Reddit did so, naming Michael Seibel, CEO of the startup funding venture Y Combinator. On June 5, the company’s cofounder, Alexis Ohanian (the husband of Serena Williams), stepped down from the company’s board and urged Reddit to replace him with a black candidate. The_Donald’s banishment comes at a cultural inflection point that’s already produced double-digit polling swings on police brutality and Black Lives activism (against and for, respectively). Only now, in the wake of half a decade of online protest and justification after justification by Reddit staff all the way up to CEO Steve Huffman, has that resistance collapsed. But while Reddit changed its rules and rewrote its algorithms to stop T_D (and other pages) from dominating the site, it resisted banning it. Major media organizations have covered the page again and again. In the five years of its existence, the subreddit played host to Russian propaganda, launched memes and stories parroted by Trump and his campaign, conducted oppo research on behalf of the president, and harassed (and was harassed by) hundreds of people around the internet. (Advance Publications, which owns WIRED’s publisher, Condé Nast, is a Reddit shareholder.) It was to double that and more, nearing 800,000 subscribers, before-on June 29, 2020-Reddit’s staff banned the subreddit, and it vanished from the site’s pages for good. By March 2017, when these posts were made, the page’s membership had swelled to more than 350,000 members. Since mid-2016, when The_Donald-or “T_D,” a subsection of the massive social site -came into its own, posts like these made the forum the most notorious in the history of a website with a fair number of skeletons in its closet. MEANWHILE IN TOKYO, (the largest city in the world) has no terror attacks and no Muslims! Coincidence? I think not!” They included “David Seaman to be SUICIDED for EXPOSING PEDOGATE. anyone who said refugees welcome invited this.” They included “Sadiq Khan- Terror attacks are ‘part and parcel of living in a big city’. In the week before the bridge attack, The_Donald’s top posts included one titled, “5 refugees rape a 7 year old girl in Hamburg Germany. The gleeful anti-Muslim banter only grew from there.įlouting those rules was routine. “Now just add in a Muslim woman stepping over one of the bodies,” commented user 2termtrump-or /u/2termtrump in the site’s shorthand. Commenters turned out to express their support.
TrumpBeatsHillary boasted a “flair” (a small image near the username) of Pepe the Frog in riot gear brandishing a gun. The post’s title referred to the attacker, Khalid Masood, who was shot and killed by London police. In block letters at the top, the image was captioned: “BRIDGES NOT WALLS.” Two corpses had signs: One read “Fuck Trump” another was a rainbow flag.
It depicted a stylized Westminster bridge covered in dead and bleeding bodies, with a distant truck trailing more blood behind it. The post itself was a political cartoon of sorts. Its title was “But hey, it wasn’t all bad. Thirty-one hours later, a Reddit user named TrumpBeatsHillary wrote a post on the forum page r/The_Donald. On March 22, 2017, at 2:40 pm local time, a terrorist attacked pedestrians on Westminster Bridge in London with a truck, killing five people and injuring at least 50.