Reddit announced a change to their algorithm governing the r/all page Thursday, which ranks posts most popular throughout the site, to accommodate more “diversity.”
Site administrators determined there was a lack of diversity only after over 70 percent of the articles on the page following the Orlando shooting came from r/The_Donald, the main Reddit page in support of GOP presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Page founder “CisWhiteMaelstrom” expressed dissatisfaction with site administrators’ censorship of his page and posts about the Orlando shooting to Breitbart Tech, saying he believes they are embarrassed that there is a strong support of Trump on the site.
“These site owners are afraid of running a site where people say things that will make them look bad. It needs to be a commitment to the userbase and an understanding of who uses their site. The_Donald [is] absolutely not Reddit’s base by any measure, but most users do feel repressed or censored in some way and it’s got a lot to do with the admins feeling embarrassed by them,” CisWhiteMaelstrom said.
In a post about the policy change, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who posts under the screen-name “spez,” confirmed suspicions that he was attempting to silence r/The_Donald.
“We have seen many communities like r/The_Donald over the years—ones 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,” spez wrote.
CisWhiteMaelstrom explained that there exists on Reddit a subculture of users and administrators who regularly suppress pro-Trump rhetoric. He believes pages like r/The_Donald are the only available forums for such conversation.
“I’m not sure if users did trust us, to be honest. Our users did, since we’ve always let them speak, but I think there was a large population of people who didn’t but just had nowhere else to turn,” he said.
Reddit users in opposition to the clearly politically-motivated move have commented on a post by r/The_Donald and a post by spez observing evidence of a double standard among the site administrators:
And, some view this simply as the most recent attack on Trump supporters in a collection of many since the business mogul announced his candidacy last year: