The atmosphere between Trump supporting Redditors and the site’s admins has been rough for awhile now. Beginning with its meteoric rise, the subreddit r/the_donald has butted heads with Reddit’s administrators over issues ranging from harassing users of other subreddits to the constant drama over a rotating cast of moderators.
But the relationship is now getting even more fraught. A request by admins to help control the behavior of users on r/the_donald has whirled up a shitstorm that is part paranoid delusions, and part legitimate concern about creeping censorship throughout the social news platform.
Reddit has long struggled with how to handle its controversial subreddits. One year ago Reddit banned r/fatpeoplehate, instigating a short revolt by the site’s users and moderators that led to the ouster of Reddit’s CEO, Ellen Pao. Just recently it banned the white nationalist subreddit, r/european, to less uproar.
If Reddit bans the_donald, last year’s controversy would be a mere Nipplegate compared to the oncoming Monica Lewinski. For a subreddit dedicated to a major party’s presidential candidate garners far more sympathy than one dedicated to making fun of fat people.
It all started when members of the_donald started complaining about anti-Trump censorship by moderators on r/politics, Reddit’s main political news discussion forum, which has more recently a Bernie Bros cheering section. Posts about the violence at Trump’s San Jose rally last week were deleted for being “off topic.”
The admins accused the_donald users of “brigading” or mass downvoting comments by r/politics moderators explaining why the posts were deleted and sending them threatening personal messages. At this point the most downvoted comment is at -59, hardly a competently organized brigade by the site’s second-most-active subreddit.
The admins responded by suspending users who downvoted the specific comments even if they were not the_donald users.
A the_donald mod even got suspended for sending an “annoying message” (according to an admin) to a r/politics mod. The admin sodypop eventually sent the other moderators of the_donald a message requesting help addressing the problem.
Basically sodypop asked the_donald moderators to help prevent their users from personally interfering with r/politics. The_donald mods took that as a demand to censor all posts on the subreddit related to censorship in r/politics. As the mod CisWhiteMaelstrom (now called Dylan-W because he deleted his first account after getting threatened with doxxing by an another Redditor) explained, when an admin makes a suggestion it is inherently not a suggestion. This is because admins have the power to ban or quarantine a subreddit.
CisWhiteMaelstrom alerted his troops with this post.
Attention: The admins modmailed us last night and said that this sub is not allowed to post about the censorship on /r/Politics anymore. from The_Donald
The post shot up to the top of r/all and this attack on the site’s admins could be seen prominently by all Redditors. The perceived censorship was discussed on various other subreddits in the following days.
Predictably, the_donald users, or centipedes as they call themselves, were pissed at this new rule put in place by their own mods censoring talk of censorship. Many angry messages were sent to sodypop and the trashing of r/politics mods did not cease.
What’s at issue here is a supposed double standard by Reddit’s admins. SRD, referred to in the exchanges above, stands for r/subredditdrama, a notably left-wing sub that discusses the dramatic goings ons of Reddit. SRD frequently discusses the_donald drama and is accused of starting witchhunts of the_donald mods. R/ShitRedditSays is another habitual vote brigader the admins never discipline.
The_donald, on the other hand, does not link to other subreddits, has banned posting tweets, and even for a period of time banned all mentions of the word “Muslim” in capitulation to the admins.
The second round of conversation between sodypop and the_donald mods only heated up the rhetoric.
Mod GayLubeOil is now calling on the centipedes to contact prominent alt-right conservatives like Anne Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos — who recently was awarded moderator status on the sub — complaining about the alleged mistreatment by the Reddit admins.
There is a pattern here to how Reddit does away with problematic subs. They ask for more and more capitulations by the sub’s moderators and then use these conversations as bread crumb evidence of the sub’s history of issues.
But the_donald is a sub that for the most part obeys Reddit’s rules. And more importantly it is the largest community of Trump supporters on the Internet. “I would say we’re going to follow the admins rules but we’re going to make sure we’re treated fairly,” CisWhiteMaelstrom said. “If not, we’re not going to keep it a secret we are not going to bend the knee.”
Will the_donald get banned? Not unless Reddit wants the largest censorship shitstorm in the history of the site. They just need to wait until November.
