*Note: this is a reformatted version...
...of the Pastebin...
...that Reddit user PortaRossa posted in a comment to a post on Reddit's DepthHub forum...
...in response to their original comment on Reddit's OutOfTheLoop being taken down *


Answer:

Hoo boy. This is probably going to be a long one that's going to end up locked, so hold onto your butts, ladies and gents: it's time for a deep dive. (Because really, did you think I wouldn't be coming back for this one?)

Before we get started, I'd like to say a couple of things. Firstly, this is going to be about as unpopular a topic as mainstream Reddit ever sees, so I'd urge you to keep in mind that picking a side based on evidence is not the same as being biased; I'm going to do my level best to source every claim I make, but it's a big story and it's going to take some time to unpack. Secondly -- and I really can't stress this enough -- do not brigade their sub, and at least try to be civil. I'd like the comments section to stay up for as long as possible without being locked (not least so I can respond personally to follow-up questions people might have), so... well, just try and keep your hate-boners in your pants for now. There are plenty of other places on Reddit to get it out of your system.

The Short Version (TL;DR, but still actually R; it's worth it)

...is that /r/The_Donald has just about walked the line of acceptable behaviour for the past couple of years, according to the admins. As noted by the site admins, /r/The_Donald newfound status as personae non gratae comes on the heels of criticism about the subreddit's response to calls to violence about a situation in Oregon where Governor Kate Brown (legally) fined Republican lawmakers who had skipped town in an attempt to block a cap-and-trade bill, and then (legally) ordered the police to escort said lawmakers back to work.

One of the Republican lawmakers who ended up on the lam, Brian Boquist, called for anyone looking for him to 'Send bachelors and come heavily armed' -- or basically, 'I'm going to shoot you and make any wife you have a widow if you try'. This resulted in a string of surprisingly-pro-shooting-police-officers-just-doing-their-job comments on the usually very pro-police /r/The_Donald, and the admins finally drew the line.

(If you're less interested in the historical examples of the sub skirting the rules, you can skip right to the in-depth information about the Oregon situation here -- but I'd urge you to consider that this is almost certainly a straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back situation, and one of those where a lot of history has gone into getting us where we are today.)

The mods have posted the post they got from the Reddit admins, and have accounced that they'll be giving more information shortly. The key paragraph is as follows:

As we have discussed in the past, and as detailed in our content policy and moderator guidelines, we expect you to enforce against rule-breaking content. You’ve made progress over the last year, but we continue to observe and take action on a disproportionate amount of rule-breaking behavior in this community. We recognize that you do remove posts that are reported, but we are troubled that violent content more often goes unreported, and worse, is upvoted.

And that, as they say, is that. Now onto the meat of it.

So what is /r/The_Donald, anyway?

Donald Trump -- reality TV personality, real estate developer, birther conspiracy theory advocate and that guy from Home Alone 2 -- announced his run for the White House on June 16th, 2015. A little over a week later, /r/The_Donald was founded as a place for supporters of Trump's campaign to get news about his run. This is not in any way unusual -- most people running for office end up with a subreddit very soon after (or occasionally even before) they announce -- but this one was... slightly different. The main issue was that people were largely split on how serious a run it was. To say that Trump was a political longshot in June of 2015 is a little like saying that Ryan Gosling is, you know, alright-looking. He was one of the last people to announce in an already crowded Republican field (in fact, up until this year's Democratic primaries, the 17 people running in the Republican primaries was the largest ever field), and very few people gave Trump great odds of winning the primary, let alone the nomination.

So this led to a kind of weird mishmash of cultures. On the one hand, it didn't look very much like a traditional political subreddit; on the other, it became rapidly pretty popular, especially when it came to the primary season. In many ways, it became a political ingroup; because of the way the subreddit used memes, it built its own culture very rapidly, which made it very appealing (after all, everyone likes an in-joke). As for how serious it was... well, head mod (pretty much right from the start, but not founder) /u/jcm267 gave an interview to Vice in July 2016 -- before Trump won the Presidency, but after he won the nomination -- and he set out his opinions on why the sub was the way it was:

We didn't have the best name for a Trump subreddit so I actually figured it would just be a nice place for a small group of supporters to have fun triggering anti-Trump people and, frankly, laughing with Trump at the same time.

