One of the largest Reddit forums devoted to President Trump has been shut down over its users inciting violence following the mob riot in the US Capitol.
On Friday morning, Reddit banned the r/DonaldTrump subreddit, which was first noticed by Axios. The community had 52,700 members and recently dubbed itself the "Trump Election Defense Task Force."
Reddit said the forum’s members repeatedly violated its policy against inciting violence when discussing the rioting that took place in the US Capitol on Wednesday. “Reddit's site-wide policies prohibit content that promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals,” the company told PCMag in a statement.
“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. We have also taken action to ban the community r/donaldtrump given repeated policy violations in recent days regarding the violence at the US Capitol,” the company added.
The ban occurs as the major tech companies have been cracking down on social media activity from Trump and his supporters amid worries they'll spark more calls for violence. On Thursday, Facebook said it would suspend Trump’s account from the social network and Instagram for at least two weeks until he exits office. Twitter, on the other hand, issued a 12-hour timeout for Trump’s account, restoring it on Thursday.
At the same time, many critics are blasting the same social media platforms for becoming breeding grounds for extremism and conspiracy theories. "Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior," wrote former First Lady Michelle Obama, who's calling on the tech platforms to ban President Trump permanently.
Nevertheless, many Trump supporters are already gathering in alternative social networks that've been marketing themselves to conservatives. In Reddit's case, the platform was once home to r/The_Donald, a controversial subreddit, which had over 700,000 members, before it was shut down last year. The subreddit’s members have since created their own forum via TheDonald.win, where they can talk without any content moderation.