The Great Ban: Reddit Bans 2,000 Communities Including the_donald, ChapoTrapHouse

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman banned more than 2,000 subreddits Monday, including the pro-Donald-Trump subreddit r/the_donald and community dedicated to the left-wing political podcast r/chapotraphouse. The company also announced sweeping changes to its content policies that will allow it wider latitude to ban hateful content on the site.

The move is one of the most sweeping content moderation actions Reddit has ever taken, reminiscent of a wave of bannings under former CEO Ellen Pao in 2015. At the time, Pao banned r/fatpeoplehate and a handful of racist, transphobic, and misogynistic subreddits. For doing this, Pao was called a “Nazi” and the platform revolted; she resigned shortly after.

Most of the subreddits banned were small, with very few users. The largest were darkhumorandmemes, chapotraphouse, consumeproduct, darkjokecentral, gendercritical, cumtown, wojak, the_donald, imgoingtohellforthis2, and thenewright. Just 200 of the more than 2,000 banned subreddits had more than 10 weekly users…

“Ultimately, it’s our responsibility to support our communities by taking stronger action against those who try to weaponize parts of Reddit against other people,” Huffman wrote in his post announcing the move. “All communities on Reddit must abide by our content policy in good faith. We banned r/The_Donald because it has not done so, despite every opportunity. The community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average (Rule 1), antagonized us and other communities (Rules 2 and 8), and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations. Until now, we’ve worked in good faith to help them preserve the community as a space for its users—through warnings, mod changes, quarantining, and more. Though smaller, r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned for similar reasons: They consistently host rule-breaking content and their mods have demonstrated no intention of reining in their community.”

It’s worth noting that, while the_donald played an outsized role in the leadup to the 2016 election—with memes from the subreddit regularly being shared by Trump himself. That community became very good at upvoting posts to the front page, amplifying its messages. Last year, Huffman “quarantined” that subreddit, meaning that its posts did not show up on the front page, and users had to be logged in in order to view it. This effectively killed the subreddit—many users left once Reddit quarantined the_donald, and its influence on Reddit and the broader political space dissipated. As of this week, it had just 7,780 users per week, a paltry sum by Reddit standards, according to Huffman.

 

ConservativeChick

Article URL : https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bv8v3v/the-great-ban-reddit-bans-2000-communities-including-the_donald-chapotraphouse