Like many online echo chambers, /r/the_donald bans people who dissent in any way. It is not a place where it is possible to engage in discussion. In fact, reddit is a horrible place to engage in meaningful discussion, as users can downvote any opinion they disagree with and make it disappear, and mods can ban any users they disagree with. It's easy to label people as trolls, but I have been banned from multiple subreddits when attempting to participate in discussions in good faith.
Lots of people are complaining about r/The_Donald in this thread, wishing that it would be banned. The casual attitude with which people are advocating censorship of Trump supporters is troubling.
They claim that it's polluting the rest of the site. It's not a default subscription, so it's not on the front page. It's at most a handful of the posts on any page of r/all, which by the way, almost no one browses according to Reddit admins themselves. Yes, the moderators of The_Donald ban opposing viewpoints, just like moderators in other partisan subreddits do. It is advertised as a 24/7 Trump rally, and that's what it is.
They claim that the subreddit is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. If you took a moment to even read it, you'd find post after post expressing the OPPOSITE sentiment, advocating for equality for all regardless of race, sex, and orientation. The problem is that the definition that the left is using of "racism" has been broadened to include basically anything they don't agree with.
There's a pretty big difference between the_donald banning people disagreeing and admins censoring /r/all. Reddit's biggest problem is abusive moderators censoring users of a community, or running a subreddit in a way contrary to how the vast majority of users want to use it.
That isn't really the case with the_donald. That subreddit has behaved in this way from the very start, and their bans over anything anti-Trump is sort of part of the joke/culture of the subreddit as a community. The vast majority of people in that sub want anti-Trump people banned. It's not a place for real discussion and the bans are pretty much just done for laughs. It's an example of a subreddit working well because of the moderators, when it's usually a subreddit working decently despite moderators stifling discussion and pushing their own agendas.
Additionally, bans on reddit are a joke. An account takes 5 seconds to make and even if admins want to IP ban you, it doesn't accomplish much. Censoring the most viewed listing of content on the entire site has a real, meaningful impact.
The Trump subreddit (r/The_Donald) prohibits any criticism of Trump or his supporters. It's purely there for celebrating all things Trump. I suspect it has the highest number of banned users of all the subs. The eager use of the ban hammer means you can't ignore the rules.
I haven't read the linked articled (yet), but I wanted to urge everyone to check out r/the_donald. It is the strangest online community that I've seen.
Truth doesn't really matter unless it supports us, everyone who says good things about us is right and everyone who doesn't is a corrupt MSM cuck libtard. To get banned you don't even have to be critical of Trump. If you're even ambiguous you'll get banned. In a sense this is self-selection in that the only people that haven't been banned are lunatic-level supporters.
Basically, it's Donald Trump times 380,000. You have to experience it.
For the longest time the argument for banning The_Donald wasn't to silence their voice. It was to tell their users to fuck off if they can't follow the site rules. They would constantly manipulate the vote counts or brigade smaller subs, more recently the spotlight has been about reddit's rules regarding advocating violence.
The problem was always that they hid behind the guise that they were the unofficial Donald Trump fanclub when there really never was an alternative one with a more moderate userbase. The_Donald is fine to exist but they seemingly refuse to stay in their playpen and ahve their fun, they need to sling mud throughout the rest of reddit while they're there.
And just to state it, I don't think TD is the only sub guilty of this behavior. I don't think its even an issue exclusive to politics but I really wish Reddit took a more hard look at their rule enforcement to make things clear and had clear transparency for their enforcement of the rules.
Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population.
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
It is the frequent brigading by the Donald sub that makes free speech argument sound hollow. That sub was not banned for supporting president or discussing politics, it was banned because it became nuisance too people who wanted to discuss their own things.
Yawn. No big surprise here, and it won't be a surprise when when the_donald is banned. Reddit users tend to be young and young people tend to lean left. It is by definition and echo chamber due to how quickly unpopular opinions are vaporized by downvoting.
What would be more interesting is to see what subreddits are tolerated that promote excessively immoral or illegal behavior.
> /r/The_Donald echo chamber bans anyone with a counter view to their own.
When you know there are super PACs literally spending millions of dollars to manipulate people on sites like Reddit, and other subreddits (like /r/HillaryClinton) also ban all dissenting opinions, why would you leave yourself so vulnerable to attack? Just so you can brag about occupying the moral high ground?
