#/the_donald

[tenth-sentence]

A 2018 analysis of 160 million archived visuals showed that far-right trolls on the internet were highly effective in spreading racist and anti-Semitic memes from fringe forums like 4chan's /pol/ board and the subreddit /The_Donald to more mainstream platforms.

"Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists" - Julia Ebner

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alex Kaplan at MMFA:

Google and Apple’s app stores have been hosting an app for Scored, a message board site dedicated to hosting far-right forum TheDonald — which was previously banned on Reddit and rebranded as “patriots.win” after January 6 — and other far-right forums pushing extremism and conspiracy theories. The site, which researchers have called “an alternative Reddit platform that shelter[s] banned fringe communities,” is supposedly owned by the lead moderator of TheDonald who apparently “made the site” for the forum.

TheDonald originally began on Reddit as “r/The_Donald,” with the subreddit dedicated to supporting Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent presidency. It was known for spreading and promoting far-right misinformation, conspiracy theories, far-right campaigns, bigotry, white nationalism and white nationalist events, and calls for violence that violated Reddit’s rules. Reddit officially banned r/The_Donald in 2020 but many of the subreddit’s users had already moved to another site, known at the time as “TheDonald.win,” which became the home of what was called the “.win” communities. After the January 6 insurrection, which TheDonald was used to help coordinate, “TheDonald.win” rebranded as “patriots.win.”

In early 2022, an administrator on the “.win” communities’ central hub site announced that “going forward, we will be known as Scored” instead of .win. “Doggos,” who is TheDonald’s apparent lead moderator and seemingly “made the site” for the forum, claimed on the message board that “I own Scored,” and advertised donations to Scored as “supporting this community’s existence.” The announcement on the communities’ central hub site also noted that “in the short term, our focus is on … working on our Android and iOS apps.” Media Matters has now found that since at least 2022, both the Google and Apple app stores have carried “Scored Communities.” The app leads users to numerous far-right forums, including TheDonald, which has continued to push extremism, rampant antisemitism, and racism after being banned from Reddit, as well as calls to violence. (Doggos has said that TheDonald on the app has “a little bit more content-level censorship due to app store policy.”)

Google App Store and Apple App Store are hosting an App called Scored to host far-right forums that were banned from Reddit, such as Patriots[.]win (formerly r/The_Donald).

[youthkenworld]

Cajunbutterfly@Cajunbutterfly

4m··/g/The_Donald

Every single Democrat voted to not secure our southern border today.

BREAKING: Senate KILLS Articles of Impeachment Against Open Borders Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Breaking 227 Years of Congressional History |…

The United States Senate was supposed to hold the impeachment trial of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas beginning at 1 PM Eastern Wednesday.The Gateway Pundit

[chariotofgod]

the phenomenon of an individual needing to "condone" or "condemn" everything really interests me when hits a critical point like this. maybe it results from a misunderstanding of what 4chan was/is. as if you can condemn 4chan as a homogenous culture and not at least as heterogeneous as tumblr is.

there are fascists, terfs, and libertarians who are here or were popular on here who participate in a lot of the same linguistic and cultural rituals as the progressive part of the site. some of these individuals even being critical in its cultural development. does it make any sense to "condemn" Tumblr as an entity because of this?

like obviously we can point to 4chan as the root of a lot of misogynistic and racist subcultures that now permeate the American and European Right. but then like. the origins of SCP, creepypasta, the growth of furry culture, the inception of the MLP fandom (as filled with paranoid homophobia as it was, which is obviously hilarious in retrospect), and even the standard formats for how shitpost punchlines are delivered all come from there.

they don't have their fingers in so many pies "for some reason???" it's because 4chan was a diverse and complex culture group that defined the early internet.

the continued treatment of it as "fringe" or "a place that's so scawy to visit :(", i think, creates a sense that whatever cultural products we decided to keep from 4chan were deviations from rather than products of its culture.

there are obviously a lot of problems with this. one being that it creates a lack of critical evaluation of 4chan's cultural exports (not that i'm rushing to categorize them as morally good or bad, just that it's important to consider).

