Allum Bokhari - #DELETED; Big Techs Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election

As the United States approaches the 2020 election, President Trumps 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, Redditthe nineteenth-most-popular site on the webhas 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 Kings 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 Trumps 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. Reddits 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 Trumps 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 yearsones 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 Huffmans statement, r/The_Donald enjoyed a place atop Reddits most active communities, thanks to our devoted user base and the energy they expended in their support of President Trumps 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 (Reddits rough equivalent of Facebook likes) they received. Clearly, dominating the conversation on Reddit is perfectly fine if youre a progressive.

In November 2016, shortly after Trumps election, Reddits 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 grandmas Facebook post because she made fun of him. Thats 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.