Reddit will ban r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and ~2,000 other subreddits, most of which are inactive, after updating rules to more explicitly ban hate speech
which has one post in the last 100 days—is now banned. https://www.nbcnews.com/... @alexisohanian : So happy to see this progress. All credit to all the redditors who have been pushing for this. https://twitter.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : It's as if tech platforms have just now, in the year 2020, realized that the First Amendment is about *government* restrictions on speech and there's no law that says they have to treat user-generated racism and hate as legitimate. https://twitter.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : (At the risk of stating the obvious, I think what really happened is that tech platforms have just now, in the year 2020, decided that the grief they're getting for tolerating hate is more trouble than the grief they'd get for not tolerating hate.) Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : It's not even a question of whether there should be a home for him on Reddit or any other platform. The prob is the idea that the platforms think there can be a home for somebody whose very presidency is a legitimation of behaviors that violate their values and many of their TOS Shane Goldmacher / @shanegoldmacher : SAN FRANCISCO — Reddit, one of the largest social networking and message board websites, on Monday banned its biggest community devoted to President Trump as part of an overhaul of its hate speech policies. https://www.nytimes.com/... Catalin Cimpanu / @campuscodi : Raise your hand if you got banned on /r/The_Donald for pointing out some of the insanity shared there https://twitter.com/... Sara Fischer / @sarafischer : 💡 It's also worth noting that Reddit is also banning the subreddit r/ChapoTrapHouse, a popular channel for left-oriented users, citing the same issues that led to the ban on The_Donald. https://twitter.com/... Benjy Sarlin / @benjysarlin : r/The_Donald was the most visible forum for Trump's online fandom in 2016 and got into constant fights over extreme content and juking rules to boost its reach. It had roughly *52 million* page views in March 2016 as Trump was taking over the party. https://www.nbcnews.com/... https://twitter.com/... Nilay Patel / @reckless : This is a huge quote — a lot of social media companies are deciding that their products should actually reflect their internal values. https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/... Drew Savicki / @senhorraposa : Trump himself doesn't browse it but Scavino does. It's where he's gotten some of pro-Trump memes he's posted on Trump's twitter account. https://twitter.com/... @slpng_giants : CONFIRMED: @reddit has finally banned The_Donald, one of most violent, racist, conspiratorial corners of the Internet. https://twitter.com/... Jane Manchun Wong / @wongmjane : Unlike the other bans, Reddit specified the rules which r/The_Donald has violated https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Will Sommer / @willsommer : Reddit bans the pro-Trump The_Donald subreddit — months after the site's users migrated to their own Reddit clone site. https://www.theverge.com/...
The VergeCasey Newton
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the end of a year-long escalation ladder for r/The_Donald: Reddit first quarantined the community over threats against cops and public figures in June 2019, leaving it visible behind a warning page while its subscriber base sat above 750K. Today's move converts that containment into removal, with the new explicit hate-speech rule supplying the legal cover to sweep up r/ChapoTrapHouse and roughly 2,000 other subreddits — most of them already dormant — in one stroke.
The timing lands inside a June 2020 wave of platform retrenchment around Trump-adjacent content: Snap had just stopped promoting Trump's account in Discover days earlier, and the same pressure soon produced Facebook's plan to throttle QAnon reach. The ban matters because it shows Reddit skipping deamplification and going straight to deletion at scale.
First-order effects
Reddit's roughly 800K-subscriber pro-Trump community loses its home entirely, along with the left-wing r/ChapoTrapHouse, and their moderators and posters must migrate to standalone forums or rival platforms overnight.
The rewritten rules give Reddit moderators and admins an explicit hate-speech standard rather than a case-by-case judgment call, so enforcement decisions no longer hinge on whether a specific threat was made.
Second-order effects
Other large communities that skirted the old implicit standards face the same binary choice — tighten or disappear — since the policy change applies platform-wide, not just to the named subreddits.
