Amazon’s Twitch suspends Trump channel, Reddit bans ‘The Donald’ forum
- One stream identified by Twitch under its hateful conduct policy was rebroadcast of 2016 rally in which president said Mexico was sending rapists to US
- Reddit says it is banning about 2,000 subreddits as it cracks down on promotion of hate based on identity or vulnerability
Social media site Reddit on Monday shut down r/The_Donald, a forum which long served as a popular online home base for fans of President Donald Trump, saying it violated the site’s hate speech rules.
Other sites also conducted high-profile sweeps: Amazon’s live-streaming platform Twitch temporarily banned Trump’s official channel, saying it violated Twitch’s policy on hateful speech, while Google’s YouTube suspended six leading white nationalist accounts.
Reddit Chief Executive Steve Huffman said in a post detailing changes to the company’s content policies that communities and users promoting hate would be barred. Reddit was banning about 2,000 subreddits, the majority of which were inactive, he said.
In response to the actions by Reddit and Twitch, a Trump campaign spokesman directed people to Trump’s campaign app “to hear directly from the president”. He did not directly address the sites’ actions.
Huffman said earlier this month that Reddit would strengthen its content policy, after Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian resigned from the firm’s board and former CEO Ellen Pao criticised its handling of r/The_Donald.