Members of r/The_Donald, a community of over 700,000 Trump supporters on Reddit that has been censored by the site administrators, have compiled a report on posts promoting violence against the police from other users of Reddit.
The Trump supporters are highlighting the threats as part of efforts to show that r/The_Donald is being held to higher standards than the rest of Reddit.
r/news Anti-Police violence by The Donald on Scribd
“This is why people kill cops. This is why people support people who kill cops,” wrote one Reddit user, commenting on a story about a man whose house was reportedly destroyed in a police shootout.
The story was posted to r/News, one of the former “default” sections of Reddit that all users automatically saw on their homepage. Although the default system has been scrapped, it still has over 19 million subscribers — and unlike r/The_Donald, it has not been censored by Reddit’s administrators, despite the calls for violence in the thread.
Another Reddit user in the thread expressed his support for cop-killers getting let off.
“No knock warrants can be a good thing. They are also how cops get shot, and the shooters get off because they thought their home was being invaded (it was).”
“I think it’s time for citizens to begin destroying the homes of police officers and see how they like it,” wrote another Redditor.
“Time to put bricks into police windows in that town,” said another.
The r/The_Donald users who compiled the report said that it highlighted Reddit’s double standards.
“At the time of this writing (3:30 PM ET), the post appears on the front page of Reddit itself, peaking at #11,” wrote the pro-Trump Reddit users. “None of these comments have been removed by r/news moderators.”
“The justification used for the quarantine of r/The_Donald was only seven comments, all of which are less severe than the ones contained within this document.”
Reddit has come under intense political scrutiny over its censorship of r/The_Donald. Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) has said the site’s censorship of Trump supporters constitutes election interference.
In a recent op-ed, Rep. Banks said Reddit’s actions constitute meddling on a scale far beyond anything the Russians attempted in 2016.
“According to a Senate Intelligence Committee report, over a year-long period the 3,900 [Russian Internet Research Agency]-connected Twitter accounts posted 600,000 tweets regarding Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton,” wrote Banks. “Well, researchers from the University of Alabama calculated that from July 2016 to February 2017 r/The_Donald was responsible for an estimated 2,771,030 tweets linking to news stories.”
“Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is set to influence conversation about the 2020 election on Twitter 4.5 times as much as Vladimir Putin influenced the 2016 electoral conversation.”
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.