Reddit Bans ‘r/DonaldTrump’ Subreddit Following Capitol Riot

The subreddit had thousands of members before it was shut down on Friday for “repeated policy violations”

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Reddit banned the subreddit “r/DonaldTrump” on Friday in the wake of Wednesday’s deadly riot at the Capitol.

A spokesperson for the forum site told TheWrap Reddit took “action to ban the community r/donaldtrump given repeated policy violations in recent days regarding the violence at the U.S. Capitol.”

The spokesperson said, “Reddit’s site-wide policies prohibit content that promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals. In accordance with this, we have been proactively reaching out to moderators to remind them of our policies and to offer support or resources as needed.”

According to archived screenshots of the subreddit, it boasted about 52,000 members as of Thursday night.

Reddit’s ban of the pro-Trump forum follows similar actions from other web giants like Facebook, Instagram, Shopify and Twitch. It also follows, however, its own ban in 2020 of the largest Trump-themed subreddit, “r/The_Donald.”

The site said at the time, “All communities on Reddit must abide by our content policy in good faith. We banned r/The_Donald because it has not done so, despite every opportunity. The community has 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. 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.”

At the time of its ban, “r/The_Donald” had almost 800,000 members.

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