Later, in describing the history of the sub:

In the early days it was just a sub for a small number of people. Now it's a large community. I was involved in /r/Romney which was a failure back in 2012 because it tried to be too serious. I also created /r/Conspiratard. That subreddit became popular because it was "fun" and not a serious place. Most of us didn't like a lot of the people that /r/conspiratard attracted and put in a lot of rules that effectively killed the subreddit, inevitably pushing the insufferable SJW posters to the point where they formed their own community. When Cis pushed for stuff like using the sticky to push shitposts to the front page I was able to buy into it because I've seen first hand that easily digestible content and a fun culture do well on reddit. "Serious" does not. The way that /r/the_donald is run simply works.

On the other hand, however, he noted:

This is a community that promotes the candidacy of a great candidate. No candidate is perfect but Trump is the best choice we have for 2016. We need immigration reform that does not grant amnesty to illegals and puts and end to end illegal immigration once and for all. We need to end the abuse of H1B and H2B visas by employers. We need to look into renegotiating or pulling out of every free trade deal, especially those that were signed with developing nations. The establishment from BOTH parties have fucked over the American people on immigration and trade, these issues unite people from all over the political spectrum.

That seems like fairly standard and sincere pro-candidate sentiment to me.

So was it intended to seriously boost Trump's chances? Probably not, at least at first -- but it soon became the place to be if you wanted to trigger the leftists, and it saw an influx of users from places like 4chan's /pol/ -- and later, from other users who were on board what became known as the 'Trump Train'. In doing so, it created its own insular community that began to leak, first into Reddit as a whole, then into the wider internet, and then into the outside world. Things that were in jokes on the subreddit -- Pepe the Frog, 'centipedes', 'Get that man a coat!', all that stuff -- started playing a back-and-forth game with reality; as Trump would say things in his speeches, they became memes in the sub, but they also fed back into the wider discourse. As phrases like Drain the Swamp became a rallying cry on the sub, they became a common feature at Trump rallies. Jokes about so-called 'meme-magic', wherein easy-to-share social media posts featuring Trump singlehandedly solving all of the USA's problems spread like wildfire, proved strangely prescient. It turned out that Trump's supporters understood something Trump knew almost instinctively: facts didn't matter as much as exposure.


I told you this was going to be a long one. For issues with censorship and the early run-ins with the admins, click here.

Told you I'd run long; there's more background here.


So what happened next?

Trump became more and more popular, and one by one, the Republican field winnowed down. Almost immediately, Trump became the frontrunner for the nomination, buoyed up largely by the intense media attention he was given. Very few people actually believed he was likely to be the nominee, but his position as an... well, let's call him an 'unconventional candidate' ensured that press attention stayed firmly on him. The same attention was applied to /r/The_Donald; between February and March 2016, it was the fastest-growing non-default sub on a number of occasions, trending frequently whenever Trump did something seemingly outrageous that spawned a new meme. More and more people flocked to the sub, either because they agreed with its message or just to shitpost and troll in what was a self-proclaimed safe space for Trump supporters. (The issue of to what extent this was an example of Poe's Law -- that sincere expressions of extremism are often indistinguishable from satirical expressions of extremism -- is probably forever going to be unsettled, but it's definitely something that has been considered.)

As the sub grew, issues quickly began to arise. /r/The_Donald soon became known for brigading other subs (especially /r/Politics), and the Reddit admins stepped in to stop /r/All basically being all Trump, all the time. The sheer volume of new posts was basically flooding the rest of the site, so the admins stepped in to basically manually weight posts from /r/The_Donald, making them less prominent. This led to complaints about censorship, especially in light of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, after which posters complained that their submissions were being 'unfairly' hidden. (The submissions were, by and large, just about what you're imagining they'd be.) It also became famous for its zero-dissent policy. The mods were notorious for banning people for even the slightest suggestion that Trump wasn't the Greatest Thing Ever, which helped the build the sub into the ultimate circlejerk: a place where facts didn't matter as much as blind obedience to one single cult of personality.

Let's take a breather: a brief history of Reddit and (maybe) censorship

Cast your minds back to the halcyon days of June 2015. The sun was shining, the grass was green, and everything was peaceful on Re... ah, just kidding. That was the summer when ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE after CEO Ellen Pao announced that four subreddits were going to be banned for basically harassing users outside of the sub, in contravention of the Reddit rules. (The largest of these, /r/FatPeopleHate, had about 151,000 subscribers at the time.) This resulted in people who just really, really wanted to still be assholes in the internet to migrate to new website Voat, but it also raised questions of what was acceptable levels of free speech on Reddit as a whole, and to what extent the 'marketplace of ideas' should be allowed to decide. At the time, it seemed to be the case that only subs that actively jumped ship and began harrassing people outside of the limited confines of their own cesspool would be banned, which again caused a degree of controversy that perhaps Reddit hadn't gone far enough. Subs like /r/Coontown were allowed to stay -- but, sadly for Ellen Pao, she was not; she left her role as CEO, and Reddit founder Steve Huffman -- /u/spez -- rejoined the company. Getting rid of /r/Coontown would be one of the first things Huffman did as CEO, and it marked one of the first times that a subreddit was banned specifically for its -- admittedly heinous -- content.