Advertiser-facing positioning shifts across social platforms as Facebook readies its QAnon crackdown: moderation severity becomes a competitive signal, with each platform calibrating against what rivals have just removed.
Third-order effects
The pattern established here — quarantine first, then rule rewrite, then mass ban — became the template Reddit applied again when it banned r/donaldtrump after the Capitol violence, suggesting platform policy moves in lurches triggered by external events rather than gradual tightening.
If platforms keep treating political communities as removable rather than containable, the long-run structure is a smaller set of sanctioned spaces on major networks and migration of fringe discourse to off-platform homes that no advertiser or regulator can see.
The trend: Major social platforms are moving from quarantining extremist and political communities toward outright removal, with each high-profile ban lowering the threshold for the next.
Oh my god, this is massive. Reddit has just banned r/The_Donald. Absolutely one of the most important hubs of his alt-right, hive-mind support base. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
NEWS: Reddit is banning r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and 2000 other subreddits as part of a huge expansion of its content policy. I talked to CEO Steve Huffman: https://www.theverge.com/...
There's a definite pattern of movement now. Big tech has decided that hosting Trump's buzzing alt-right support base - with their hate, swarming and doxing - is just more trouble than they're worth. https://twitter.com/...
Politically, this will probably hurt Trump more than Twitter's interstitials. Reddit is *such* an important hub for the alt-right organisationally. It's been one of their strongholds, from which they sally forth into hostile territory https://twitter.com/...
A year ago, I spoke with @reddit ceo and co-founder Steve Huffman about what he was going to do about r/The_Donald. He finally did. Listen to this terrific interview we did: https://www.vox.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Reddit says it is banning its controversial subreddit channel r/The_Donald, one of the largest political communities and a hub of support for Trump, along with 2000 other subreddit groups and users that violate new content policies aimed at hate speech. https://www.axios.com/...
This is so pathetic. Reddit has capitulated to the moral panic and effectively upended the entire content moderation structure that made Reddit popular in the first place. As usual, the cry-bullies screaming “harassment” and “abuse” get their way https://www.theverge.com/...
If Twitch & Reddit don't see big usership declines after suspending Trump/The_Donald, I wonder if it will embolden other app. The fear of right winger flight has paralyzed social networks' policy enforcement for too long
“Enforcing problems that don't exist anymore” might be the takeaway from this Reddit purge. Murder/Civil War fetishism is thriving on this subreddit, and it's still very much on Reddit. The_Donald—which has one post in the last 100 days—is now banned. https://www.nbcnews.com/...
It's as if tech platforms have just now, in the year 2020, realized that the First Amendment is about *government* restrictions on speech and there's no law that says they have to treat user-generated racism and hate as legitimate. https://twitter.com/...
(At the risk of stating the obvious, I think what really happened is that tech platforms have just now, in the year 2020, decided that the grief they're getting for tolerating hate is more trouble than the grief they'd get for not tolerating hate.)
It's not even a question of whether there should be a home for him on Reddit or any other platform. The prob is the idea that the platforms think there can be a home for somebody whose very presidency is a legitimation of behaviors that violate their values and many of their TOS
SAN FRANCISCO — Reddit, one of the largest social networking and message board websites, on Monday banned its biggest community devoted to President Trump as part of an overhaul of its hate speech policies. https://www.nytimes.com/...
💡 It's also worth noting that Reddit is also banning the subreddit r/ChapoTrapHouse, a popular channel for left-oriented users, citing the same issues that led to the ban on The_Donald. https://twitter.com/...
r/The_Donald was the most visible forum for Trump's online fandom in 2016 and got into constant fights over extreme content and juking rules to boost its reach. It had roughly *52 million* page views in March 2016 as Trump was taking over the party. https://www.nbcnews.com/... ht…
This is a huge quote — a lot of social media companies are deciding that their products should actually reflect their internal values. https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Trump himself doesn't browse it but Scavino does. It's where he's gotten some of pro-Trump memes he's posted on Trump's twitter account. https://twitter.com/...