reported and they still aren't deleted. It is also unfortunate that reddit doesn't think it needs to provide any evidence for this action, considering that it is the beginning of Trump's 2020 campaign and on the eve of the Dem primary debates.
- eesmith 7y ago
  FWIW, his 2020 campaign started in January 2017, just after getting into office. His first rally was a month later.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    His campaign officially just kicked off, about one week ago. But yeah, he himself is in a sort of perpetual campaign mode.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      No he filed his new campaign the day s/after/of taking office. > Trump began his reelection campaign unusually early for an incumbent President. He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2020_presidential_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2020_presidential...
      - eesmith 7y ago
        The operative word is 'officially', whatever that means. From your link we see both: > He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration. and > On June 18, 2019, Trump held an official campaign launch event at the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago
Voat with your feet, as they say!
- mankeysee 7y ago
  They did try that once, the sane ones among them ended up loathing that site
draw_down 7y ago
The conservative reaction to such things used to be "it's their property and they can do what they want with it, so if you don't like it go build your own". I guess they don't feel that way anymore.
s9w 7y ago
reddit censored the_donald long before this. It was completely filtered off r/all. This effectively changes not that much.
Miner49er 7y ago
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain /r/The_Donald already didn't have ads on it as the article implied it did. Reddit only allows ads in white-listed subs and T_D was never white listed AFAIK. Edit: Found where I read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/groundrules_for_this_community/ https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/gro... Edit 2: my comment was moved from a different thread that was on a TechCrunch article on this. TechCrunch claimed that this quarantine would mean that ads would no longer run on T_D.
- revicon 7y ago
  Quarantine also prevents their posts from showing up on the front page or in the /r/all feed and (I think) you can’t access the sub if you aren’t already a member and are on the mobile app.
  - BitwiseFool 7y ago
    They already removed it from the front page a while back. It would only appear for subscribers.
  - darksaints 7y ago
    Also, subscribed members can't access unless they are email verified, which means the vast majority of their upvoter sockpuppeteers can't get in.
- ixtli 7y ago
  As far as I know ads are served on all subreddits until they are quarantined. According to https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205701245-Quarantined-Subreddits https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205701245-Quara... they totally demonatize, meaning even reddit gold doesn't generate profit for reddit.
  - ihuman 7y ago
    How is that possible, if you buy reddit gold before you use it?
gfosco 7y ago
The subreddit moderators provided the admin logs, showing that on average, 1 post per day was actioned on by reddit admins. "Biggest headache" yeah, right.
- altcognito 7y ago
  I doubt their headaches were limited to only a single post on average per day.
- MrStonedOne 7y ago
  For admins thats a high amount, They require moderators moderate for the reddit rules as well as the subreddit rules to ensure they don't have to step in.
  - uncoder0 7y ago
    To be fair, in the same logs it shows they removed mod permissions from one of the mods. The picture it paints is that the Admins were making it harder for them to moderate the subreddit.
    - bduerst 7y ago
      The mod was removed because they violated Reddit rules of not using mod positions to promote financial gain. The mod was promoting his gofundme campaign and broke the rules. This same mode also delisted three other mods, which was making it harder to moderate the subreddit. Interpreting these actions as site admins intentionally making it more difficult for moderators of that subreddit is cognitive dissonance.
- AaronFriel 7y ago
  The members of the the_donald had a history of breaking rules and crying foul any time any sort of administrative action was taken against them for it. Whether it was for brigading and harassment, or flooding modmail in other subreddits, or other actions. The result was that after the banning of the just as toxic "fatpeoplehate", admins were loathe to interfere with t_d. Any administrative response was met with charges of politicization, "liberal bias", and more rule-breaking. I'm surprised it's taken this long, but it appears that Reddit's staff waited until they had an obviously non-partisan reason for doing it. In this case, threatening police officers. I think they wanted to wait until they had a reason that would be difficult for people to turn into a partisan brawl that would give Reddit bad publicity. Imagine if you will the difficulty conservative sites may have in threading the needle that t_d is simultaneously being persecuted here for their conservative, pro-Trump political views, and that the particular views they were banned for were making violent threats to law enforcement.
product50 7y ago
Anything pro right is a headache while extreme left (aka AOC) is Jesus' gift to the world!
- product50 7y ago
  And Hacker News is a terrible sub to discuss this. Most tech workers tilt far-left - so likely any discussion here talking about neutrality will elicit downvotes and hatred. But here is the thing though. While reddit owners and hacker news represent one worldview which aligns left, the reality is that a large part of America, who stay quiet and are not active, tilts right. And by banning subreddits and downvoting anything which attacks left, we just create an environment where discourse is prevented - but the feeling is not.
  - buboard 7y ago
    i actively flag all political posts here. this is clearly not a place to have a sane political discussion .
  - brighter2morrow 7y ago
    Where did you get the idea most coders tilt far-left?
  - kjsbfkjbf 7y ago
    HackerNews is at best center-left. Maybe not that. The world extends beyond America where being on the "left" involves drone bombing.
    - buboard 7y ago
      the issue is the militancy, not the particular orientation.
  - phailhaus 7y ago
    It is disingenuous to suggest that these subreddits are being banned simply because they "attack the left". T_D was banned because of a consistent pattern of rhetoric that violates Reddit's ToS, the most recent cases being outright calling for taking up arms against the government and killing police officers. r/frenworld, r/clownworld, and r/honkler were all banned for similar reasons, being hotbeds of violent white nationalist rhetoric.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
Here's an article with a collection of threats of violence that may have precipitated this: https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump-subreddit-is-full-of-calls-for-violence-in-support-of-Oregon-Republicans/224018 https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump... Representative quote: A user wrote, “Rifles are the only way we're going to get any peace in our lives ever again,” adding, “It's either war and we get rid of these guys or a lifetime of listening to this shit over and over again start getting yourself ready.”
x1ph0z 7y ago
Thank god, that subreddit was insufferable
- ng12 7y ago
  Sure, but you didn't have to visit it. The worst part of the increasing corporatization of the public-facing internet is that we no longer seem to be content leaving well enough alone.
  - asdff 7y ago
    The problem with that subreddit was more that it made headlines. If it wasn't named in dozens of articles, all over the news, and an overall very public embarrassment for reddit for three years now, everything would be all fine and dandy for the donald.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bhouston 7y ago
Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population. Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less. But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
- futureastronaut 7y ago
  Have you tried searching reddit for threads about a current event, only to find pages of results of vitriolic/psychotic ("trolling!") /r/The_Donald posts? I'm pretty tired of it and I hope they ban that sub and similar ones. I couldn't care less about the political aspect, it's the 4chan lulz crap that has to go. From reddit's point of view these users are parasites, who basically deface the website in an attempt to control it. That's their M.O., good riddance.
  - ng12 7y ago
    I can't say I've ever experienced this. In fact, I would occasionally browse r/T_D just to temper the overtly left-leaning bias of /r/news and /r/politics.
    - asdfgasd 7y ago
      /r/news is not left-leaning by any reasonable metric (there is frequently blatant racism heavily upvoted). /r/politics is only left-leaning because of how heavily skewed right american politics is. Most of their opinions are centrist at best. Their obsession with trump is a bit annoying, but it's only annoying, not actively harmful.
  - 7y ago
nilkn 7y ago
I suspect this isn't going to accomplish much of anything and may even backfire. According to published statistics by Reddit as of this writing, this subreddit has 755k subscribers and over 45,000 members online right now. For comparison, the official politics subreddit has 5.2 million subscribers but fewer online members (42,000). r/the_donald has an extraordinarily high level of activity and engagement. So long as r/the_donald exists and is maintained, it can act as a sort of black hole so that official subreddits can be heavily moderated to support certain platforms, politicians, and advertisers. If it were actually shut down, though, the users there are so numerous and active that it probably wouldn't be possible to maintain r/politics or other official subreddits in their current moderated state. Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn't accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.