Now consider the dates we've encountered so far. This is -- to the month -- the Reddit that /r/The_Donald was born into. The issue of what constituted acceptable speech was on everyone's mind, and it's safe to say that /r/The_Donald users enjoyed skirting that line. Over the next year or so, they became infamous for 'trolling' other subreddits -- if that's what you want to call it -- to the extent that the mods eventually asked them to stop linking to /r/Politics shortly before the election in an effort to keep the brigading down. As Trump's nationalist agenda grew in prominence, comments on the sub that frequently devolved into some real racist bullshit were ignored by the mods. Misinformation was thrown around like confetti, all in the name of 'memes', and conspiracy theories ran rampant. Among the most prominent of these was Pizzagate.

What's so bad about pizza?

Depends on whether you believe the Pizzagate conspiracy -- which you shouldn't, as it's utter horseshit. In mid-2016, as the election was nearing, Hillary's campaign chief John Podesta has his emails hacked (granted, in a not-particularly tech-heavy way...). These were then released by WikiLeaks and pored over by denizens of /r/The_Donald and other alt-right thinktanks, who came to the conclusion that encoded within their digital bones was evidence of a secret child-trafficking sex ring operating out of the basement of a Washington D.C. pizzeria, frequented by higher-ups from the Democratic Party. (It's worth pointing out that among the many, many faulty leaps in logic in this theory, one of the easiest to check is the fact that Comet Ping Pong doesn't actually have a basement.)

Unfortunately for the /r/Pizzagate subreddit, wannabe vigilante hero Edgar Maddison Welch took it on himself to rescue the children who were -- to reiterate -- definitely not being held in the basement that does not exist, and fired three bullets into the building. Coupled with the doxxing of anyone associated with the pizzeria, it was enough to ensure that /r/Pizzagate was banned from Reddit. Users from /r/The_Donald, which was closely associated with the conspiracy, had a field day either jokingly or not-so-jokingly accusing /u/spez of being a paedophile, and...

Well, this happened.

In response to these accusations and 'fuck /u/spez' becoming a meme, /u/spez manually edited users' comments to replace /u/spez with mods of /r/The_Donald. This was not a good move; it eroded confidence of the management of the site and it emboldened /r/The_Donald to feel victimised. While it must have felt pretty good at the time -- and as was once said of a great man, 'When he's attacked, he'll punch back ten times harder' -- it basically set the already shitty relationship between the admins and the mods back to open hostility. (This is the short version; there's an OOTL megathread here if you're interested in further reading.) Even a lot of people who thought /r/The_Donald had a right to be on the site were concerned about what was going on there -- a fact which only worsened when the mods promoted the openly racist Unite the Right rally. You may know it better as the rally in Charlottesville, where there were 'very fine people on both sides', which may or may not have included those shouting 'blood and soil', or the protestor from fascist group American Vanguard, who deliberately ran his car into a group of counter-protestors and in doing so murdered 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

/r/The_Donald was allowed to continue.

In May of 2017, three mods were banned from the sub for not complying with stricter rules about moderation. /r/The_Donald went private for a couple of days in protest, and in doing so ended up the top post on /r/iamverybadass. (Again, this is the short version; there's a megathread here.)

/r/The_Donald was allowed to continue.


For the recent developments, click here.

On second thought, if I'm going to do a full history of the subreddit, I'm going to need a third part. You guys are going to have a lot of reading to do, but at least now we're at the present. If you want the background, you can find it here and here.


The balance of free speech...

So now Reddit had a problem. True or not, /r/The_Donald had started to get the reputation of being too big to fail. Remember when they banned /r/FatPeopleHate at 151,000 subscribers, and the site basically went into meltdown? In May of 2017, /r/The_Donald was roughly three times that size, and it was the de facto official subreddit for the President of the United States. Banning it was not going to be good optics, especially given the way the President went after Twitter and other social media sites for 'silencing conservative voices'.

