Reddit shuts down The_Donald under new policies against hate speech

By Aaron Mamiit June 29, 2020

Reddit has shut down the subreddit called The_Donald after years of it violating content policies. Reddit cited new rules that aim to push hate speech out of the online community.

“All communities on Reddit must abide by our content policy in good faith. We banned r/The_Donald because it has not done so, despite every opportunity,” said Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman in the announcement of the platform’s updated content policy.

Huffman clarified that the shutdown of The_Donald was “absolutely not” about the political views that were discussed in the subreddit, as one of Reddit’s founding principles is to foster political discussion, according to The Washington Post.

“There’s a home on Reddit for supporters of Donald Trump. … We’re not the ones who shut down the community. The moderators are the ones who shut down that community,” said Benjamin Lee, the company’s general counsel.

Reddit placed The_Donald under quarantine last year, which resulted in a warning being shown when people tried to access the subreddit, after it was found to feature content that supported violence. Moderators and most of the community have since moved to another, less restrictive website, so there was relatively little activity on the subreddit as it was banned.

The_Donald is just one of about 2,000 subreddits that are being banned alongside the rollout of Reddit’s new content policy. While most of the affected subreddits were inactive, the most active ones included r/darkhumorandmemes, r/chapotraphouse, r/consumeproduct, r/darkjokecentral, and r/gendercritical.

Changes at Reddit

The new content policy that resulted in the shutdown of The_Donald follows the resignation of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian from the company’s board earlier this month, amid the social unrest caused by the killing of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis.

Ohanian, who pledged $1 million to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp, urged for his seat to be filled by a Black candidate. He was replaced by Twitch co-founder Michael Seibel, who has a track record of promoting diversity and inclusion inside startups.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributor

Aaron received a NES and a copy of Super Mario Bros. for Christmas when he was 4 years old, and he has been fascinated with…

Computing

How Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to take on Apple

An Intel Meteor Lake system-on-a-chip.

It seems like Apple might need to watch out, because Intel and Microsoft are coming for it after the latter two companies reportedly forged a close partnership during the development of Intel Lunar Lake chips. Lunar Lake refers to Intel's upcoming generation of mobile processors that are aimed specifically at the thin and light segment. While the specs are said to be fairly modest, some signs hint that Lunar Lake may have enough of an advantage to pose a threat to some of the best processors.

Today's round of Intel Lunar Lake leaks comes from Igor's Lab. The system-on-a-chip (SoC), pictured above, is Intel's low-power solution made for thin laptops that's said to be coming out later this year. Curiously, the chips weren't manufactured on Intel's own process, but on TSMC's N3B node. This is an interesting development because Intel typically sticks to its own fabs, and it even plans to sell its manufacturing services to rivals like AMD. This time, however, Intel opted for the N3B node for its compute tile.

Computing

How much does an AI supercomputer cost? Try $100 billion

A Microsoft datacenter.

It looks like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora, among other projects, are about to get a lot more juice. According to a new report shared by The Information, Microsoft and OpenAI are working on a new data center project, one part of which will be a massive AI supercomputer dubbed "Stargate." Microsoft is said to be footing the bill, and the cost is astronomical as the name of the supercomputer suggests -- the whole project might cost over $100 billion.

Spending over $100 billion on anything is mind-blowing, but when put into perspective, the price truly shows just how big a venture this might be: The Information claims that the new Microsoft and OpenAI joint project might cost a whopping 100 times more than some of the largest data centers currently in operation.

Computing

There’s an unexpected, new competitor in PC gaming

Snapdragon's X Elite PC SoC.

Windows gaming on ARM is becoming a legitimate possibility, and it's not just thanks to the recently unveiled emulation options, but it's chiefly due to the fact that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is shaping up to be pretty excellent. Spotted in a recent benchmark, the CPU was seen beating some of the best processors on the current market. Are we finally at a point where it's not always going to be a choice between just Intel and AMD?

The benchmarks were posted by user @techinmul on Twitter, and the results couldn't be more promising for the upcoming Qualcomm processor. The chip was tested in Geekbench 6, and although it's important not to take these results entirely at face value, it's an impressive show of performance that bodes well for upcoming thin and light laptops.