Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), who recently sent a letter to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman urging the company to stop meddling in the 2020 election by censoring its largest pro-Trump community, “r/The_Donald”, responded to Reddit’s decision, reported earlier today, not to lift the sitewide “quarantine” of the community.
Rep. Banks drew attention to Reddit’s refusal to offer r/The_Donald, a user-created “subreddit” of over 700,000 Trump supporters, a clear methodology behind the site’s decision to censor them.
“Why can’t Reddit ‘share the methodology’ used to make their decision to quarantine r/The_Donald? Because they don’t have one,” said Rep. Banks in a statement, provided exclusively to Breitbart News.
“This is an admission of political prejudice. The world’s third-largest social media site should not make politically motivated publishing decisions.”
Reddit decided to “quarantine” r/The_Donald in June this year, citing violent threats made by users that were not removed with sufficient speed by the community’s moderators. Following the decision, users of r/The_Donald compiled a report showing that far-left communities on Reddit routinely feature even more extreme violent threats, sometimes failing to take them down altogether, without facing any top-down censorship from Reddit’s leadership.
Rep. Banks called out the site’s double standards earlier this week, in a letter provided exclusively to Breitbart News.
“The same content-policy violations that led to r/The_Donald’s quarantine take place regularly and egregiously in numerous left-wing subreddits,” wrote Banks.
“After the controversy in Oregon, a commenter in the liberal subreddit r/Politics had the following to say about Republican legislators: ‘Shoot these f*ckers. In the knees. For running like pieces of sh*t.’ Not one of the comments that led to r/The_Donald’s ban reached such a staggering level of vitriol.”
Rep. Banks cited a 2018 interview in which Huffman boasted of Reddit’s ability to “sway elections,” coupled with a promise not to do it. Reddit is one of the most popular websites on the internet, with a userbase approximating that of Twitter.
R/The_Donald is one of the web’s most active communities of Trump supporters, and played a crucial role as a center of pro-Trump online grassroots activity in the 2016 election. Censorship of the community represents a major attack on the Trump campaign’s online grassroots power in 2020.
Are you an insider at Reddit or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.