- yummypaint 7y ago
  TD cant be directly tother subs due to the volume of fake/bot accounts
- tdb7893 7y ago
  In my experience when Reddit banned the more toxic subreddits many of the other subreddits I actually did frequent became better. I think the people who would be in those subreddits are already there and when there are bans in subreddits some of the people leave and the community is better for it.
  - nilkn 7y ago
    Those subreddits tended to be very small and inactive in comparison. r/the_donald is one of the most active communities on the entire website.
    - tdb7893 7y ago
      The thing is that those people are also on other subreddits, people generally don't frequent just one. So those people always bring in Reddit to comment on the Donald is also leasing to more engagement on other subreddits. It's possible that the Donald would organize more and be more of an issue in other subreddits but that wasn't how it worked in the past.
bhouston 7y ago
Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population. Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less. But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
- root_axis 7y ago
  > by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population. I don't think reddit is the measure of acceptable discourse. If the_donald was banned it would just mean that its users would have to find another subreddit or site to use, it says nothing about what type of discourse is generally acceptable. Further, I think it's pretty obvious by now that reddit's problem with the_donald is not related to their political ideas since there other subreddits supportive of the president that have had no conflicts with the site admins (e.g. /r/conservative, /r/republican).
- asdfgasd 7y ago
  > Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? That's the problem though. The mods were repeatedly hostile to any attempts by the admins to handle the more egregious rule violations. The admins have treated them with kid gloves for years now. They were historically one of the worst sources of brigading of other (much smaller) subs. For instance, /r/legaladvice had huge problems with them in the past. Even the chapo mods complied with the admins when they were asked to crack down on calls for violence... Even though those calls for violence were about _dead_ slave owners... Hard to kill someone already dead.
writepub 7y ago
Observe the rinse-and-repeat patterns here: 1. Openly leftist media outlet [1] sensationalizes posts by a few users, and proclaims a non-sequitur - that the problem lies with the entire sub-reddit, instead of with a few users 2. SV tech company feigns umbrage, cowering behind the sensationalism of said media outlet, legitimizes their false claims and BANS the entire sub-reddit. Instead of banning the offending users. 3. Ecosystem of left leaning outlets (techcrunch et. al.) publish opinions in agreement with the actions, though similar actions from their preferred political faction (say for a few illegal posts by far-left activists on AOC subreddit) goes ignored and free of media amplification. The frequency of the above steps happening has skyrocketed as the democratic presidential campaign gains steam. If you trained an AI on the above phenomenon, the internet would be rid of any speech not condoned by the left faction of the democratic party. Techno-fascism is well and truly here. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759967/reddit-quarantines-the-donald-trump-subreddit-misbehavior-violence-police-oregon https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759967/reddit-quarantin...
- StellarTabi 7y ago
  > (say for a few illegal posts by far-left activists on AOC subreddit) [Citation Needed]
khawkins 7y ago
First they came for the Trump supporters, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Trump supporter.
- jrace 7y ago
  Nobody's coming for the Trump Supporters. They did not play by the rules that all voluntary users of a private website agree to abide by. They are still free to support Trump on other sub reddits, are if banned from reddit they still have the rest of the internet to play in.
  - khawkins 7y ago
    Nearly the entire subreddit is playing by the rules. If the actions of a minuscule percentage of anonymous social media accounts can result in the destruction of entire political forums, then this establishes a dangerous precedent. You can silence opposition groups by planting false flags and spreading infighting, hatred, and violence in their communities. It seems like the sub /r/ChapoTrapHouse seems to claiming they did just this. We don't want a world where opposition groups are regularly trying to astroturf calls for violence in the other group. This guarantees escalation; some of these calls will be carried through.
    - jrace 7y ago
      The rules state no calls for violence. that subreddit called for violence regularly.
MRD85 7y ago
I'm actually sort of scared with the way that censorship of different views is becoming the norm. I'm predominantly left leaning but I'm seeing more and more moderation where the only allowed opinion is the correct one. I seem to recall that a lot of horrible things were started with good intentions, ie Nazi book burnings were censoring the wrong views. It's also incredible divisive. In my country we had a football star doing a GoFundMe for legal fees after he was sacked for a religious and homophobic cartoon on his social media. GoFundMe blocked his campaign, as it's against their views, and now he's making more money than before through a private donations drive. The banning of The Donald is going to drive an even bigger wedge between the two sides of the political spectrum. For a political movement obsessed with power/privilege, the left seems oblivious to its own power/privilege. They wield the cast majority of the societal power currently and they're throwing it around like a hammer.
- Daishiman 7y ago
  > The banning of The Donald is going to drive an even bigger wedge between the two sides of the political spectrum. This keeps getting repeated over and over again and does not correspond with reality. /r/the_donald is a forum full of obvious bots, spin doctoring, and people with openly extreme and antisocial views. Out entire history has shown that the "deplatforming" of these views works. The views in that forum are not part of a majority, nor what most people would associate with mental sanity. You would do well to dive into the content.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    > This keeps getting repeated over and over again and does not correspond with reality. Like it or not Donald Trump actually is the president of the United States. It's not like this is some fringe forum of weirdos, it's the fan site of the sitting president of a major country. It's also very likely that it played a big role in helping him get elected. If you think quarantining or banning The_Donald won't sow the seeds of discord, you're sorely mistaken.
    - Daishiman 7y ago
sho 7y ago
I was actually very disappointed when Reddit banned r/WatchPeopleDie. Sure, there were some idiots there - there always are, insensitive comments sometimes, and a lot of gallows humour - sometimes literally. But there were thoughtful comments as well, and the content itself could be... well, educational, in a brutal kind of way. I visited occasionally as a kind of memento mori, and I feel like gained a lot of appreciation for the fragility of life from that sub - as well as a very healthy respect for safety around industrial machinery, and a resolve to never again ride a motor scooter in South East Asia. Sweeping it away - sure, they likely made their lives easier. But what's the real outcome? The real freaks who get off on that stuff will go off to some horrible other site to ferment and radicalize away from the normalising influence of the more well-adjusted participants there, and regular people, who just might have been curious, have been deprived of whatever insights they might have found. I think it's a real shame. And for what it's worth, I don't think The_Donald should be banned either. People have a right to speak, and we can ignore them if we want - or we can at least try to engage. I don't buy the "private company, they can do what they want!" argument. The age of the internet has introduced powerful network effects into where we can conduct our public discourse with any efficacy - Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you don't like - you don't really support free speech!
- Daishiman 7y ago
  > Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you don't like - you don't really support free speech! Unlike Facebook and Google, which exert truly horrendous amounts of power over very significant aspects of people's lives, Reddit is, fundamentally, just another forum. It even has its older versions open-sourced. In fact, There are reddit clones where these things are perfectly allowed. And those clones are cesspits of schizophrenics, fascists, and deeply disturbed people.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
AlexB138 7y ago
I don't understand the cat and mouse game conservatives play with Bay-area companies. These companies are blatantly bias against anyone right of their political bubble, but conservatives keep using them and being surprised and outraged when they're censored. On the other hand, these companies are playing dumb and doing mental back flips to try to justify their blatant bias and claim neutrality because they only want to run off the conservative thought leaders, and keep most of the users. Conservatives just need to move off of these platforms. They're private property, let them have their bubbles. This moral outrage at being censored is a waste of time, and staying on these platforms just continues to enrich them. I'm all for avoiding echo chambers, but it's futile to try to have neutral debate on a biased platform.
- krapp 7y ago
  Why are you trying to associate the extremist views of The_Donald, and the violent, separatist rhetoric there and on other platforms, with mainstream conservatism?
  - AlexB138 7y ago
