Link to excerpt

Several months ago, Mr. Bokhari approached us to write the foreword to his upcoming book (releases September 22nd) Deleted: Big Tech's Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election. He closely followed and reported on the trials and tribulations of r/the_donald on the former platform that screwed us over at every available opportunity. Provided with an opportunity to tell our story in a book that will likely make the best sellers list, we happily accepted Mr. Bokhari's request. Below, you'll find the complete text of our submission:

As the United States approaches the 2020 election, President Trump’s supporters find themselves in the crosshairs of all major social media platforms.

Whether from the rabidly left-wing Twitter Trust and Safety Council, an activist Facebook administrator, or a political operative overseeing Reddit communities, Trump allies and voters are at risk of censorship in the digital world by simply voicing their beliefs. These companies enjoy protection under federal law, but their actions toward conservatives clearly undermine their standing as neutral platforms and lend credence to the belief that they have become publishers with clear political agendas. So why do they continue to enjoy the special federal protections reserved for such platforms?

We are the creators and moderators of r/The_Donald, the largest community of Trump supporters on Reddit, the wildly popular message board that calls itself “the front page of the internet.” For five years, Reddit—the nineteenth-most-popular site on the web—has been home to our nearly eight hundred thousand users and has become one of the most influential sources of pro-Trump content on the web. A 2018 study by computer scientists at King’s College London, University College London, Boston University, the University of Alabama, and the Cyprus University of Technology found that we were far and away the top distributor of memes on the internet.

But our position is in peril. Since r/The_Donald was created, Reddit has consistently targeted it with restrictions that are not equally imposed upon other subreddits on the site. Even before President Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, Reddit and its CEO, Steve Huffman, aka “spez,” began displaying hostility toward us and taking actions to diminish our reach and suppress our message. Reddit’s suppression of r/The_Donald only grew when George Soros acolyte Jessica Ashooh joined Reddit as director of policy and de facto manager of Reddit communities.

Our major issues with Reddit began with the Pulse nightclub shooting, during which radical Islamist Omar Mateen slaughtered forty-nine gay people and wounded an additional fifty-three. Upon learning of the Muslim faith of the attacker, default subreddits, those with the most subscribers, began a campaign of censorship and oppression of speech, going so far as to remove comments directing users to locations to donate blood. As Redditors were unable to receive updates on the shooting elsewhere, users began flocking to r/The_Donald and significantly boosted our subscriber count. In response, Reddit began a long history of capricious actions aimed at removing the voices of President Trump’s supporters from the Reddit public forum.

Four days after the shooting, Huffman, the Reddit CEO, stated the following concerning the reactionary changes to their website: “Many people will ask if this is related to r/the_donald. The short answer is no, we have been working on this change for a while, but I cannot deny their behavior hastened its deployment. We have seen many communities like r/the_donald over the years—ones that attempt to dominate the conversation on Reddit at the expense of everyone else. This undermines Reddit, and we are not going to allow it.”

At the time of Huffman’s statement, r/The_Donald enjoyed a place atop Reddit’s most active communities, thanks to our devoted user base and the energy they expended in their support of President Trump’s 2020 campaign.

While Huffman accused us of dominating the conversation, topics of interest to progressives, such as support for net neutrality and the failed presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, routinely made the front page, often originating from subreddits where the user counts do not even remotely match the large number of upvotes (Reddit’s rough equivalent of Facebook “likes”) they received. Clearly, “dominating the conversation” on Reddit is perfectly fine if you’re a progressive.

In November 2016, shortly after Trump’s election, Reddit’s CEO revealed his true colors. Frustrated by our users continually mocking him, Huffman used his database access to edit user comments in r/The_Donald, something unheard of on any social media website and calling the integrity of Reddit as a whole into question. He offered a halfhearted apology and continued as CEO despite the severe damage to the reputation of his site. Imagine Mark Zuckerberg using his powers to edit your grandma’s Facebook post because she made fun of him. That’s the equivalent of what Huffman did.

