A subreddit dedicated to a figure that is radicalizing and openly suggests violence it goes hate, violence, and racism can come from there.

And freedom of speech need not tolerate death threats.

The mods would ban opposing views and leave hateful, violent, and racist views. Its not complicated.

I've browsed TD since it's inception and haven't seen any violent, hateful, or racist posts.

That's not to say that they haven't ever existed, but certainly not anything remotely close to how it's perceived. And definitely not any worse than you would see right now on r/politics.

I don't know what to tell you. I followed it during the election but it got too disgusting. Immigrants, and Muslims were large targets from what I remember. Lots of misogyny towards Hillary Clinton as well but I guess that doesn't count. It was certainly much worse than r/politics which is very biased but not racist.

Plenty of really gross Pepe memes. I mean, I don't know what to tell you.

538 did an interesting analysis into the kind of people on the sub at the time https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-...

They always did a good job of some token news story as a "see we're good guys!" type post but if you scratched the surface and read the comments its was obvious.

The 538 article has some examples https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ldfmg/red_pills...

Oh give me a break. You're being willfully ignorant if you actually believe this to be the case. For months there were front page posts on reddit, manipulated by bots, from TD that were some of the worst content I've ever seen outside of 4chan.

I mean, reddit scrambled to implement a subreddit filtering feature just to provide a means for users to filter TD out due to the near constant complaints about the content of that sub.

Meanwhile, they banned other subreddits for much, much less. They actively fought to provide them their safe space and wrote actual features to support that subreddit.

Same here, I don't know what their standard for racist and violent view is?

It was by far the largest online conservative community, and it funneled people into even more extreme communities.

I don't really get bringing up the freedom of speech angle here - r/the_donald has always aggressively deleted posts and banned users for expressing anything but complete loyalty to Donald Trump.

This opinion bothers me. TD was always an explicitly pro-Trump subreddit. You expect anti-Trump content to be modded or removed. The modus operandi of /r/politics is much more nefarious. It is branded as a general politics-related subreddit but content that doesn't fit the left-leaning narrative is removed for ambiguous reasons.

> content that doesn't fit the left-leaning narrative is removed for ambiguous reasons

it's much narrower than that: whatever doesn't fit centrist Dem narratives is removed

You'd expect mods of t_d to not partake in smear campaigns against survivors of a school shooting, actually remove calls for death of various politicans, not telling people to harass journalist and maybe remove blatant fake news.

Straw-man. I never said TD was moral--just consistent with their ruleset.

> TD was always an explicitly pro-Trump subreddit.

Are you saying "smear campaigns against survivors of a school shooting" is explicitly pro-Trump?

Nobody cares about the survivors of a school shooting, other than having sympathy for them.

The survivors of the school shooting politicized the issue which makes it everyone's problem. They want a political action, they are constantly on the television promoting a certain viewpoint which I believe is asking to give up on my civil rights. They're saying that I need to give up my civil rights because of what happened to them.

Virginia Beach Shooting resulted in sweeping anti-gun legislation passed and the flipping of Virginia legislature, almost none of it was targeted at the survivors of the shooting. There was world's biggest Mass demonstration of armed protesters, and almost nobody brought the survivors of Virginia Beach shooting up.

> It was by far the largest online conservative community, and it funneled people into even more extreme communities.

a) This is such a stretch and you have no evidence to support your claim.

b) I'm pretty conservative and know a large number of conservatives and exactly none of the people I know even like Reddit, or consider it a viable "conservative community" at all.

There is a surprisingly large literature of academic literature on Reddit an TD specifically, at least some of which mentions radicalisation, though I've yet to find specific bits.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=reddit%20the_donald&btn...

Work elsewhere certainly expresses and substantiates that narrative: Kate Starbird, Renee DiResta, Samuel Wooley, Kara Swisher, Zynep Tufekci, among others.