Moreover, the mods had repeatedly flouted the rules and received little more than a slap on the wrist for their trouble. Reddit has always struggled with a reputation for being a 'toxic community' -- accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia are only a Google search a way -- and this wasn't helping the site's broad appeal... but if /r/The_Donald could be seen to be getting away with it, what was to stop other subreddits from trying their luck?

And so here we are.

There hasn't really been much in the way of controversy between the sub and the site in a while, even during last year's midterm elections. That changed recently, when a political snafu broke out in Oregon over the attempt by the (Democrat controlled) legislature to pass a cap-and-trade bill. The Democrats easily had the votes to pass it without Republican help, but in order to do so they needed a quorum: a certain percentage of the legislature to be seated in order to legitimise the bill. Without a quorum, they couldn't vote on it. The Republicans, realising this, quite literally ran away, knowing that the vote couldn't take place without them and thus it had to fail.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown wasn't having any of those political shenanigans, thank you very much, and so she announced that the Republicans who buggered off would be fined $500 per day they were derelict in their duties, and dispatched the police to bring them back -- both of which are allowed under the Oregon State Constitution. The thing is, a walkout isn't a strictly partisan affair: it's happened previously in the Oregon State Legislature, notably in 2001 when the Democrats walked out to block a Republican redistricting bill. At that time, the Governor was also a Democrat, so they didn't need to worry so much about being ordered home. The Republicans tried it in 2007 and already once before in 2019, when they got Brown to agreed to kill vaccine and gun control bills. Having seen that it works, they decided to use it to try and block a cap-and-trade bill that they didn't much care for. This time, though, Kate Brown didn't yield, and the walkout began.

So how does this impact Reddit? Well, prior to the walkout -- back when it was just threatened, and knowing that Brown would probably use the powers of the office (again, legally) to bring the Republicans back to the legislature to form a quorum -- Republican State Legislator Brian Boquist made the following statement when asked what he'd do in such a situation:

“This is what I told the superintendent,” Boquist said, referring to OSP Superintendent Travis Hampton. “Send bachelors and come heavily armed. I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon. It’s just that simple.”

(If you think the text doesn't do it justice, you can also see it on video.)

Now, 'send bachelors and come heavily armed' is pretty damn hard to interpret as anything other than 'I'm going to straight-up murder anyone who comes after me, even if they're a police officer in the course of their lawful duties'. The thing about /r/The_Donald is that, by and large, they are rabidly pro-police. You may expect, then, that someone -- even a Republican -- threatening out-and-out cop murder wouldn't be picked up in any big way... but you'd be wrong. Posts about the issue called for anti-police violence were all over the sub for a couple of days, and the mods left them up certainly for long enough to be picked up by tech blogs:

Oregonian here. Hopefully all State Police in Oregon refuse, hes serious. No problems shooting a cop trying to strip rights from Citizens. If he calls for help I’d come.

Fourth generation Oregonian here. I have seen my beloved state turn into North California. The only way to get it back is to burn Portland and Eugene to the ground.

MediaMatters picked up on the story and ran with it; if you're looking for more examples, here you go.

Now of course, it's worth pointing out that assholes being assholes does not make a news story, and these posters could only be a fraction of the 700,000 users that currently make up /r/The_Donald; it's the internet, and people are banned for threatening violence every day. Ordinarily, it might be expected that the users would be blocked and the subreddit could continue as (what passes for) normal. The problem is that this came on the heels of precisely the kind of habitual line-stepping that I detailed in the past two posts. When it started getting mainstream press attention -- remember, that link comes from before the sub was punished -- the Reddit admins acted, and the sub was quarantined.

What's a quarantine, anyway?

It's a way for Reddit to a) warn a sub to get its house in order and b) limit the rulebreaking things it can do. (There are better posts on the topic than mine here, and you can also check out the official Reddit post about the new quarantine rules.)

For /r/The_Donald, the biggest issue is that Reddit took away the personalised CSS stylesheet. This was previously used to ensure that you needed to subscribe before you could downvote comments, and also that the report button was changed to read 'deport' button. In short, it was made much easier for people to report problematic content. Whether that makes a difference is... well, let's leave that as an exercise for the reader.

So how does this fit into the broader picture?