    I've never read a single post in The_Donald, and only rarely read reddit as a whole. I couldn't claim any idea of the group's views (though the habit of claiming the other team's ideas are things like "violent, separatist rhetoric" is pretty common, so pardon me if I don't take your word for it). I'm simply talking about the trend with conservatives, and those right of center, in general. I don't have any particular love for the modern Republican party. I'm just pointing out how ridiculous it is for them to setup shop on platforms owned by their political rivals and then be surprised when excuses are found to shut them down.
    - krapp 7y ago
      There is no trend. Plenty of conservative and right-wing subs still exist on Reddit, plenty of conservatives and right-wing commenters are still on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. There has been no general purge of conservative or right-wing content from social media. Also, it's odd that you seem to have missed the specific context of this thread entirely, to the point of never even having read The_Donald once, and having no idea of the nature of their politics, much less the alleged actions leading to their quarantine. Did you just comment based on the title alone?
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
I didn't vote for Trump, don't support him, and think he is a worthless human being. That being said, its become crystal clear that a large part of our "cultural elite" at the pinnacle of most big tech companies, media outlets and universities in this country have taken it upon themselves to decide what social and political opinions are acceptable, and are working hard to erase and/or silence anyone who doesn't adhere to their cultural/political ideology. Given the largely centralized nature of modern society and modern communication, this gives tremendous power to those at the top to decide what views are acceptable to disseminate (or hold at all). This is extremely troubling to those of us who believe in the concept of free speech and free expression as being the bedrock of a free society (which is distinct from the legal mechanism of the 1st Amendment). The results of this lockdown on free speech are not necessarily the results being sought or desired by our tech/corporate censors. Ideas and philosophies that are deemed taboo and banned don't simply disappear, they go underground and find alternative communication networks, often becoming even more radical in the process. Those who prefer to keep their heads buried in the sand and suggest that monopolistic behemoths like Google are simply exercising their right as a private company to decide who to silence and who to promote are simply ignoring reality.
RickJWagner 7y ago
One thing we can all agree on: Donald Trump attracts attention like no other. Years from now, controversy will still roil. Historians will have a colorful character to teach about.
yread 7y ago
So many of the users defending The_Donald here (as if it was a serious political platform) are users that seem to comment mostly on political threads or submit only political articles. At least the form they've used so far is a bit more acceptable than average T_D post.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  I kind of dislike when Reddit bleeds onto HN. Any comment not fanatically supporting extreme right wing narratives gets downvoted to oblivion. We're generally not a toxic community and the mods and community here does a pretty good job at keeping a it's on things. It's why I prefer this as pretty much my primary social network. I learn useful things here, have meaningful disagreements that don't end in name calling, and learn tons.
thinkingemote 7y ago
A little observation: this subreddits posting and commenting habits were not like other subreddits. The users used the system more like chat than a forum with no long threaded discussions, very short one line replies and new posts being created instead of comments in an established one, for example. There are a few other subreddits like this and they all appear to work in a similarly ephemeral way. It's odd to me how they use the system. It's similar to 4chan in the ephemerality but it's more like IRC.
digsy 7y ago
In the thread that allegedly lead to the ban (you can see an archived version here - http://archive.is/vpvb4 http://archive.is/vpvb4), The_Donald users post comments like: - 'get a rope' - 'So, firing squad time right?' - 'If he is not fired for this then wtf do we do next? Take matters into our own hands?' What was Reddit supposed to do? Tolerate death threats on its platform? Then get sued if the person gets murdered? And this isnt an isolated example.
- hiram112 7y ago
  If you give me access to their elastic search dB, indexed from the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
- xtirpation 7y ago
  Quarantining the community does nothing to mitigate those risks.
- filoleg 7y ago
  >what was reddit supposed to do? Probably treat the situation the same way they do in other subreddits. The whole “taking matters into our own hands” and calls for violence against politicians happen in other subreddits, and yet they don’t get quarantined (looking at you, r/politics). Either quarantine them all or none of them.
  - pizzazzaro 7y ago
    r/politics perma-bans those commenters with a quickness, unless I'm out of date. Meanwhile, r/LateStageCapitalism, a sub whose premise is to induce lust for the guillotine, has been quarantined before because one user was running around yelling about Guillotines in the comments. This would happen periodically. So the admins changed up the mod team. They kept the Anarchist/Communist asthetic, but Social Democrats run the sub now. And they keep the space guillotine-free.
- grandridge 7y ago
  this is total bullshit, ive been on that sub since the beginning, never calls to violence. I go elsewhere on reddit and Im told I should be harassed and die and so should my newborn son, because you know, hes white. Trump should be killed, mitch mcconnell killed, ag barr and on and on. its censorship, plain and simple, and spare me the private company bs. you want to cite more instances of violence I dare you to find more on t_d, its a daily occurrence on politics, worldnews, the mueller. the people that want to get t_d banned go in and make the comments and then say "look look" but what do you expect from a bunch of pussies
jkljqwiokj 7y ago
Frankly, I think they've effectively killed Reddit with this move. Like it or not, it was one of the last places to discuss right-leaning politics on the site. Every major "neutral" sub (ex: /r/politics) has notoriously biased mods placed in by the admins. Now with one half chopped off from political debates, is the site still fun?
lurquer 7y ago
Dissapearing a subredit devoted to Trump immediately before the Democratic debates? Election meddling.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Probably not. If it were before the Republican debates (if there is a Republican challenger), that might be actual meddling. But before the Democratic debates? How's that supposed to actually change any election outcomes?
  - CapricornNoble 7y ago
    My guess? Issues that get raised on a major information platform such as The_Donald could turn into policy debate questions for the Democrats. Questions like "Given the Project Veritas video and associated leaked documents on emails, what is your position on big tech social media platforms and free speech? If you are President, what is your agenda for balancing the exchange of ideas on arguably private yet mass-media platforms?" A question like that could a) but some of the Democrat candidates in a bind comparing their answer to any voting history/previous statements on the issue or b) could cast light on the sort of topics that obviously Democrat-supporting/anti-Trump big tech doesn't want people to investigate or learn about for themselves.
  - lurquer 7y ago
    Removing a forum dedicated -- at least for the next two nights -- to criticizing the Democratic position, is an obvious tactic. Anyway, the real point of my post was to see how quickly it would be downvoted. Petty partisanship is rife on HN.
KKPMW 7y ago
That's a quick turn from their stance on the same issue just 22 days ago. /u/spez: > While they can be offensive and antagonistic to the rest of Reddit, we have not found them to be in consistent violation of our content policies.[0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/bwpqqi/we_are_us_senator_ron_wyden_and_reddit_ceo_steve/epzk051/ https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/bwpqqi/we_are_us_...
turk73 7y ago
I'm just going to tell you all: I'm a life-long libertarian. You're not going to sway my opinions because I get censored online and my posts deleted. I am limited to 2 posts like every 4 hours lest I poison your minds with theories about free markets and personal freedom. I guess I'm lucky I can post at all, probably someone will come along to fix that glitch or delete my posts or whatever. What are you afraid of? Is freedom really so dangerous? Why have so many tech companies closed ranks around such anti-freedom concepts? What changed since the late '90s and early '00s when tech was so anti-authority and wanted to disrupt bureaucracy and give a voice to other ideas? Freedom is not racist, sexist, or anything else. It is definitely terrifying to someone, though. Is the Millenial generation just so indoctrinated that they can't see how destructive what they are doing is? When you side with the left, you are making a very clear statement about the value of individual human lives (zero). Try having a little self-worth. An estimated 262 million people were murdered by their own governments between 1900 and 1999. That toll is a silent testimonial about misplaced trust and idealism. It is real, it is reality--bodies stacked like cordwood, piled by the thousands, mass graves, misery beyond comprehension. Are we doomed to repeat that? If so, in the next conflagration it will be billions.
- pcunite 7y ago
  Is freedom really so dangerous? Selfishness is the root of it. Can you imagine giving up your place of superiority so that someone else gets a chance? They can't.
nautilus12 7y ago
So whats keeping r/The_Donald from just endorsing a new subreddit to replace the old one?

