r/The_Donald was "quarantined", which is not banning but kinda. The excuse I think was that they did "organized brigading" or something like that.

They were eventually banned after the quarantine.

But they also spent years promoting racism, hate, dangerous conspiracy theories, a neo-nazi rally that resulted in murder, etc. It's hard to look at all of that and think it was just "kind of taboo".

I went to the Donald all the time to get a different perspective and if there was racism and hate any worse than /r/politicalhumor or /r/politics I never saw it.

Or your are too ignorant of all the dogwhistles to realize how packed full of racists that place was.

It's equally as possible that some people have become so overly sensitive to the idea of dog whistles that they see them everywhere, even when that wasn't the intent.

I started doing the same after the Pulse Nightclub shooting when literally the rest of Reddit was censoring and preventing discussion because it was almost immediately known the shooter was Muslim. It was the only place you could go for a live thread and actual info.

Over time, the signal to noise was low. But occasionally there was a good point or funny meme.

I can't say for sure I saw any racism worse than anywhere else. I really don't like when people use whatever this is ((( ))) to talk about Jews, saw that a couple times on t_d, but I've definitely also seen it on /r/politics /r/atheism etc

> The excuse I think was that they did "organized brigading" or something like that.

It was actually for "violence against police". Hillary Clinton's MediaMatters group found a few comments and made an article on it, this was pushed as far as possible, presenting Reddit with enough cause to "quarantine" them.

The specific anti-police messages were about a congressional walkout in Oregon, and threats to use the police to bring them back for a quorum. A rep replied "Send bachelors". This was the cause and theme of the comments MediaMatters focused on. None were made by mods, their own posts, or even upvoted (under 20 or so). Reddit used this to say the mods there were not removing extremist content, eventually forcing the sub allow only mods "approved" by Reddit Inc. They shuttered the sub before allowing this to happen.

The big joke to is that these anti-police messages were before the summer when it was non-stop ACAB, Kill The Police, etc, in practically every other sub-reddit as part of the riots and protests. Standards applied evenly, Reddit would be left with a knitting and a windsurfing section.

Reddit wanted the_donald gone, end of story. MediaMatters helped, and the reason was surface level deep, but they didn't need some iron clad reason. Interestingly, Reddit removed the "violence against police" reasoning, and replaced it with a more generic cause, as the hypocrisy was warming up.

I researched this shortly after it happened.

This statement feels a bit misleading.

For starters, the comments got considerably more explicit than "Send Bachelors". I'm unfamiliar with this specific event, but researching it, I see:

“none of this gets fixed without people picking up rifles” and “[I have] no problems shooting a cop trying to strip rights from Citizens.”

Perhaps these are what you meant by the "theme", but those seem considerably more explicit, especially for a subreddit already linked to an event that resulted in someone being murdered.

>Reddit wanted the_donald gone

Then why didn't they get rid of them until a year later? The event you're referencing seems to be part of the quarantine, not part of the banning. The banning took place after the mods of the subreddit tried to evade the quarantine by moving to another sub and continued to support breaking Reddit rules.

> Then why didn't they get rid of them until a year later? The event you're referencing seems to be part of the quarantine, not part of the banning. The banning took place after the mods of the subreddit tried to evade the quarantine by moving to another sub and continued to support breaking Reddit rules.

Except that what actually happened was they had moved off Reddit, locked the sub down as an archive, and then finally banned when they refused to accept the Reddit provided mods.

They tried to move to a non-quarantined subreddit first, but yeah? We're not in disagreement on that.. The scenario you just described is very different than the one you were talking about a post ago, which is why I called it misleading. They weren't banned over the Media Matters story.

They were initially quarantined because of posts highlighted by MediaMatters.

But not banned because of it, as you implied.

I just checked, and it looks like the website they moved to lasted only months, before the operator shut it down over concerns about racism, concerns from their host, and FBI inquiries. Painting it like it was just media matters picking up on one thing is far from the whole story. The place was septic.

I actually don't think that Reddit wanted T_D gone - the Subreddit had a massive amount of subscribes and generated activity all over the site. It surely was controversial, but in the end it probably helped Reddit more than it damaged it.

It just seems that Reddit has a policy of cutting subreddits loose once they get mainstream media attention, in order to avoid overly negative press. It happened to T_D, WatchPeopleDie and quite a few other Subreddits; basically all bans came after they went into the spotlight despite existing (in some case, peacefully) for years. To me it seems that Reddit is totally fine with hosting controversial opinions as long as it doesn't generate press.

I'm sure there is some law for the most ridiculous example you can think of off the cuff, someone will find has been true somewhere. :)

I never saw that back then, that subs would ban you for that, but recently I posted a negative comment to No New Normal. I was instantly banned from almost every popular reddit sub.

A couple of them sent me a think saying they might unban me if I promised never to post there again. It wasn't a supportive comment, I was mocking one of them. How insane is it that the people that admin and mod Reddit are so fragile that they literally ban anyone who talks to people they don't like?

This can't continue. I suppose I appreciate their acceleration.

R/watchpeopledie and similar got banned.

All of the porn subreddits that still exist banned domains that serve "unverified" content. The amateur porn scene has been leveled, most of which was legitimate content. Also a lot less user submitted content simply because the hassle of verification and also you have to formally identify yourself at one point. Claims of Reddit hosting illegal content is hugely overblown.