Activists realize they can bully people into giving them what they want by rioting in the streets or pressuring online. Reddit, like other corporations, has responded by giving them exactly what they want: shutting down pro-Trump political speakers online and politically-incorrect speech of all kinds.
“Reddit will ban r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and about 2,000 other communities today after updating its content policy to more explicitly ban hate speech,” The Verge reported on June 29. This policy update allegedly came after “Black Lives Matter protests led several popular Reddit forums to go dark temporarily in protest of what they called the company’s lax policies around hosting and promoting racist content.”
Reddit also updated its terms of service with a blog “Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability,” which explained how the platform openly enforces a double standard on who is allowed to be openly hated:
“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
Essentially, a person who is in the “racial minority” may call somebody in the racial majority “sub-human and inferior” with impunity.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman commented that “I have to admit that I’ve struggled with balancing my values as an American, and around free speech and free expression, with my values and the company’s values around common human decency,” according to The Verge.
In the official “Update to Our Content Policy” blog, moderators explained that the pro-Trump r/The_Donald subreddit forum was banned because it had “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.”
The moderators even went so far as to claim that “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.”
The r/The_Donald subreddit forum had been heavily restricted with a quarantine last year after being accused of calling for violence. Moderators of The_Donald responded by commenting, “We were quarantined without warning for some users that were upset about the Oregon Governor sending cops to round up Republican lawmakers to come back to vote on bills before their state chambers. None of these comments that violated Reddit’s rules and our Rule 1 were ever reported to us moderators to take action on.” The r/The_Donald forum’s moderators claimed they would not allow law-breaking behavior and told members to “hit that deport button” if they saw anyone else violating the rules of the group.
Huffman explained in a podcast interview with Vox’s Kara Swisher:
“We’re not sure quite how to ban it yet, or how to justify this, but this is not what we want users seeing. This is not what we want to be representing to the world. So we’re going to put them on this like, list of sanctions.”
Even the left has been purged for not being PC enough. The r/ChapoTrapHouse forum was also banned “for similar reasons” in that its leadership allegedly “consistently host rule-breaking content and their mods have demonstrated no intention of reining in their community.”
Reddit’s blog hilariously claimed that “views across the political spectrum are allowed on Reddit—but all communities must work within our policies and do so in good faith, without exception.”
This is not the only platform to shaft conservtive speech today. Video game broadcasting platform Twitch, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has “temporarily banned President Trump’s account for 'hateful conduct' stemming from footage of the president’s speeches,” Fox News reported.
The r/The_Donald community, exiled from Reddit, can be found at the new TheDonald.win forum website.
Contact Reddit admin and demand that the platform mirror the First Amendment: Tech giants should afford their users nothing less than the free speech and free exercise of religion embodied in the First Amendment as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