216 points by hih0 7y ago

From what I gather, the reason was that there were calls to violence that weren't deleted sufficiently fast by the mods. Someone correct me if this is wrong. This seems like it would be easy to replicate this on any subreddit, doesn't it? Get a group of people and deliberately target subreddits in various hours of the day with calls for violence, and then report them to the admins of reddit. Wouldn't this, in theory at least, quarantine any subreddit? Something doesn't add up here.

equalunique 7y ago
The Against Hate Subreddit orchestrated similar false-flag attacks last year and successfully shut down many other subreddits. During 2016 on Facebook, similar spamming tactics were used to shut down many pages promoting Bernie Sanders. If it really were something orchestrated by users of T_D, then why would they report it to reddit? It's more likely that outside forces had a hand in this.
- rofo1 7y ago
  Maybe it's unclear from my post, but I don't think T_D users did this, or even deserve this. I was merely commenting how easy is to do this to other subreddits, so any subreddit can get banned etc. So maybe Reddit should reconsider their position on banning solely because of this, if this is in fact the only reason they quarantined T_D.
  - equalunique 7y ago
    So I think we're on the same page. Not sure why you got downvoted, but that wasn't me. I was only trying to list a couple of examples that might add to your theory.
sawjet 7y ago
Media Matters a Political action group with the mission of "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." posted this[0] article just 2 days ago. I'm pretty sure this same source has been banned from the politics subreddit for self-promotion and astroturfing comments but I can't find the source. Amusingly, all of the wayback archives for the r/politics blacklist have been purged from existence. [0]https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump-subreddit-is-full-of-calls-for-violence-in-support-of-Oregon-Republicans/224018 https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...
ng12 7y ago
Judging by the fact that there are multiple watchdog-style subreddits dedicated to policing Reddit content (Against Hate Subreddits, Top Minds, SRS, plus others) I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Can_Not 7y ago
I look forward to any supporting evidence for your conspiracy shower thought.
- rofo1 7y ago
  Interesting :) What part of my post do you find it to be 'conspiracy' ? That's the reason they stated for the quarantine - that's official and confirmed. I quote: “encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon” [0] Since they remove all such posts from there (also can be proved by searching through the subreddit), that must mean that the speed of removal was the ultimate reason, right? The mods said something similar I believe: “It would seem they’ve set up an impossible standard as a reason to kill us before the 2020 election.” [0] I think "impossible standard" means that nobody can delete the posts faster than that. If you accept all of this on face value (guy posts on subreddit, mods don't react "quick enough", subreddit gets quarantined - end of story), then good for you! I've got a bridge to sell you :) [0] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/26/reddit-the-donald-trump-quarantined-subreddit https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/26/reddit-the-d...

malvosenior 7y ago

That's pretty ridiculous (and I'm sure counter productive). If you look at /r/politics, it's as bad as The_Donald yet remains a default sub. https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/

wyldfire 7y ago
I rarely drop in on T_D but when I last looked it was kinda ludicrous. I had a head-scratching Poe's law moment with most of the comments. /r/politics does have some unreasonable frothing-at-the-mouth comments but not ones that seem like they're trolling.
spamizbad 7y ago
/r/politics isn't threatening to murder police offices unless you think "ACAB" and "40%" memes constitute threats of violence.
lukifer 7y ago
/r/politics has become a race-to-the-bottom of polarization, but it's nowhere near as bad as T_D; a civil defense of Trump on the former will be tolerated (even if downvoted/flamed), whereas any anti-Trump sentiment on the latter results in an instant ban. One could perhaps attribute to the difference to a supposedly neutral framing vs. an explicitly partisan one; but much of the opposition to Trump (including from conservatives) has to do with flaunting democratic norms and other such "meta-politics", rather than policy positions, which I think is certainly fair game for the /r/politics hivemind to have an explicit opinion on.
- sawjet 7y ago
  users get rate-limited on r/politics if their comment is downvoted too far, effectively silencing anyone who doesn't go along with the hivemind.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
  >/r/politics has become a race-to-the-bottom of polarization, but it's nowhere near as bad as T_D; a civil defense of Trump on the former will be tolerated (even if downvoted/flamed), whereas any anti-Trump sentiment on the latter results in an instant ban. The problem is /r/politics pretends to be a general politics subreddit, while /r/the_donald is explicitly just for Trump supporters.

mdorazio 7y ago

I feel like reddit ends up playing whack-a-mole with toxic subreddits because it's not like the problem users disappear - they just move onto another subreddit and slowly turn it into some flavor of the place that got banned/quarantined. This might be an unsolvable problem long-term without something like real IDs tied to user accounts, which brings its own slew of problems.

msbarnett 7y ago
> I feel like reddit ends up playing whack-a-mole with toxic subreddits because it's not like the problem users disappear - they just move onto another subreddit and slowly turn it into some flavor of the place that got banned/quarantined. On the contrary, at least one study found that what you describe does not happen. Rather, a quantitative reduction in hate speech was observed when Reddit banned a number of toxic subreddits in 2015. Inhabitants either moved off the platform entirely (accounts that frequented those subs ceased to be active) or those that stayed appeared to modulate their behaviour to conform to the norms of less-toxic subs. http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  The dynamics may be different with 750,000 subs (on T_D) compared to ~20,000 in the ones mentioned in the study. Political-related speech won't disappear from Reddit, especially with an election year coming up.
  - msbarnett 7y ago
    > The dynamics may be different with 750,000 subs (on T_D) compared to ~20,000 in the ones mentioned in the study. They may be, they may not be. So far we have evidence that, in general, banning a sub doesn't result in it simply diasporaing into other subs. "Something different will happen this time because I feel like it will" isn't a terribly compelling counter-argument in and of itself. Absent new evidence, and given the evidence already in hand, this seems like a reasonable move to me. > Political-related speech won't disappear from Reddit, especially with an election year coming up. I don't think Reddit is attempting to "eliminate political-related speech" in general so much as the "I'm ready and willing to put a bullet in an Oregon cop's skull" speech that was being given free-reign in this subreddit?

empath75 7y ago

About time. I am looking forward to the drama.

pmoriarty 7y ago
Perhaps we can anticipate an angry tweet from the White House about this.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

empath75 7y ago

https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2019/06/25/you-cant-offer-to-murder-cops-on-reddit-unless-youre-on-r-thedonald/ https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2019/06/25/you-cant-offer-to-... This article is probably what triggered it.

deleted 7y ago
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egwynn 7y ago
Interestingly that article continuously refers to the sub as ‘r/TheDonald’ (which is about Donald Glover) instead of ‘r/The_Donald’ (which is the sub that’s been quarantined).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sdinsn 7y ago
  Looks like it's been corrected
  - egwynn 7y ago
    Hmmm mostly yeah. The title + 4th from last paragraph still have it wrong though.
    - bduerst 7y ago
      Probably auto-formatting that removes underscores.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  It also refers to two posts on a thread which are impossible to find, because it doesn't reference user names, and the posts are apparently deleted now, and were not captured in the google cache of the page, or common reddit archiving sites(ceddit/removeddit). What if those two posts referenced in the article were written by the same person, and generally downvoted?

