In many ways, The_Donald fulfils neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin’s vision of Reddit as a “ fertile recruiting ground.” Though Anglin’s The Daily Stormer might be more open and aggressive in its white nationalist messaging, all the themes and memes in his “ Normie’s guide to the alt-right” can be found among the thousands of threads on The_Donald, which serves as a major vehicle for these ideas to reach the “front page of the internet.” They found close similarities between The_Donald and the recently banned white nationalist sub r/uncensorednews as well as r/coontown, a member of the racist network of subs known as the “Chimpire.”

In March 2017, FiveThirtyEight quantified this undercurrent of far-right extremism using latent semantic analysis, a technique developed to compare two works of literature. The subreddit inherited from /pol/, the alt-right’s stronghold on 4chan, a distinct brand of reactionary politics as well as a complete system of white nationalist slang and dog whistles.

Trump.'īut even though much of its content is just a more tasteless version of garden variety Tea Party populism, the online subculture of the alt-right forms the core of The_Donald’s identity. Its tagline is: 'The_Donald is a never-ending rally dedicated to the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Logo for Reddit's The_Donald subreddit, one of the top 200 subreddits on the site. On the surface, The_Donald - Reddit’s “never-ending rally dedicated to the 45 th President” - appears to be nothing more than a forum for bad jokes and the usual partisan vitriol. The_Donald, abbreviated as T_D, is currently ranked the 153rd most popular subreddit on Reddit. However, one of Reddit’s largest platforms for hate speech managed to escape the fate of the others: r/The_Donald. Last year, Reddit revised its policy again after the killing of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, prohibiting the incitement of violence and banning more than 100 explicitly violent and white supremacist subs, like r/KillTheJ- and r/KKK. Those that had engaged in harassment were banned and the rest were “quarantined,” or limited in their ability to interact with the rest of the site.

Though the site initially tolerated these communities, Reddit took action in 2015. But an unfortunate side-effect of Reddit’s laissez-faire content policy has been the proliferation of subs dedicated to hate speech and violence with names like r/c-town, r/b-women and r/watchn-die. Reddit comprises autonomous communities called subreddits, or “subs,” that are expected to police themselves with minimal interference from administrators.

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