Reddit administrators are cracking down on the "The_Donald" subreddit, threatening the existence of what's become both the most prominent pro-Trump site on the internet and a reliable source of memes for Trump's Twitter feed.
Reddit brass have been at odds with The_Donald for years and made the forum
harder to find last June after users advocated for violence against police officers. On Tuesday, they went further, ousting some of the subreddit's moderators and
declaring that new moderators will need to be "vetted" by Reddit administrators before they can run the forum.
A Reddit spokesperson confirmed the moves in an email to me.
"Reddit may intervene from time to time when moderators are consistently in violation of our Moderator Guidelines, which can include removing a user's moderator status," the email reads.
The_Donald's users haven't taken this well, turning the subreddit, briefly, into a home for memes aimed at Reddit administrators rather than Democrats.
All of this likely means that The_Donald's time on Reddit and its access to Reddit's massive user base will soon come to an end.
This won't be the end of The_Donald as a pro-Trump internet community, though. Sensing that an outright ban is in the offing, The_Donald's administrators have already set up a
fallback site called "TheDonald.Win" and are encouraging users to migrate over.
While TheDonald.Win looks just like a subreddit, it's independently run—and thus beyond the control of Reddit's administrators. Still, other right-wing groups that have been kicked off Reddit have struggled to gain traction with their own Reddit-style sites. QAnon believers who moved to another Reddit knock-off after their own Reddit bans, for example, have struggled to attract anything like the kind of Reddit-level user numbers on their backup sites.