LandR 7y ago

Why? I don't like Donald Trump, so I don't go to Donald Trump fan sites. Can't people that don't like the content just not read it?

criddell 7y ago
The subreddit was in violation of Reddit's rules. I can only guess that they finally did something because the mods were too slow to respond this time.
nlh 7y ago
Read reddit’s linked description of what a quarantined community is - it explains the answer to your question. It’s not about people who want to go to fan sites (or don’t want to go) - it’s about misinformation / inappropriate content leaking out to folks who might inadvertently view it and not understand the rat hole they’re about to go down. Putting the subreddit into the quarantine just means that there’s an extra disclosure and opt-in before viewing content from that subreddit (and content won’t be shown in popular, /r/all, etc.)
deleted 7y ago
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sdinsn 7y ago
The problem is that they violated Reddit's rules by posting threats of violence against Oregon police & public officials.
StellarTabi 7y ago
That would be nice, but they come into normal subs with detached from reality troll comments and disturbing "opinions".

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

amyjess 7y ago

According to the post about this in SRD [0], this was because of repeated calls to violence (something that has been well-documented), and the final straw was repeated incitements to commit violence over the situation in Oregon. The following is an excerpt of the message the Reddit admins sent the moderators of /r/The_Donald: (Edit: I originally posted an excerpt of the message from the OP in the SRD post. I've since found the full message in a comment [1], so I'll be replacing it here with that version. Of note is that the admins have disabled /r/The_Donald's ability to use custom styling, as they abused CSS to hide the report button in order to prevent people from reporting violent content to them. The comment also mentions that one of the moderators of /r/The_Donald was stripped of most of his permissions as well.) > Dear Mods, > We want to let you know that your community has been quarantined, as outlined in Reddit’s Content Policy. > The reason for the quarantine is that over the last few months we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community and an over-reliance on Reddit admins to manage users and remove posts that violate our content policy, including content that encourages or incites violence. Most recently, we have observed this behavior in the form of encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon. This is not only in violation of our site-wide policies, but also your own community rules (rule #9). You can find violating content that we removed in your mod logs. > As we have discussed in the past, and as detailed in our content policy and moderator guidelines, we expect you to enforce against rule-breaking content. You’ve made progress over the last year, but we continue to observe and take action on a disproportionate amount of rule-breaking behavior in this community. We recognize that you do remove posts that are reported, but we are troubled that violent content more often goes unreported, and worse, is upvoted. > User reports and downvotes are an essential way that Reddit functions to moderate content. Limiting or prohibiting them prevents you from moderating your community effectively. Because of this, we are disabling your custom styling in order to restore these essential functions. > As stated in our Moderator Guidelines, our goal is to keep the platform alive and vibrant, as well as to ensure your community can reach people interested in it. Accordingly, here are the specific terms of the quarantine and the next steps we are asking from you as a mod team to resolve this situation. > Quarantine terms: > Visitors to this community will see a warning that requires users to explicitly opt-in to viewing it. This messaging reminds users of the importance of reporting rule-breaking content. > Custom styling has been disabled to restore the report and downvote buttons. > We hope both these changes will help improve the signal around rule-breaking content and improve your ability to effectively address it. > Next steps: > You unambiguously communicate to your subscribers that violent content is unacceptable. > You communicate to your users that reporting is a core function of Reddit and is essential to maintaining the health and viability of the community. > Following that, we will continue to monitor your community, specifically looking at report rate and for patterns of rule-violating content. > Undertake any other actions you determine to reduce the amount of rule-violating content. > Following these changes, we will consider an appeal to lift the quarantine, in line with the process outlined here. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe_donald_has_been_quarantined_discuss_this/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe_donald_has_been_quarantined_discuss_this/es3sin0/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe...

hashberry 7y ago

Interesting, because the The_Donald has always been toxic, but now action is finally being taken. The narrative on The_Donald this week has been about Google's interference with the political process such as manipulating search results (e.g. the Project Veritas Jen Gennai video)[0], and why the media is ignoring this after obsessing over Russian interference. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c4miq0/insider_blows_whistle_exec_reveals_google_plan_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c4miq0/insider_...

CapricornNoble 7y ago
Your first sentence implies that the subject/content of your second sentence is somehow toxic or factually incorrect. Can you clarify what you mean? The last time I checked, (about 12 hours ago), MSNBC/CNN/NYT/WashingtonPost/Vox/HuffPo....not a single one had an article about this latest Google situation. There are Federal Senators and Congressmen grilling Google about this and issuing statements and NOBODY thinks it should even be worthy of public attention or discourse, except for Tucker Carlson on FOX and YT journalists such as Tim Pool (a center-Left Bernie voter)?!?!
krapp 7y ago
Referring to TLA, the rationale for quarantine may have been calls by T_D users for violence against police officers, not (if you're implying this) an attempt censor news about Google.
- rhegart 7y ago
  r/politics is equally bad, seriously. Look through a police thread. r/chapotraphouse is insane, far worse than any subreddit today. Breaks every reddit rule.
  - krapp 7y ago
    Even assuming that were true for the sake of argument, it doesn't suggest /r/The_Donald shouldn't be quarantined. At best, it means other subs deserve to be quarantined along with it.

rhegart 7y ago

The perception of bias from liberal tech platforms will lead to a large group becoming “conservative” when in actuality they are just contrarian and go for the counter culture underdog side. It’s a real phenomenon. The artificial religious right in bush era constantly pushed in our faces led to liberal values completely dominating mainstream society partly because it all felt too fake and suffocating it forced average person to think and the right turned into a joke. I predict liberal values that are mainstream today will be met with the same fate. They are filled with as many fallacies if not more than the religious right and the more suffocating almost religion like feel they get when someone tries to argue against one aspect, the more people will rebel and fall into the arms of conservatives.

bassman9000 7y ago
Note you got downvoted, but not debated. Some of the liberal values will remain mainstream. Some of them will be abandoned as passing fads. I think people are not against, subconsciously, to the evolution of some of these values, but to the rate and way they're imposed onto society.
mcphage 7y ago
> when in actuality they are just contrarian and go for the counter culture underdog side I'm not sure why you think this is better. > the more people will rebel and fall into the arms of conservatives So they're not actually "conservative", but they will be? Sure. Unless of course, that already happened, and they actually are.
0815test 7y ago
The values you are objecting to are not "liberal" values but radically collectivizing ones. Liberals value freedom and have always done so.

sawjet 7y ago

Interesting, I've saved multiple comments on r/politics that explicitly call for violence against trump supporters that I've reported and they still aren't deleted. It is also unfortunate that reddit doesn't think it needs to provide any evidence for this action, considering that it is the beginning of Trump's 2020 campaign and on the eve of the Dem primary debates.

eesmith 7y ago
FWIW, his 2020 campaign started in January 2017, just after getting into office. His first rally was a month later.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  His campaign officially just kicked off, about one week ago. But yeah, he himself is in a sort of perpetual campaign mode.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    No he filed his new campaign the day s/after/of taking office. > Trump began his reelection campaign unusually early for an incumbent President. He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2020_presidential_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2020_presidential...
    - eesmith 7y ago
      The operative word is 'officially', whatever that means. From your link we see both: > He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration. and > On June 18, 2019, Trump held an official campaign launch event at the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida
gremlinsinc 7y ago

bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago

Voat with your feet, as they say!

mankeysee 7y ago
They did try that once, the sane ones among them ended up loathing that site

draw_down 7y ago

The conservative reaction to such things used to be "it's their property and they can do what they want with it, so if you don't like it go build your own". I guess they don't feel that way anymore.

s9w 7y ago

reddit censored the_donald long before this. It was completely filtered off r/all. This effectively changes not that much.

