Reddit quarantines popular pro-Trump forum

Reddit placed a pro-Trump subreddit threat r/The_Donald under quarantine after users reportedly — and repeatedly — threatened and incited violence.

What are the details?

A board moderator shared the information, insisting that "violent content" is simply "unacceptable" on the internet forum.

A posting read, "Over the last few months we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community and an over-reliance on Reddit admins to manage users and remove posts that violate our content policy, including content that encourages or incites violence. Most recently, we have observed this behavior in the form of encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon. This is not only in violation of our site-wide policies, but also your own community rules (rule #9). You can find violating content that we removed in your mod logs.

"As we have discussed in the past, and as detailed in our content policy and moderator guidelines, we expect you to enforce against rule-breaking content. You've made progress over the last year, but we continue to observe and take action on a disproportionate amount of rule-breaking behavior in this community. We recognize that you do remove posts that are reported, but we are troubled that violent content more often goes unreported, and worse, is upvoted."

According to reports, Media Matters for America revealed that members of the subreddit were reportedly supporting attacks on Oregon police officers and other local authorities.

"We are clear in our site-wide policies that posting content that encourages or threatens violence is not allowed on Reddit," the statement, which was obtained by The Verge, read. "As we have shared, we are sensitive to what could be considered political speech, however, recent behaviors including threats against the police and public figures is content that is prohibited by our violence policy. As a result, we have actioned individual users and quarantined the subreddit."

So what does this mean?

Reddit stated that "visitors to this community will see a warning that requires users to explicitly opt-in to viewing it. This messaging reminds users of the importance of reporting rule-breaking content."

The quarantine will be reevaluated if board moderators "unambiguously communicate to your subscribers that violent content is unacceptable."