Archive Link to avoid giving them traffic: https://archive.fo/GOqAJ
Actual Link: https://www.ft.com/content/23f4d7fe-a478-410d-9d03-d5526b6753d1
Far-right finds new online home in TheDonald.win
Pro-Trump meme website gains popularity as critics express concern over its role in the spread of hateful content
SCREENSHOT (https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/ef6b9147-8761-4612-a169-2634c4cd08cc.jpg)
The far-right has its own social media spaces, including the forum TheDonald.win, which originated in Reddit
Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan in London 2 HOURS AGO
As Facebook, Twitter and Reddit step up their efforts to flush out extremists ahead of the US election, the successor to a banned Reddit page is emerging as a magnet for extreme discourse.
TheDonald.win, which hosts a range of rightwing memes and bills itself as “a never-ending rally dedicated to the 45th President of the United States”, was first set up as a back-up space for Reddit’s controversial subreddit The_Donald.
But after its parent was banned in June, it became the community’s main hub, with traffic to the site increasing from about 750,000 monthly views in February to more than 5.8m in July, according to SimilarWeb data.
While still relatively small, experts said TheDonald.win is playing an increasingly important role in disseminating hateful content that then leaks into the mainstream.
“A lot of times, [far-right websites] are viewed as not successful because their numbers are not equivalent to YouTube or Reddit,” said Angelo Carusone, president and chief executive of the liberal-leaning non-profit Media Matters for America. “That’s not the only metric: we have to ask about the energy of the community.”
TheDonald.win owes its success in part to its Reddit-like interface, which has made it a natural landing point for the displaced community of r/The_Donald. Meanwhile, with lighter content moderation than more mainstream platforms, users are afforded a greater degree of freedom in what they can post.
“Where TheDonald.win did really well is to replicate the functionality of Reddit and also created a place where the community could transfer itself over to,” said Mr Carusone. “In a lot of ways it’s a more distilled and refined version of their community, free of safeguards.”
Before its ban, The_Donald had amassed more than 729,000 followers — many of whom have since migrated to its successor, said Joe Ondrak, a senior researcher at counter-misinformation organisation Logically. “It was essentially like moving house for them.”
The_Donald had long been a source of controversy for Reddit. A 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center said the site hosted a combination of racism, conspiracy theories and violent narratives against political opponents. Last year, the platform “quarantined” — added warning labels to — the forum after some posts encouraged violence towards police officers in Oregon.
The layout of TheDonald.win will be familiar to Reddit users, albeit with a header featuring Mr Trump — who is often referred to on the site as “God-Emperor of the United States” — and a bald eagle.
The site continues its predecessor’s emphasis on circulating memes, both as a tool to rally supporters and infuriate opponents. Popular examples last week include a Photoshopped image of US politician Ilhan Omar, falsely portraying her as a terrorist, and a number of memes mocking George Floyd’s death.
Former Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet is also a popular subject. The most popular post referring to him, posted in April, is simply titled: “No quarter for communists. Pinochet did nothing wrong.” Other posts cite “free helicopter rides” — a reference to the killing of political opponents by throwing them from an aircraft.
Mr Carusone argued that TheDonald.win will continue to attract attention even if Mr Trump is unsuccessful in the election. “[Mr Trump] represents a style of engaging in politics as well as an ideology of ‘might makes right’ with a bit of [talk about] white genocide and a conspiratorial twist — that’s something people can organise around,” he said.
In response to a request for comment, a moderator from TheDonald.win sent a link to a statement in Russian which concluded: “If the promotion of the expulsion of Communists from our country is considered far-right discourse, then yes, we are supporters.”
The rise of TheDonald.win comes as other spaces formerly used by the far-right have faced disruption. The notorious imageboard 8chan has struggled to recreate the same level of engagement since it was shut last year, according to Mr Carusone.
Mr Ondrak said its successor 8kun is also facing an identity crisis between younger ethno-nationalists and an older generation of QAnon supporters who have opposing stances over Israel and Mr Trump himself.
That challenge has driven some far-right groups to existing platforms as well. Kristina Gildejeva, a disinformation researcher at Logically, said she had seen increasingly organised white nationalist operations on chat app Telegram.
While Telegram has been a key tool for protesters around the world, Ms Gildejeva said that she had seen far-right groups increasingly using it to co-ordinate their posts in order to amplify their reach.
Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.
Researchers and academics are also concerned about the influence these platforms may have on mainstream social media sites ahead of the 2020 election. “I don’t think it’s those really extreme people who carry the election,” said Samantha North, a freelance disinformation investigator. “It’s when these narratives filter through to the mainstream and reach ordinary voters and push them towards voting for [Mr] Trump through conspiracy theories.”
One post from TheDonald.win — calling for the implementation of a potentially restrictive type of voter identity system that many on the left argue is discriminatory — received 7,000 interactions when it was posted on an unofficial fan page on Facebook for former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, including more than 4,000 shares.
According to CrowdTangle, which analyses the spread of content on the web, posts from TheDonald.win have been interacted with more than 45,000 times on Facebook.
Ms North emphasised that these metrics did not account for private, local groups, which she said were a key vector for the spread of far-right ideas and conspiracy theories and which were far harder for researchers to discover.
“It’s shocking to find Bill Gates vaccine conspiracy theories posted in these village groups.”
A spokesperson for Facebook said that while private groups offer additional privacy, their users must adhere to its community standards. They also said that it finds nearly 90 per cent of all the hate speech it removes before it is reported.
Far right? No, we are the center now.
"There's something aggressive about just ... standing there. Do you feel like you owe an apology?"
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1088105150479323138
What the fuck. Never saw that interview before. What a fucking bitch.
I've been looking for the far right. While I'm not convinced that such a group actually exists, there has to be an equal and opposite reaction to the radical far left. I'm wondering if the far left and far right have merged into the anarcho-communists.
I've been called a right wing racist since 2004 for support the president at the time, George W. Bush.
Anything right of Democrat is "right wing," and these days, "far right." All Democrats/leftists know how to do is label people. We're racists or xxxphobe, misogynists, etc. It's to a point now where after being called everything under the sun without basis the words have no meaning besides to help chicken tendie leftists feel better about their miserable reality..
I have no perspective since I've been MAGA since 2016, but you have to think their rhetoric is losing any semblance of meaning to normies.
lol love the tag (leg_hairs), but I think it's waking up normies more than it's hurting at this stage in the game. I think the labeling was extremely effective leading up to the Obama elections though.
I think we can make a spectrum on how much one hates communism.
1.) Ronald Reagan [Least Hateful] {Show the communists and the people why they are wrong}
2.) Joseph McCarthy {Remove communists from power}
3.) A. Mitchell Palmer {Arrest all Communists}
4.) Augusto Pinochet {Kill all Communists}
5.) Francisco Franco {Kill all communists and their sympathizers}
6.) Adolf Hitler [Most Hateful] {Kill all communists, their sympathizers, and anyone willing to work with them}
Edit: I removed Mussolini because their is no such thing as a non-revolutionary communist. And added A. Mitchell Palmer [Man who led the First Red Scare] because he actually arrested Communists vs. McCarthy who merely removed them from power.
Right now I would say I am a McCarthy right now.
Will probably become a Palmer by the end of this election.
And if the left starts a civil war I will definitely become a Pinochet.
I could probably add more to this spectrum because their are tons of people that took many different approaches to removing communists.
Wait, Franco was more based than Pinochet? :-O
No, the "far right" definitely exists, all eleven of them plus around 1382 FBI informants.
Yes, they do. I stumbled across them via the family of someone I went on a few dates with. From what I saw, they use off the books organizations to network (think social groups that have existed pre internet). I have no idea if they can back up their talk, but they have serious plans and at least appear to be extremely well networked for using old school means, as I've come across groups using their identifiers all across the country.
My honest impression is that they're really just angry and well armed people that have been fed up for so long that they don't care about civility or anything but self preservation, and they concern me as a group that could get painted as the negative face of resistance to communism, should they ever act.
But as for right wing extremists out in the open? I see very few. But hoardes of crazy far left lunatics that are so deep into their imaginary narrative world that they can't see reality at all.
Anyone to the right of Mao is considered "far right" to these communists.
Their metric for a "good right-winger" is Mitt Romney
This community is much better moderated and less threatening than reddit and twitter.
Supporting law and order, family and basic constitutional rights (like 1A and 2A) is indeed center. Loony libtards moved so far left that from their point of view it seems like we are far-right.