Miner49er 7y ago

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain /r/The_Donald already didn't have ads on it as the article implied it did. Reddit only allows ads in white-listed subs and T_D was never white listed AFAIK. Edit: Found where I read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/groundrules_for_this_community/ https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/gro... Edit 2: my comment was moved from a different thread that was on a TechCrunch article on this. TechCrunch claimed that this quarantine would mean that ads would no longer run on T_D.

revicon 7y ago
Quarantine also prevents their posts from showing up on the front page or in the /r/all feed and (I think) you can’t access the sub if you aren’t already a member and are on the mobile app.
- BitwiseFool 7y ago
  They already removed it from the front page a while back. It would only appear for subscribers.
- darksaints 7y ago
  Also, subscribed members can't access unless they are email verified, which means the vast majority of their upvoter sockpuppeteers can't get in.
ixtli 7y ago
As far as I know ads are served on all subreddits until they are quarantined. According to https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205701245-Quarantined-Subreddits https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205701245-Quara... they totally demonatize, meaning even reddit gold doesn't generate profit for reddit.
- ihuman 7y ago
  How is that possible, if you buy reddit gold before you use it?

gfosco 7y ago

The subreddit moderators provided the admin logs, showing that on average, 1 post per day was actioned on by reddit admins. "Biggest headache" yeah, right.

altcognito 7y ago
I doubt their headaches were limited to only a single post on average per day.
MrStonedOne 7y ago
For admins thats a high amount, They require moderators moderate for the reddit rules as well as the subreddit rules to ensure they don't have to step in.
- uncoder0 7y ago
  To be fair, in the same logs it shows they removed mod permissions from one of the mods. The picture it paints is that the Admins were making it harder for them to moderate the subreddit.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    The mod was removed because they violated Reddit rules of not using mod positions to promote financial gain. The mod was promoting his gofundme campaign and broke the rules. This same mode also delisted three other mods, which was making it harder to moderate the subreddit. Interpreting these actions as site admins intentionally making it more difficult for moderators of that subreddit is cognitive dissonance.
AaronFriel 7y ago
The members of the the_donald had a history of breaking rules and crying foul any time any sort of administrative action was taken against them for it. Whether it was for brigading and harassment, or flooding modmail in other subreddits, or other actions. The result was that after the banning of the just as toxic "fatpeoplehate", admins were loathe to interfere with t_d. Any administrative response was met with charges of politicization, "liberal bias", and more rule-breaking. I'm surprised it's taken this long, but it appears that Reddit's staff waited until they had an obviously non-partisan reason for doing it. In this case, threatening police officers. I think they wanted to wait until they had a reason that would be difficult for people to turn into a partisan brawl that would give Reddit bad publicity. Imagine if you will the difficulty conservative sites may have in threading the needle that t_d is simultaneously being persecuted here for their conservative, pro-Trump political views, and that the particular views they were banned for were making violent threats to law enforcement.

product50 7y ago

Anything pro right is a headache while extreme left (aka AOC) is Jesus' gift to the world!

product50 7y ago
And Hacker News is a terrible sub to discuss this. Most tech workers tilt far-left - so likely any discussion here talking about neutrality will elicit downvotes and hatred. But here is the thing though. While reddit owners and hacker news represent one worldview which aligns left, the reality is that a large part of America, who stay quiet and are not active, tilts right. And by banning subreddits and downvoting anything which attacks left, we just create an environment where discourse is prevented - but the feeling is not.
- buboard 7y ago
  i actively flag all political posts here. this is clearly not a place to have a sane political discussion .
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  Where did you get the idea most coders tilt far-left?
- kjsbfkjbf 7y ago
  HackerNews is at best center-left. Maybe not that. The world extends beyond America where being on the "left" involves drone bombing.
  - buboard 7y ago
    the issue is the militancy, not the particular orientation.
- phailhaus 7y ago
  It is disingenuous to suggest that these subreddits are being banned simply because they "attack the left". T_D was banned because of a consistent pattern of rhetoric that violates Reddit's ToS, the most recent cases being outright calling for taking up arms against the government and killing police officers. r/frenworld, r/clownworld, and r/honkler were all banned for similar reasons, being hotbeds of violent white nationalist rhetoric.

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago

Here's an article with a collection of threats of violence that may have precipitated this: https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump-subreddit-is-full-of-calls-for-violence-in-support-of-Oregon-Republicans/224018 https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump... Representative quote: A user wrote, “Rifles are the only way we're going to get any peace in our lives ever again,” adding, “It's either war and we get rid of these guys or a lifetime of listening to this shit over and over again start getting yourself ready.”

x1ph0z 7y ago

Thank god, that subreddit was insufferable

ng12 7y ago
Sure, but you didn't have to visit it. The worst part of the increasing corporatization of the public-facing internet is that we no longer seem to be content leaving well enough alone.
- asdff 7y ago
  The problem with that subreddit was more that it made headlines. If it wasn't named in dozens of articles, all over the news, and an overall very public embarrassment for reddit for three years now, everything would be all fine and dandy for the donald.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bhouston 7y ago

Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population. Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less. But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.

futureastronaut 7y ago
Have you tried searching reddit for threads about a current event, only to find pages of results of vitriolic/psychotic ("trolling!") /r/The_Donald posts? I'm pretty tired of it and I hope they ban that sub and similar ones. I couldn't care less about the political aspect, it's the 4chan lulz crap that has to go. From reddit's point of view these users are parasites, who basically deface the website in an attempt to control it. That's their M.O., good riddance.
- ng12 7y ago
  I can't say I've ever experienced this. In fact, I would occasionally browse r/T_D just to temper the overtly left-leaning bias of /r/news and /r/politics.
  - asdfgasd 7y ago
    /r/news is not left-leaning by any reasonable metric (there is frequently blatant racism heavily upvoted). /r/politics is only left-leaning because of how heavily skewed right american politics is. Most of their opinions are centrist at best. Their obsession with trump is a bit annoying, but it's only annoying, not actively harmful.
- 7y ago

nilkn 7y ago

I suspect this isn't going to accomplish much of anything and may even backfire. According to published statistics by Reddit as of this writing, this subreddit has 755k subscribers and over 45,000 members online right now. For comparison, the official politics subreddit has 5.2 million subscribers but fewer online members (42,000). r/the_donald has an extraordinarily high level of activity and engagement. So long as r/the_donald exists and is maintained, it can act as a sort of black hole so that official subreddits can be heavily moderated to support certain platforms, politicians, and advertisers. If it were actually shut down, though, the users there are so numerous and active that it probably wouldn't be possible to maintain r/politics or other official subreddits in their current moderated state. Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn't accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.

yummypaint 7y ago
TD cant be directly tother subs due to the volume of fake/bot accounts
tdb7893 7y ago
In my experience when Reddit banned the more toxic subreddits many of the other subreddits I actually did frequent became better. I think the people who would be in those subreddits are already there and when there are bans in subreddits some of the people leave and the community is better for it.
- nilkn 7y ago
  Those subreddits tended to be very small and inactive in comparison. r/the_donald is one of the most active communities on the entire website.
  - tdb7893 7y ago
    The thing is that those people are also on other subreddits, people generally don't frequent just one. So those people always bring in Reddit to comment on the Donald is also leasing to more engagement on other subreddits. It's possible that the Donald would organize more and be more of an issue in other subreddits but that wasn't how it worked in the past.

