U.S. President Donald Trump talks with reporters before leaving the White House for the G20 summit ... [+]
Reddit's largest pro-Trump community, r/the_donald, was quarantined Wednesday morning following a deluge of posts that violate the site's content policy. This announcement was made in a post attached to the top of the subreddit, whose 754,000 subscribers have made it one of the most formidable and controversial communities on Reddit.
"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," r/the_donald moderator shadowman3001 wrote.
Oregon catapulted itself to the center of American politics after 11 state senators recently fled the state in an attempt to block a vote on a climate change bill, the Daily Beast reported. The saga got even more strange when armed right-wing militias stepped in to help these senators avoid police sent to bring them back to Oregon.
The following terms of the r/the_donald quarantine were also laid out by shadowman3001:
- 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.
After months of controversy, Reddit's largest pro-Trump community has been punished.
The following screengrab was also shared showing a breakdown of posts and comments removed from r/the_donald over the past month. The subreddit was started in June 2015. The decision to punish r/the_donald has been years in the making, top Reddit user Robert "gallowboob" Allam told Forbes.
"It looks like reddit admins finally took actions against r/The_Donald subreddit after years of doing nothing. It is now quarantined. If there is a time to invest in popcorn, it is now," Allam said.
Reddit's administration provides Forbes with the following comment:
"We are clear in our site-wide policies that posting content that encourages or threatens violence is not allowed on Reddit. As we have shared, we are sensitive to what could be considered political speech, however, recent behaviors including threats against the police and public figures is content that is prohibited by our violence policy. As a result, we have actioned individual users and quarantined the subreddit."