One week later, messages were leaked from Slack, an instant messaging service, that clearly displayed collusion between site administrators and non-r/The_Donald moderators in an attempt to ban r/The_Donald. Again, Huffman found himself in the middle of the controversy. The leaked messages showed him saying, “I think we need to figure out T_D without banning them. [Because] there will be another.”

As part of a new advertising campaign, Reddit created a site for prospective advertisers to view user counts in subreddits so that they might select where to run their ads. While all other subreddits displayed numbers similar to what Reddit states, r/The_Donald showed a number of 6 million users—far beyond the nearly eight hundred thousand Reddit currently displays. Administrators attempted to explain the discrepancy as an error, but together with our own website metrics, it cast doubt over the reliability of the site’s numbers. Is Reddit hiding the true number of Trump supporters on its platform?

Reddit’s anti-Trump users often parroted the leftist media line that Trump supporters are Russian bots and foreign operatives, but Reddit itself dispelled this lie in March 2018. It released a security report stating that 14,000 posts during the 2016 election may have originated from Russia. Of those, only 316 originated from r/The_Donald, by far the most active political subreddit during the election cycle.

June 2019 saw Reddit hit r/The_Donald with a deathblow, by putting us in “quarantine.” This made our subreddit invisible to anyone not subscribed to r/The_Donald, the majority of Reddit’s user base.4 The justification given was violent comments aimed toward government officials, posted by anonymous users. This quarantine occurred only after a Media Matters article and a campaign by censor extraordinaire and spoiled rich child Carlos Maza. In response, we conducted a review of other subreddits and compiled a twenty-five-page report on violent comments directed at government officials. Of particular note was the fact that the far-left r/politics subreddit contained twenty-nine violent comments in a post about the same exact story, a standoff between Republicans and Democrats in Oregon, each one of which far exceeded the ferocity of the seven that resulted in our quarantine.

We unsuccessfully tried to appeal our quarantine by preparing an in-depth report demonstrating the changes we made and the accompanying data. We complied with all requests from administrators. Reddit responded by notifying us that the quarantine would remain in place because we failed to meet a metric that they would not share with us and because our users supposedly upvoted content that violated their intentionally broad rules, something over which we had no control. Even after condemnation from a member of Congress, Representative Jim Banks (R-IN), Reddit wouldn’t budge.

On February 25, 2020, Reddit hammered the final nail into the coffin of r/The_Donald. With no prior warning, they gutted our moderation team by removing our sixteen most active moderators.7 Over subsequent days, Jessica Ashooh, author of such articles as “What the Rise of the Islamic State Tells Us About Donald Trump: And How to Take Them Both Down,” and her community team removed several more, leaving us unable to properly run the web’s largest hub for Trump supporters. Thankfully, we prepared for this eventuality by creating a site for our user base without the activist interference of Reddit, thedonald.win, which we now call home.

A common phrase uttered by the liberal-outrage mob is “If you don’t like it, build your own platform.” We did and our host was immediately targeted by the same people whose goal in life is to silence dissenting opinions. After a few bumps in the road, we now find that traffic exceeds that of r/The_Donald, and we will only continue to grow the community. Our time on Reddit is over, but our next phase of online Trump support is only beginning. We look forward to the day when we may discuss the actions of Reddit’s leadership team with members of Congress and prepare them for any hearings.

We only hope that other Trump supporters, spread out across leftist-owned platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, will find a way to escape the grip of Silicon Valley censors before the next election. As you’ll find out in the rest of this book, our experience dealing with Big Tech censorship is not unique to Reddit—the same story is being played out across the entire internet.

Note: As thedonald.win adheres to a strict no-monetization policy, we did not receive anything for writing this piece, nor will we. We are simply thankful for the opportunity to be heard and the chance to continue to grow this site and do what we can to ensure a landslide on November 3rd.