Reddit's completely opaque, volunteer moderator system guarantees that every single subreddit is biased in one way or another. /r/The_Donald was only doing what was necessary to create a community where people could discuss Trump without being berated and silenced by downvotes.
I have come to the conclusion that there is no real way to discuss The Donald in a politically neutral way so I think it is best left out of the conversation for the moment. There are plenty of less politically charged examples of Reddit's moderation or the lack thereof.
Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population.
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
Doesn’t that just lead to an echo chamber on the site they left also? When Trump supporters were banned from the political subreddits, they formed /r/The_Donald. And it’s an anti-Trump-criticism, anti-anything-left-leaning echo chamber. But that left /r/politics to become a left leaning echo chamber itself. Now, one can’t have a civil discussion about anything because /r/politics will ban anything saying Trump did anything remotely good, and /r/The_Donald will ban anything remotely critical of Trump.
You've left out the fact that The_Donald was banned from reddit for repeatedly and egregiously breaking site wide rules on harassment, brigading, and issuing death threats. Despite the mods efforts to keep it clean the subreddit was a cesspit that was only getting more extreme.
I don't agree with other subreddits automatically banning people based on post history, but I can see why the subreddit was banned, along with the left leaning subreddit chapotraphouse which engaged in similar behaviour.
First, I don't think it really makes sense to say a subreddit has opinions as such; it's simply a place for people to post thing. And while the user's do have opinions, nobody is suggesting the user's themselves be banned. Which brings me to...
Second, it's not about opinions. There are much more fringe groups than that sub, and in any case, politically I'm probably significantly closer to the median The_Donald poster than the median Reddit admin. It's not about opinions, it's about tolerance and disruption. Because...
Third, Reddit is a business and a community which thrives on promoting free, open, tolerant discourse. Just looking at the political subs there are communists, fascists, anarchists, libertarians, and everything in between, all happily posting away in their little corners, and occasionally participating in discussions that bring out proponents of different views. And then you have The_Donald. The issue isn't their strange, outrageous views (which aren't so much "outrageous" as "what you get if you cross standard American conservatism with standard European conservatism, put it in a blender, filter through the eyes of a 16 year old, and sprinkle with american flags and memes"). You're talking about a site with actual unironic advocates of actual literal dictatorship on it, come on.
So when you say:
> They picked side
I'm not seeing it. In fact I think they're trying so hard to avoid even the appearance of having picked a side, that they're erring on the side of taking The_Donald's side, and in so doing they're harming the site.
> And for what it's worth, I don't think The_Donald should be banned either. People have a right to speak, and we can ignore them if we want - or we can at least try to engage.
The thing is, with The_Donald, I don't think anyone could reasonably actually try to engage. Their subreddit has and had some of the most heavy-handed moderation. Read their rules on "concern trolling" [1] to get a hint of what kind of things they regularly removed. If you read their full rules, you quickly realize that not being a Trump supporter is a top level rule as well. They were a self proclaimed endless rally, and anything that doesn't fit their narrative was removed.
In my opinion, how notoriously heavy handed their moderation was probably amplified how upset the admins were that they had to regularly step in and clean up content. Anti-trump comments are almost always removed within minutes, and so the idea that they were incapable of moderating away things which violated the site guidelines is easily busted.
> "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views
But it's not because of their political views, it was because of how they ran their community. There's a huge difference here. There are plenty of conservative communities that remain on Reddit today. The difference is that those communities have chosen to cultivate and moderate a different environment. T_D cultivated a community that produced problematic content on the regular. They amplified the visibility of that problematic content by hiding downvote buttons and making it more difficult to report. They prevented any sort of self-policing in the community with heavy handed moderation that removed any dissenting opinions on almost any topic. For all the cries about censorship, censorship was at the heart of how T_D was run. Any hopes that you had of interaction with better adjusted individuals providing a counterbalance to the predominant content were removed.
In short, T_D is quarantined because they have intentionally developed a toxic echochamber that amplified content that the reddit administrators view as objectively bad enough to ban site-wide. It's not a matter of political views, it's a matter of views on how to run a healthy community, and a true community T_D is not.
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