It's important to note that this isn't happening in a Reddit bubble: lots of organisations have been cracking down on the worst parts of Trump supporters and their activities on social media. Three weeks ago, an AMA with /u/spez and Senator Ron Wyden focused in pretty heavily on the issue of /r/The_Donald, with Senator Wyden noting -- with /u/spez right there -- that 'From what I am told, The_Donald is home to messages that cross the line toward inciting the hatred that is eroding our democracy and it would be good to see Mr. Huffman and Reddit to do more work to moderate such behavior.' A couple of months ago, Twitter banned some of its rightwing users for repeatedly breaching the site's terms of service, including James Woods, and most recently -- literally this week -- knitting site Ravelry made (I shit you not) international news when it announced that it was no longer going to allow pro-Trump material on its site.

Is there a broader reason for this? Well, maybe. It's important to note that the first debates of the primaries for 2020 kicked off tonight, and one of the major complaints about the 2016 election was the way social media companies such as Facebook -- and, yes, Reddit -- dealt with the influx of pro-Trump misinformation and flouting of rules. It's possible that all of this is a timed backlash to that criticism... but that could only ever be speculative at the moment. Either way, it seems that social media companies are largely growing tired of the rules violations by rightwing users, and no longer fear the political pushback that comes from being seen as enforcing those rules.


And last but not least, the aftermath. Expect this to be updated over the next few days as the story settles down.

... one last push to the finish, folks. This is where I'll put the most up-to-date information over the next couple of days. If you've stumbled on this and want to read the whole thing, you can find the start here.


What's the view from the other side?

And what does /r/The_Donald make of all this? Well, originally they had stickied the text from the admins explaining the situation, but that has since been removed. In its place is the following (emphasis mine), that sets out the subs stance going forward.

As everyone knows by now, 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. Those comments were reported on by an arm of the DNC and picked up by multiple news outlets.

Upset. Not for suggesting Portland and Eugene be burned to the ground. Not for suggesting that police be murdered for doing their jobs. Just because they were upset.

This may come as a shock to many of you here as we have been very pro law enforcement as long as I can remember, and that is early on in r/The_Donald's history. We have many members that are law enforcement that come to our wonderful place and interact because they feel welcome here. Many are fans of President Trump and we are fans of them. They put their lives on the line daily for the safety of our communities. To have this as a reason for our quarantine is abhorrent on our users part and we will not stand for it. Nor will we stand for any other calls for violence.

To reiterate: while it was not all users, or even a majority of users, this ban very much came down to people threatening police with violence. The sub has been filled with pro-police posts all day, but it's hard to get away from that singular fact.

Going Forward: We have a limited amount of moderators and do thousands of actions a day on things that are reported. Our mods work hard and work for free for the love of our President and this community. We can not go into threads and read every single comment. That is where we need you to come in and help. If you see something that breaks the rules, report it and hit that deport button. The rest of Reddit and many on the left would like to see us gone. They won't hit that report button. They will see it and send it to the media or admins. Don't give them that satisfaction, report it to us and we will take care of it. We have documented cases where they actually will instigate it with alts that we catch and report those.

It's no longer the 'deport' button because the CSS has been stripped away, but as the admins demanded, the mods are at least making a call for the sub to moderate itself better.

If you make a comment that breaks the violence rule, you will be banned just like a shill because after this warning, only shills will be doing it to try and get us banned.

It's fair to say there's zero evidence that 'only shills will be doing it to try and get us banned'.

In bold is the following, which seems to be the official stance of the sub from now on. How it holds -- and whether it prevents the quarantine from become a full ban -- is still up in the air.

Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise, do not post content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals. We understand there are sometimes reasons to post violent content (e.g., educational, newsworthy, artistic, satire, documentary, etc.) so if you’re going to post something violent in nature that does not violate these terms, ensure you provide context to the viewer so the reason for posting is clear.

The post ends with the sign-off 'The acts of a few do not define us as a group' which, while true, is at least a little at odds with a lot of their collective approach to things like, say, Islam.

So... what now?

And that's how it stands at the moment. I'm sure it will develop further over the next couple of days, but I think it only fair, after all of this, that I give the final word to /u/jcm267, the mod of /r/The_Donald who gave the interview to Vice that I mentioned in Part One. When asked if he considered the subreddit to be a place of free speech, he responded:

No, it never has been a "free speech" subreddit. We have rules that are necessary for preserving our culture. "Free speech" applies to governments, not subreddits.

The rules that are necessary for preserving the culture of Reddit, it seems, cut both ways.

Edit
Pub: 27 Jun 2019 17:21 UTC
Views: 429