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Influential pro-Trump netpaintings have been harmed by harassment and attacks, said Reddit, which has also banned other groups.
By Mike Isaac
SAN FRANCISCO — Reddit, one of the largest social networking and message board websites, on Monday banned its biggest community devoted to President Trump as part of an overhaul of its hate speech policies.
The community, or “subreddit,” called “The_Donald,” hosts more than 790,000 users who post memes, viral videos and messages about Mr. Trump. Reddit executives said the group, which has had a major influence on the cultivation and feeding of Trump’s online base, had constantly blurred its regulations by allowing other Americans to attack and harass others with hate speech.
“Reddit is a place for community and belonging, not for attacking people,” Steve Huffman, the company’s chief executive, said in a call with reporters. “‘The_Donald’ has been in violation of that.”
Reddit said it also banned another 2,000 communities from all political backgrounds, and added a loyal one to the left-wing podcast organization “Chapo Trap House,” which has about 160,000 normal users. Prohibited forums are inactive.
“The_Donald,” which has been a virtual base for Trump supporters, is by far the ultimate active and critical network that Reddit has to do it against. For years, the big apple of Trump’s top viral memes that revel in Facebook, Twitter and other penetrated places could be attributed to “The_Donald.” One video, “The Trump Effect,” was born in “The_Donald” in mid-2016 before returning to Trump, who tweeted it to his 83 million followers.
Social media sites face an assessment of the bureaucracy of the content they host and their day-to-day work to moderate and content. While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and other more recent friends positioned themselves as neutral sites that only hosted people’s posts and videos, users are now pressuring them to do so in contrast to hate speech, abusive and fake speech on their platform.
Some of the sites have recently become more proactive in dealing with these issues. Twitter started adding labels last month to some of Mr. Trump’s tweets to refute their accuracy or call them out for glorifying violence. Snap also said it would stop promoting Mr. Trump’s Snapchat account after determining that his public comments off the site could incite violence.
On Monday, the Twitch broadcast suspended Mr. Trump’s account for violating his policy opposed to hateful behavior. The Trump channel had broadcast one of his birth crusades in 2015, in which he denigrated Mexicans and immigrants, among other flows. Twitch deleted the videos from the president’s account.
YouTube also said Monday that it banns six channels for violating their policies. They included those of two prominent white supremacists, David Duke and Richard Spencer, and American Renaissance, a white supremacist publication. Stefan Molyneux, a podcast and Internet commentator who had amassed a large audience on YouTube for his videos on philosophy and far-right politics, was also banned from the site.
Facebook, the world’s largest social network, said it refused to be a content referee. The comparative apple said it will allow all speeches through political leaders to be highlighted again on its platform, the messages were misleading or problematic, as the content was of journalistic interest and public interest to read.
Since then, Facebok has been increasingly criticized for his position. In recent weeks, Major Apple advertisers, adding Coca-Cola, Verizon, Levi Strauss and Unilever, have said they plan to suspend social media advertising because they are unhappy with their handling of hate speech and misinformation.
Andrea Hickerson, an associate dean of the University of South Carolina’s School of Information and Communications, said the upcoming movements of social media corporations would reduce the “unwarranted noise and confusion circulating the truth.”
“There is a wonderful variety of popular rhetoric about the negative influence of “media” on civil discourse, but now social media corporations recognize that some of their own users are the problem,” he said.
Reddit, which was founded five years ago and has more than 430 million normal users, has long been a corner of the Internet capable of accommodating a wide variety of communities. No problem, whether video games, makeup or high presbound cleaning aisles, was too small to discuss. People can also simply register, browse the site anonymously and connect to 130,000 active sub-redits.
However, this loose position has led to toxic-speaking apple disorders and objection content on the site, so Reddit has been constantly criticized. In the past, society organized forums that promoted racism as opposed to brayered blacks and minor children, all in a call for freedom of expression.
This has replaced hesitant over time. In 2015, Reddit brought anti-bullying policies. Later that year, he banned several submaritals targeting black or obese people. In 2016, it implemented additional anti-harassment measures and tools. It has also been freed from forums faithful to the acquisition and sale of drugs openly.
But the company’s executives had specific problems controlling “The_Donald” and its destructive content. Reddit said other Americans in “The_Donald” had posted racist and vulgar messages that caused harassment and targeted other Americans from other ethnic and devoted stations outside and on their site.
“The_Donald” has also been the subject of extensive conspiracy theories, adding the spread of the demystified conspiracy of “PizzaGate,” Hillary Clinton and top logical Democrats were falsely accused of running a child sex trafficking network at a Washington pizzeria.
Reddit said that on Monday it brought 8 regulations that define the conditions that users must comply with. These come with a ban on selective harassment, disclosure of the identity of others, the publication of applicable sexual exploitation content with minors, or the trafficking of illegal ingredients or other illicit transactions.
While the site had a prohibited position of such behaviors, control changes take a tougher line in speech that “promotes identity-based hatred or vulnerability.”
Mr. Huffguy said “The_Donald” users had violated his first rule of counterdependence: “Remember the huguy.” He said he and others at Reddit had continually tried to explain why with the “The_Donald” moderators, who controlled the subreddit voluntarily, without success. Banning the forum was a last-last effort to involve harassment, he said.
“We’ve given them great apple opportunities to succeed,” Huffguy said. “The message is transparent, there is no goal of running with us.”
Mabig Apple’s Republican lawmakers have accused social media corporations of censoring conservative prospects on their sites. Huffguy said the “The_Donald” ban is not a check-out and in specific conservatives.
“Absolutely not, period, ” he said.
On a Monday, Tim Murtaugh, communications director of Trump’s re-election campaign, did not adhere to Reddit’s resolution, but directed other Americans to the Trump app or send a text message directly to the campaign.
The new bans adhere to the resignation this month by Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit’s co-founders of the company’s board of directors. Ohanian, who said he moved through protests opposed to the death of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis who died in police custody last month, requested that Reddit’s administrative board be repeated through a black candidate.
“I’m writing this like a father who wants to meet his black daughter when she asks, ‘What have you done?'” said Ohanian, married to tennis star Serena Williams, in a blog post at the time. “To all who are suffering to fix our dazzling nation: don’t stop.”
Michael Seibel, managing director of Silicon Valley and African-American incubator Y Combinator, replaced Mr. Ohanian on Reddit’s board of directors.
Reddit executives said the site remained a place that they hoped could be a forum for civil political discourse in the future, as long as users played by its rules.
“There’s a hoax on Reddit for conservatives, there’s a reddit hoax for liberals,” said Benjamin Lee, Reddit’s general counsel. “There’s a hoax on Reddit for Donald Trump.”
Kevin Roose contributed to the report.
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