another being a lack of perspective on why and how marginalized groups tended to thrive within the space in spite of its hostility towards.. everything (a kind of countercultural edgy nihilism which was not *inherently* reactionary, but definitely a response to 2001-2008 American and European neoliberal positivism).

anyways. you spend two seconds on a board that's not /pol/ and you quickly find an overarching paranoia around "redditors" who invaded after 2016 when r/The_Donald was shut down. there's a marked difference in the website's culture post-Trump, when the fascists on /pol/ (who i don't think you could call a majority) forged an alliance with Trump-aligned redditors.

pretty much any "oldfag" on the website is extremely resentful of this change. you could not take pity on them in a "where did you think such edgy nihilism would lead?" sense, but it also makes it quite clear that the website's earlier dissonance between anti-social behaviors and pro-social politics was not an accident. and while i would not want to adopt early 4chan's philosophy full sale, i do think there are things to learn from it.

whatever. post over. kisses, mwah, xoxo. 💋💋💋

[imeverywoman420]

You know that transition phase between awake and asleep. Well my brain just flashed images of like 2016 r/the_donald and 4chan groypers being into gossip girl and seeing it as political symbolism.

One of the few things i remember seeing was a comparison to carter baizen and the jewish global elites?? Like i saw them say (((carter baizen)))???

i need my brain to show me more of this dimension

[datasoong47]

Hunh, always wondered where "based" came from

Based comes from the slang basehead, a term from the 1980s to describe people addicted to freebasing cocaine, a method which makes the drug smokable. The term basehead became synonymous with the crack epidemic that swept the United States at the time. Over time, calling someone based was a way of saying that they were a crack addict, or acting like one, especially in West Coast street slang.

In the way slang things go, people acting eccentric or abnormal were labelled based. At least that’s what seems to have happened with quirky West Coast rapper Brandon “Lil B” McCartney. In reaction to people calling him based, Lil B decided to redefine the term. In 2007, his group, The Pack, released their debut album, Based Boys. In a 2010 interview in Complex magazine, Lil B described his new definition of based: “Based means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do.”

It’s not clear when Lil B started calling himself Based God, but by 2011 that nickname was firmly associated with him. Eventually, a cosmology of Based God (or BasedGod) emerged, referring to becoming a sort of higher power that Lil B could access, allowing him special abilities, such as the power to curse basketball player Kevin Durant.

The re-invented based, as a signal of power and swagger, was picked up by the alt-right/white nationalist community online in the 2010s. In 2014, during a controversy over female video-game reviewers known as Gamergate, conservative commentator Christina Hoff Sommers was referred to as Based Mom for pushing back against criticisms that video games and their culture are sexist. Since then, referring to alt-right or right-wing conservative figures as based has become a sign of approval in online social-media forums like the pro-Trump subreddit, r/The_Donald.

Who uses based?

Being based is a core part of Lil B’s brand, and so it’s no wonder he—and his fans—are all about that based life. In this hip-hop subculture, it’s all about being a based God—someone with “maximum swagger, a mansion, sports cars, wonton soup, and the inherent ability to fuck your bitch,” as one user on Quora put it. Not sure if the wonton soup bit is universal, but we think the point is that you can have whatever you want.

A catch phrase for Lil B fans is Thank You Based God—a sort of tongue-in-cheek conflation of a sincere thanks to God and an expression of Based God fandom. It even has its own acronym: TYBG. This catchphrase is a popular meme, typically shown over image macros of someone crying dramatically.

On the other side of the spectrum, alt-right, white nationalist, and other Trump supporters online have, incongruously, adopted based for their own purposes. They routinely post on forums like Reddit with headlines describing someone whose actions they approve of as based (e.g. “Based Boris Johnson refuses to apologize for saying women in burkas look like letterboxes.”).

In 2016, Slate writer Ben Mathis-Lilley perhaps best summed up this strange turn of events with based, worth quoting at length:

“So what we have here, then, is a word that was created amid an addiction epidemic in urban communities being adopted by bigoted fans of a presidential candidate who was demonstrated unprecedented contempt for, and ignorance of, said communities.”