bhouston 7y ago

Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population. Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less. But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.

root_axis 7y ago
> by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population. I don't think reddit is the measure of acceptable discourse. If the_donald was banned it would just mean that its users would have to find another subreddit or site to use, it says nothing about what type of discourse is generally acceptable. Further, I think it's pretty obvious by now that reddit's problem with the_donald is not related to their political ideas since there other subreddits supportive of the president that have had no conflicts with the site admins (e.g. /r/conservative, /r/republican).
asdfgasd 7y ago
> Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? That's the problem though. The mods were repeatedly hostile to any attempts by the admins to handle the more egregious rule violations. The admins have treated them with kid gloves for years now. They were historically one of the worst sources of brigading of other (much smaller) subs. For instance, /r/legaladvice had huge problems with them in the past. Even the chapo mods complied with the admins when they were asked to crack down on calls for violence... Even though those calls for violence were about _dead_ slave owners... Hard to kill someone already dead.

writepub 7y ago

Observe the rinse-and-repeat patterns here: 1. Openly leftist media outlet [1] sensationalizes posts by a few users, and proclaims a non-sequitur - that the problem lies with the entire sub-reddit, instead of with a few users 2. SV tech company feigns umbrage, cowering behind the sensationalism of said media outlet, legitimizes their false claims and BANS the entire sub-reddit. Instead of banning the offending users. 3. Ecosystem of left leaning outlets (techcrunch et. al.) publish opinions in agreement with the actions, though similar actions from their preferred political faction (say for a few illegal posts by far-left activists on AOC subreddit) goes ignored and free of media amplification. The frequency of the above steps happening has skyrocketed as the democratic presidential campaign gains steam. If you trained an AI on the above phenomenon, the internet would be rid of any speech not condoned by the left faction of the democratic party. Techno-fascism is well and truly here. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759967/reddit-quarantines-the-donald-trump-subreddit-misbehavior-violence-police-oregon https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759967/reddit-quarantin...

StellarTabi 7y ago
> (say for a few illegal posts by far-left activists on AOC subreddit) [Citation Needed]

khawkins 7y ago

First they came for the Trump supporters, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Trump supporter.

jrace 7y ago
Nobody's coming for the Trump Supporters. They did not play by the rules that all voluntary users of a private website agree to abide by. They are still free to support Trump on other sub reddits, are if banned from reddit they still have the rest of the internet to play in.
- khawkins 7y ago
  Nearly the entire subreddit is playing by the rules. If the actions of a minuscule percentage of anonymous social media accounts can result in the destruction of entire political forums, then this establishes a dangerous precedent. You can silence opposition groups by planting false flags and spreading infighting, hatred, and violence in their communities. It seems like the sub /r/ChapoTrapHouse seems to claiming they did just this. We don't want a world where opposition groups are regularly trying to astroturf calls for violence in the other group. This guarantees escalation; some of these calls will be carried through.
  - jrace 7y ago
    The rules state no calls for violence. that subreddit called for violence regularly.

MRD85 7y ago

I'm actually sort of scared with the way that censorship of different views is becoming the norm. I'm predominantly left leaning but I'm seeing more and more moderation where the only allowed opinion is the correct one. I seem to recall that a lot of horrible things were started with good intentions, ie Nazi book burnings were censoring the wrong views. It's also incredible divisive. In my country we had a football star doing a GoFundMe for legal fees after he was sacked for a religious and homophobic cartoon on his social media. GoFundMe blocked his campaign, as it's against their views, and now he's making more money than before through a private donations drive. The banning of The Donald is going to drive an even bigger wedge between the two sides of the political spectrum. For a political movement obsessed with power/privilege, the left seems oblivious to its own power/privilege. They wield the cast majority of the societal power currently and they're throwing it around like a hammer.

Daishiman 7y ago
> The banning of The Donald is going to drive an even bigger wedge between the two sides of the political spectrum. This keeps getting repeated over and over again and does not correspond with reality. /r/the_donald is a forum full of obvious bots, spin doctoring, and people with openly extreme and antisocial views. Out entire history has shown that the "deplatforming" of these views works. The views in that forum are not part of a majority, nor what most people would associate with mental sanity. You would do well to dive into the content.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  > This keeps getting repeated over and over again and does not correspond with reality. Like it or not Donald Trump actually is the president of the United States. It's not like this is some fringe forum of weirdos, it's the fan site of the sitting president of a major country. It's also very likely that it played a big role in helping him get elected. If you think quarantining or banning The_Donald won't sow the seeds of discord, you're sorely mistaken.
  - Daishiman 7y ago

sho 7y ago

I was actually very disappointed when Reddit banned r/WatchPeopleDie. Sure, there were some idiots there - there always are, insensitive comments sometimes, and a lot of gallows humour - sometimes literally. But there were thoughtful comments as well, and the content itself could be... well, educational, in a brutal kind of way. I visited occasionally as a kind of memento mori, and I feel like gained a lot of appreciation for the fragility of life from that sub - as well as a very healthy respect for safety around industrial machinery, and a resolve to never again ride a motor scooter in South East Asia. Sweeping it away - sure, they likely made their lives easier. But what's the real outcome? The real freaks who get off on that stuff will go off to some horrible other site to ferment and radicalize away from the normalising influence of the more well-adjusted participants there, and regular people, who just might have been curious, have been deprived of whatever insights they might have found. I think it's a real shame. And for what it's worth, I don't think The_Donald should be banned either. People have a right to speak, and we can ignore them if we want - or we can at least try to engage. I don't buy the "private company, they can do what they want!" argument. The age of the internet has introduced powerful network effects into where we can conduct our public discourse with any efficacy - Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you don't like - you don't really support free speech!

Daishiman 7y ago
> Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you don't like - you don't really support free speech! Unlike Facebook and Google, which exert truly horrendous amounts of power over very significant aspects of people's lives, Reddit is, fundamentally, just another forum. It even has its older versions open-sourced. In fact, There are reddit clones where these things are perfectly allowed. And those clones are cesspits of schizophrenics, fascists, and deeply disturbed people.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

AlexB138 7y ago

I don't understand the cat and mouse game conservatives play with Bay-area companies. These companies are blatantly bias against anyone right of their political bubble, but conservatives keep using them and being surprised and outraged when they're censored. On the other hand, these companies are playing dumb and doing mental back flips to try to justify their blatant bias and claim neutrality because they only want to run off the conservative thought leaders, and keep most of the users. Conservatives just need to move off of these platforms. They're private property, let them have their bubbles. This moral outrage at being censored is a waste of time, and staying on these platforms just continues to enrich them. I'm all for avoiding echo chambers, but it's futile to try to have neutral debate on a biased platform.

krapp 7y ago
Why are you trying to associate the extremist views of The_Donald, and the violent, separatist rhetoric there and on other platforms, with mainstream conservatism?
- AlexB138 7y ago
  I've never read a single post in The_Donald, and only rarely read reddit as a whole. I couldn't claim any idea of the group's views (though the habit of claiming the other team's ideas are things like "violent, separatist rhetoric" is pretty common, so pardon me if I don't take your word for it). I'm simply talking about the trend with conservatives, and those right of center, in general. I don't have any particular love for the modern Republican party. I'm just pointing out how ridiculous it is for them to setup shop on platforms owned by their political rivals and then be surprised when excuses are found to shut them down.
  - krapp 7y ago
    There is no trend. Plenty of conservative and right-wing subs still exist on Reddit, plenty of conservatives and right-wing commenters are still on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. There has been no general purge of conservative or right-wing content from social media. Also, it's odd that you seem to have missed the specific context of this thread entirely, to the point of never even having read The_Donald once, and having no idea of the nature of their politics, much less the alleged actions leading to their quarantine. Did you just comment based on the title alone?

