Reddit bans thousands of subreddits including The_Donald, chapotraphouse and gendercritical

File photo of the Reddit offices. Reuters. 

Reddit has banned thousands of subreddits including popular subs like The_Donald, chapotraphouse and gendercritical. Reuters. Reddit claimed that the subreddits involved "promoted hate speech". President Trump's unofficial subreddit, The_Donald was banned, though it was largely abandoned last year when the site quarantined it. chapotraphouse, a subreddit for the eponymous left wing blog was also banned for breaking Reddit rules. Twitch, a video game streaming service, also suspended President Trump's channel. 

A full list of banned subreddits can be found here on WatchRedditDie

My Comment:

The mainstream media is making a big deal out of the fact that The_Donald was banned, but the truth of the matter is that the subreddit had been abandoned last year. The users created their own website as a backup plan and left for it after Reddit quarantined them. They can now be found on TheDonald.win. 

That doesn't mean what they did to The_Donald was ok though. Far from it, they banned the subreddit for "making threats" but the moderators always removed any threatening posts. Indeed, many other subreddits were trying to get The_Donald banned and were posing as Trump supporters when they made the threats themselves. Reddit set an impossible standard for them, which basically every other political subreddit on the site would not pass, and then held them accountable for something they couldn't control. 

chapotraphouse getting the ax isn't that surprising either. They needed left wing subs to "balance" out the bans on right wing ones and they fit the bill. From what I understand the users of chapotraphouse were causing Reddit problems with the Secret Service due to the regular threats against President Trump and the moderators failure to do anything about it. Despite that, I don't think the subreddit itself should have been banned even if the users and moderators should have been. I'm a free speech absolutist and even the absolute worst people on the internet deserve free speech. 

Gendercritical is the most notable ban for me. Though I never used the subreddit itself, from what I understand it was for people, most notably feminist women, who did not agree with the idea that transgender men are actually women. These women are called "TERF's" Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, which I consider a slur. Banning them shows that it's really the lunatics running the asylum and I always thought that out of all the feminists out there they were the only ones that actually had good points. It's amazing that they would ban a subreddit that has a main argument that the vast majority of people actually agree with. 

The rest of the subreddits banned appear to be either chapotraphouse alts, right wing meme subs, or the occasional "racist" sub. Most of them appeared to be minor but it's clear that many of them shouldn't have been banned. 

More concerning is Reddit's new rules. They specifically say that you are allowed to be racist or bigoted against majority groups. Presumably this means white people, men (even though women are more common) or "cis" (ie non-transgender people). Of course this is pretty damn racist and bigoted itself, but it's very clear that if you are fully on board with the radical left you are fine unless you are bringing government heat on you like chapotraphouse.

They also seem to be pretty hypocritical as they left up a lot of creepy porn subreddits. After Tumblr banned porn, a lot of their worst users went to Reddit and the site now apparently has a real problem with pedophiles and other degenerates. But those subreddits are apparently fine under these new rules. 

I really think that Republicans screwed up in 2016-2018 when they didn't seem to realize that tech censorship is one of the biggest threats against them. They had an opportunity when they controlled both houses of congress, the presidency and, supposedly, the Supreme Court (yeah, Roberts has been very flaky lately but still) and didn't do anything to stop this. Sure, some Senators are tweeting about it right now but there is very little they can do to stop this kind of nonsense, when that wasn't true just a couple of years ago. 

The assault on our culture of free speech continues.https://t.co/pxLHO3dbTf

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) June 29, 2020

 As for me, I only visit reddit for a couple of small subreddits that have, so far, avoided the eye of Sauron. They tend to be from Scott Alexander's online diaspora. Out of the main subreddits, the only one I visit is AskReddit. Reddit in general is terrible and not just because of it's insane moderation policies. It's just a terrible design for the website.

I do think that The_Donald did it right. When a website starts to bash it's own users like this it can be replaced. After all Reddit itself only became popular because Fark.com changed all it's rules and layouts and a mass exodus began. Though I think Twitter and Facebook are too big for this to happen, Reddit is not so big and if they keep screwing over their users to the point where only transgender radical feminists are allowed then they too will go the way of Fark.