Enlarge / The image currently at the top of r/donaldtrump. (credit: Reddit)
On Friday, Reddit joined this week’s response to violent online rhetoric as spearheaded by President Donald Trump and removed its “r/donaldtrump” community, the site’s largest existing community dedicated specifically to Trump. Visiting any of that community’s pages now leads to a simple message pointing to Reddit’s rules about “inciting violence,” which starts by saying, “Do not post violent content.”
Without a citation of specific Reddit threads or a formal announcement from Reddit administrators clarifying the move, users may be left wondering about the exact reason for the removal. It’s possible, for example, that the community page was punished for reposting Trump’s speeches and statements from earlier in the week, which alternated between false claims about election fraud, calls to action by his followers in response to his claims about fraud, or sympathetic statements about the seditionists who stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday.
While searching through r/donaldtrump archives is a bit unwieldy (owing to how such archives are maintained at sites like archive.is), cursory searches point to the community hosting pre-protest conversations about the January 6 protest, usually with titles pointing to Trump’s direct request that his followers from across the nation attend. The issue may also have come from multiple claims at r/donaldtrump shortly before its shutdown about Wednesday’s seditionists being disguised as “antifa,” despite a majority of Capitol building invaders being identified with clear links to white nationalist organizations and calls for a violent January 6 protest.
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