On Monday, Reddit banned over two thousand subreddits today, including r/The_Donald and r/TheNewRight, allegedly to stop the “promotion of hate” on the social media platform.
In an announcement posted on Reddit, Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of the company, said that “communities and users that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned,” and that over 2000 subreddits were removed, although only 200 had more than 10 daily users.
The announcement was pre-empted by a post on Sunday, claiming that the site’s “largest ever banwave” was on the way, claiming that the framing of the narrative would be largely bogus, and was instead a push for wider censorship:
I’ve been working in the San Francisco tech industry for about 15 years now and have a few friends that work at Reddit. Apparently they’re going to ban a large number of subs on Monday and frame it as an anti-racism initiative, but the scope of the subs being banned is supposed to be larger than that. The staff is anticipating that things are going to be crazy. That’s all I know.
A number of subreddits were banned, including right-leaning subreddits, such as r/The_Donald, r/TheNewRight, r/RightWingLGBT, r/rightwingcomics and r/Groyper_Movement.
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One of the admins of r/TheNewRight spoke exclusively to NationalFile about their removal from the site, saying that he knew this would happen, as soon as they set up their community, but not in “such a broad sweeping move that completely unmasks the complete communist bend of the site. Everyone that has a shred of American pride should leave the site and let them reap with they sow.”
However, it wasn’t just explicitly right wing communities that were attacked – anyone who opposed or poked fun at Reddit’s hivemind and liberal ideas were also removed. These included meme subreddits like r/smuggies, r/ConsumeProduct, r/bruhfunny, and r/CumTown, the latter being the mainhub for the unpolitically correct, “dirtbag left” podcast of the same name. Subreddits that were feminist, but critical of transgender ideology, had the censorship treatment too, such as r/GenderCritical.
r/The_Donald, Reddit’s largest pro-Trump community, had already been quarantined for months, with its userbase mostly moving over to their replacement site, thedonald.win, but was finally removed in this wave of banning.
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r/ChapoTrapHouse, a far-left subreddit which did genuinely post content that was violent, was banned today, along with all the spin off subreddits, like r/ChapoTrapHouse2, that were created to avoid its quarantine. Some commenters considered this to be a smoke screen for their wider censorship action.
It comes on the same day as President Trump had his Twitch account suspended for apparent “hateful conduct” included in his campaign videos.