StanislavPetrov 7y ago

I didn't vote for Trump, don't support him, and think he is a worthless human being. That being said, its become crystal clear that a large part of our "cultural elite" at the pinnacle of most big tech companies, media outlets and universities in this country have taken it upon themselves to decide what social and political opinions are acceptable, and are working hard to erase and/or silence anyone who doesn't adhere to their cultural/political ideology. Given the largely centralized nature of modern society and modern communication, this gives tremendous power to those at the top to decide what views are acceptable to disseminate (or hold at all). This is extremely troubling to those of us who believe in the concept of free speech and free expression as being the bedrock of a free society (which is distinct from the legal mechanism of the 1st Amendment). The results of this lockdown on free speech are not necessarily the results being sought or desired by our tech/corporate censors. Ideas and philosophies that are deemed taboo and banned don't simply disappear, they go underground and find alternative communication networks, often becoming even more radical in the process. Those who prefer to keep their heads buried in the sand and suggest that monopolistic behemoths like Google are simply exercising their right as a private company to decide who to silence and who to promote are simply ignoring reality.

RickJWagner 7y ago

One thing we can all agree on: Donald Trump attracts attention like no other. Years from now, controversy will still roil. Historians will have a colorful character to teach about.

yread 7y ago

So many of the users defending The_Donald here (as if it was a serious political platform) are users that seem to comment mostly on political threads or submit only political articles. At least the form they've used so far is a bit more acceptable than average T_D post.

cannonedhamster 7y ago
I kind of dislike when Reddit bleeds onto HN. Any comment not fanatically supporting extreme right wing narratives gets downvoted to oblivion. We're generally not a toxic community and the mods and community here does a pretty good job at keeping a it's on things. It's why I prefer this as pretty much my primary social network. I learn useful things here, have meaningful disagreements that don't end in name calling, and learn tons.

thinkingemote 7y ago

A little observation: this subreddits posting and commenting habits were not like other subreddits. The users used the system more like chat than a forum with no long threaded discussions, very short one line replies and new posts being created instead of comments in an established one, for example. There are a few other subreddits like this and they all appear to work in a similarly ephemeral way. It's odd to me how they use the system. It's similar to 4chan in the ephemerality but it's more like IRC.

digsy 7y ago

In the thread that allegedly lead to the ban (you can see an archived version here - http://archive.is/vpvb4 http://archive.is/vpvb4), The_Donald users post comments like: - 'get a rope' - 'So, firing squad time right?' - 'If he is not fired for this then wtf do we do next? Take matters into our own hands?' What was Reddit supposed to do? Tolerate death threats on its platform? Then get sued if the person gets murdered? And this isnt an isolated example.

hiram112 7y ago
If you give me access to their elastic search dB, indexed from the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
xtirpation 7y ago
Quarantining the community does nothing to mitigate those risks.
filoleg 7y ago
>what was reddit supposed to do? Probably treat the situation the same way they do in other subreddits. The whole “taking matters into our own hands” and calls for violence against politicians happen in other subreddits, and yet they don’t get quarantined (looking at you, r/politics). Either quarantine them all or none of them.
- pizzazzaro 7y ago
  r/politics perma-bans those commenters with a quickness, unless I'm out of date. Meanwhile, r/LateStageCapitalism, a sub whose premise is to induce lust for the guillotine, has been quarantined before because one user was running around yelling about Guillotines in the comments. This would happen periodically. So the admins changed up the mod team. They kept the Anarchist/Communist asthetic, but Social Democrats run the sub now. And they keep the space guillotine-free.
grandridge 7y ago
this is total bullshit, ive been on that sub since the beginning, never calls to violence. I go elsewhere on reddit and Im told I should be harassed and die and so should my newborn son, because you know, hes white. Trump should be killed, mitch mcconnell killed, ag barr and on and on. its censorship, plain and simple, and spare me the private company bs. you want to cite more instances of violence I dare you to find more on t_d, its a daily occurrence on politics, worldnews, the mueller. the people that want to get t_d banned go in and make the comments and then say "look look" but what do you expect from a bunch of pussies

jkljqwiokj 7y ago

Frankly, I think they've effectively killed Reddit with this move. Like it or not, it was one of the last places to discuss right-leaning politics on the site. Every major "neutral" sub (ex: /r/politics) has notoriously biased mods placed in by the admins. Now with one half chopped off from political debates, is the site still fun?

lurquer 7y ago

Dissapearing a subredit devoted to Trump immediately before the Democratic debates? Election meddling.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Probably not. If it were before the Republican debates (if there is a Republican challenger), that might be actual meddling. But before the Democratic debates? How's that supposed to actually change any election outcomes?
- CapricornNoble 7y ago
  My guess? Issues that get raised on a major information platform such as The_Donald could turn into policy debate questions for the Democrats. Questions like "Given the Project Veritas video and associated leaked documents on emails, what is your position on big tech social media platforms and free speech? If you are President, what is your agenda for balancing the exchange of ideas on arguably private yet mass-media platforms?" A question like that could a) but some of the Democrat candidates in a bind comparing their answer to any voting history/previous statements on the issue or b) could cast light on the sort of topics that obviously Democrat-supporting/anti-Trump big tech doesn't want people to investigate or learn about for themselves.
- lurquer 7y ago
  Removing a forum dedicated -- at least for the next two nights -- to criticizing the Democratic position, is an obvious tactic. Anyway, the real point of my post was to see how quickly it would be downvoted. Petty partisanship is rife on HN.

KKPMW 7y ago

That's a quick turn from their stance on the same issue just 22 days ago. /u/spez: > While they can be offensive and antagonistic to the rest of Reddit, we have not found them to be in consistent violation of our content policies.[0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/bwpqqi/we_are_us_senator_ron_wyden_and_reddit_ceo_steve/epzk051/ https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/bwpqqi/we_are_us_...

turk73 7y ago

I'm just going to tell you all: I'm a life-long libertarian. You're not going to sway my opinions because I get censored online and my posts deleted. I am limited to 2 posts like every 4 hours lest I poison your minds with theories about free markets and personal freedom. I guess I'm lucky I can post at all, probably someone will come along to fix that glitch or delete my posts or whatever. What are you afraid of? Is freedom really so dangerous? Why have so many tech companies closed ranks around such anti-freedom concepts? What changed since the late '90s and early '00s when tech was so anti-authority and wanted to disrupt bureaucracy and give a voice to other ideas? Freedom is not racist, sexist, or anything else. It is definitely terrifying to someone, though. Is the Millenial generation just so indoctrinated that they can't see how destructive what they are doing is? When you side with the left, you are making a very clear statement about the value of individual human lives (zero). Try having a little self-worth. An estimated 262 million people were murdered by their own governments between 1900 and 1999. That toll is a silent testimonial about misplaced trust and idealism. It is real, it is reality--bodies stacked like cordwood, piled by the thousands, mass graves, misery beyond comprehension. Are we doomed to repeat that? If so, in the next conflagration it will be billions.

pcunite 7y ago
Is freedom really so dangerous? Selfishness is the root of it. Can you imagine giving up your place of superiority so that someone else gets a chance? They can't.

nautilus12 7y ago

So whats keeping r/The_Donald from just endorsing a new subreddit to replace the old one?