Several moderators of The Donald, Reddit’s largest pro-Trump community, have been purged by the site’s administrators, who aim to replace them with moderators approved by the San Francisco company. The Donald’s creators say this is the latest in Reddit’s “thousand cuts” campaign to kill off its massively successful pro-Trump community.
The Donald is one of largest and influential hubs of pro-Trump activity on the web, with over 790,000 subscribed Reddit users. In 2016, the community’s users were responsible for the creation and proliferation of numerous pro-Trump tropes and memes across the Internet, in what has colloquially become known as the “great meme war.”
The Reddit administrators announced their purge in a post on The Donald, offering to “help” recruit new moderators, and implying a list of conditions on applicants.
In a statement to Breitbart News, moderators of The Donald accused Reddit of trying to kill its pro-Trump community with “a thousand cuts,” and urged subscribers to migrate to thedonald.win, an independent Reddit-like site created by the pro-Trump community.
The Donald’s statement follows:
Reddit has been trying to slowly kill The_Donald since it played a role in getting Trump elected in 2016. It started with user harassment, moved on to restricting our posts from being seen by most of the rest of Reddit (The third highest-traffic website in the world), then entirely quarantining us from the rest of the website as well as search engine results.
In the last couple of days, China-backed Reddit has begun warning and banning our users not only for posting content that they disagree with, but even “liking” wrongthink. Finally, on Tuesday, Reddit admins removed more than half of the moderators that have spent the last four years of their lives building the number one Trump supporting online community and announced that they would be choosing users to replace us. Their post requesting new moderators was met with thousands of responses telling them, in no-so-nice words, to shove it.
As they’ve done with other Reddit communities, such as Kotaku In Action, they’ll be installing their own puppet moderators to continue to silence and dilute our message. Reddit knows that to entirely ban what is effectively the only conservative voice on their website would garner them too much negative press, and possibly legal attention, so they’ve been trying to kill off The_Donald with a thousand cuts.
In preparation for this inevitable course of events, the mod team established a backup website, free from the political censorship of Reddit, and have encouraged our users to migrate to it (of which at least 100,000 have in the last day). The_Donald can now be found on an independent website, created and run by the people that have ran The_Donald for years, at http://thedonald.win.
This is just the latest attempt by Reddit to interfere with its pro-Trump community. Reddit “quarantined” The Donald earlier this year, hiding its posts from Reddit’s front page and forcing visitors to Reddit to sign up to the site before they can view The Donald’s content.
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) has condemned Reddit for censoring the pro-Trump page, accusing the site of trying to tilt the scales against Republicans in 2020.
“I can’t think of a more obvious and effective way to ‘sway elections’ than to hide the largest conservative forum on your site a year ahead of the 2020 elections,” wrote Rep. Banks, in a letter to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in October.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.