Reddit\u2018s r\/The_Donald has long been a thinly veiled breeding ground for racism, misogyny, homophobia, and all-around bigotry devoted to the 45th President of the United States. Today, after years of criticism, Reddit decided to take definitive action against the subreddit of 790,000 subscribers by banning it altogether. The move is part of new policies and\u2026<\/b>
\nReddit\u2018s r\/The_Donald has long been a thinly veiled breeding ground for racism, misogyny, homophobia, and all-around bigotry devoted to the 45th President of the United States. Today, after years of criticism, Reddit decided to take definitive action against the subreddit of 790,000 subscribers by banning it altogether.
The move is part of new policies and enforcement against hateful content in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests that resulted in an initial ban of 2,000 communities today. Although only about 200 of these had more than 10 daily active users, other prominent subreddits banned today include r\/chapotraphouse, a subreddit associated with a far-left podcast of the same name, and r\/gendercritical, a subreddit for trans-exclusionary radical feminists.
It\u2019s about time.
To be clear, it\u2019s not the first time Reddit has taken action against r\/The_Donald. It was made an opt-in subreddit in 2019, was limited in features, and its posts were hidden from Reddit\u2019s front pages. Still, the community continued to grow because ultimately it just took a couple of clicks to reach.
Reddit sites the subreddit as specifically having broken it rules 1,2, and 8 of its newly refined content policies. Number 1, specifically, reads as follows:
Yeah, r\/The_Donald is was well beyond that threshold. If you\u2019re lucky enough to have never come across content from the subreddit, you can read this piece by my colleague Tristan Greene on what it was like reading r\/The_Donald every day (spoiler: unpleasant). The subreddit didn\u2019t just give free passes to the occasional troll or bigot, it was a community that made \u2018attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups\u2019 the norm.
While some will worry that the ban will stifle free speech and diverse political opinion, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said on a call that \u201cpolitical speech continues to be safe\u201d but \u201call communities, including our political communities, have to abide by our policies,\u201d according to The Verge. Let\u2019s not forget Reddit used to also allow communities featuring sexually suggestive content with minors also in the name of \u2018free speech.\u2019
You might think \u201cwell, aren\u2019t the same people just going to go elsewhere?\u201d Of course. Reddit will probably lose thousands of users over its new policies, many of whom will likely find other grimy corners of the internet to fester in. And today\u2019s ban is neither all-encompassing \u2013 there remain many subreddits that are arguably more harmful than some on the list \u2013 nor likely to be without a myriad of detractors.
But hate spreads when it is normalized and given a platform, especially one as large and young-leaning as Reddit. \u2018Deplatforming\u2018 hate has been shown to be effective. The previous attempts at curbing r\/The_Donald\u2019s message just weren\u2019t enough. Good on Reddit for finally taking a stance, even if there\u2019s still more work to do.
Update to Our Content Policyon Reddit
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