Reddit bans largest pro-Trump subreddit amid hate speech crackdown
Reddit and Twitch became the latest social media companies to ban or suspend pro-Donald Trump accounts over hate speech on Monday, further isolating Facebook in its reluctance to enforce content rules against the US president’s hateful and violent rhetoric.
Reddit banned its largest pro-Trump message board (known as a subreddit), r/The_Donald, saying that it had “consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average” while refusing to cooperate with the company’s efforts to bring it into compliance.
The subreddit and its more than 750,000 subscribers had played a major role in shaping the trollish tone and style of the Trump campaign’s digital persona during the 2016 campaign. The Trump aides Brad Parscale and Dan Scavino were reportedly frequent visitors, and memes or videos from the board on occasion found their way to Trump’s Twitter feed.
The community was also rife with harassment, bigotry and hate, and in 2019, Reddit placed it under “quarantine” due to repeated violations of rules, including the “encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon”. The message board was largely inactive by the time of the ban.
Reddit’s banning of r/The_Donald came amid a larger push by the company to sharpen and enforce its rules against hate speech and harassment. Reddit said it was “initially banning about 2,000 subreddits”, though just 200 of them had more than 10 daily active users. Among the other communities that were banned for “promoting hate” were r/ChapoTrapHouse, a message board for fans of the leftwing podcast, and r/GenderCritical, a community of anti-trans feminists.
“To be clear, views across the political spectrum are allowed on Reddit – but all communities must work within our policies and do so in good faith, without exception,” the company’s CEO, Steve Huffman, wrote in a post announcing the policy change.
Twitch, the streaming video platform popular among gamers, temporarily suspended Trump’s own channel on Monday for violating its policy against “hateful conduct”.
“Hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch,” a spokeswoman for the Amazon-owned company said in a statement. “In line with our policies, President Trump’s channel has been issued a temporary suspension from Twitch for comments made on stream, and the offending content has been removed … Like anyone else, politicians on Twitch must adhere to our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. We do not make exceptions for political or newsworthy content, and will take action on content reported to us that violates our rules.”
The company said that Trump violated its rules against hate by rebroadcasting his 2016 campaign launch, in which he smeared Mexican immigrants to the US as “rapists” and criminals. Also violating the rules were comments he made at his Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally, in which he used the Spanish word for man, “hombre”, to characterize potential criminals.
The actions by Reddit and Twitch follow similar moves by Twitter and Snap to address the rhetoric the president uses on their platforms. In May, Twitter labeled one of Trump’s tweets for containing voting misinformation and hid a tweet threatening violence against people protesting about the alleged police murder of George Floyd.
Snap, the company that makes Snapchat, announced on 3 June that it would bar Trump’s posts from appearing in its Discover channel, citing its desire not to “amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice”.
Facebook remains an outlier amid the push to rein in Trump’s social media behavior. The company has repeatedly massaged or reinterpreted its policies in order to avoid sanctioning the president, according to an investigation by the Washington Post. The pattern of accommodation stretches back to Trump’s candidacy, when his call for a ban on Muslims entering the country was given an exemption from Facebook’s rule against hate speech, and continues today.
The recent controversy over Facebook’s decision to allow Trump’s “when the looting starts the shooting starts” post to remain on the platform has led to a growing advertiser boycott that includes Unilever, Levi’s, Coca-Cola and Starbucks.