[boundingfeather]

starting to realize that very few people on here understand the culture of reddit

most of its userbase is fucking trash. We are talking about the website that spawned /r/the_donald, /r/nonewnormal, /r/fatpeoplehate (which people will STILL say they miss), and so many more

like there was a site wide protest because reddit hired a person who got caught helping her dad sexually abuse children. she also, coincidentally, happened to be trans. reddit proceeded to fire her, and for a good week after most of the LGBT+ subs were on lockdown because they were flooded with so much hate. Transphobia is still very normal on reddit.

so keep in mind when you're making posts about how cool redditors are that /r/196 and /r/vexillogycirclejerk were very much an exception to reddits culture.

[gaiusgoose]

Shocking development ig. Tbh I think I might like it here better then Reddit. For starters r/The_Donald never existed and then the fact y’all tumblr natives are crackheads about niche fandoms, this is good

despite staff's recent changes, we're... winning??????

[steamedtangerine]

This huge Reddit thread evokes imagery of war-torn survivors picking through the rubble and trying to piece together what the Hell happened on that site from 2015-2020.

Most of what is sensibly posted is fairly accurate.

Anyone who was "fighting the goof fight" on Reddit at that time, will find it worth their while to read what is being discussed.

[bishonenknife]

'r/The_Donald' Fagen fandom takeover, Steely fans rev up your motor scooters

[gusty-wind]

C h a m o r r i t a @Cham0rrlta

13h··/g/The_Donald

This is presented as humor, however we’ll be seeing more of this as people reach their limit. The bad guys are about to find out.

[liatkolink]

The same platforms that allow outright fascists to thrive will then ban you for harassing them. This is not hyperbole, BTW. I was perma-banned from Reddit over harassment, which was targeted at Zionists denying genocide and it was yelling at them or annoying them at best. And the "harassment" concern is bullshit when they allowed r/The_Donald to thrive for several years, and to this day, you see people cheering for genocide in common subs like r/WorldNews.

I was just informed by Tumblr that a neonazi with a swastika pfp saying "Jews are my enemy", is in fact NOT against Tumblr's Terms of Service so they wont be removing the post. I guess theyre too busy removing Gazan fundraisers and transwomen's blogs. This fucking website.

[youthkenworld]

racing9@racing9

2m··/g/The_Donald

THERE IS A POST ELON MUSK ON X HAS WERE A GUY WERE'S A TRUMP SHIRT AROUND HARRIS SUPPORT'S AND HE IS NAME CALLED WATER THROWN ON HIM. THEN HE GOES TO A TRUMP RALLY WITH A HARRIS SHIRT ON AND HE GREETED WITH HAND SHAKES NOT A SINGLE BAD NAME CALLED AT HIM. WE ARE THE CRAZY'S AGAINST THE SANE NO OTHER WAY TO PUT THIS. PROBLEM IS WE FIND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO DO WHAT EVER WE NEED TO DO TO WIN. SO WHO IS REALLY CRAZY. THINK ABOUT IT.

[irlwakko]

okay but on a serious note maybe dream promoting not taking your meds to his fanbase of largely young and impressionable teenagers is maybe not good actually

[nowthisnews]

Reddit announced on June 29 that it banned a total of 2,000 subreddits, 200 of which had 10 or more active users. The company also announced a content policy update that more explicitly bans speech that ‘promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability.’ 

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the company banned r/The_Donald because it did not ‘abide by [Reddit’s] content policy in good faith.’

‘The community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average (Rule 1), antagonized us and other communities (Rules 2 and 8), and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations,’ Huffman said in a June 29 post. ‘Until now, we’ve worked in good faith to help them preserve the community as a space for its users—through warnings, mod changes, quarantining, and more.’

For years, r/The_Donald, which has no official ties to Trump or his campaign, promoted conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and let its users make racist, misogynistic, and violent posts. Reddit has taken action against the subreddit in the past, and many of the subreddit’s users and volunteer moderators have left Reddit altogether for other social media websites. 

In addition to r/The_Donald, Reddit banned r/ChapoTrapHouse.

follow @nowthisnews for daily news videos & more

[siryouarebeingmocked]

As someone who's a regular on both Reddit and Tumblr, I find that they're both mainly prog-to-leftist, then some liberal, with a few islands of people to the right of that. For example; the most (in)famous conservative subreddit, The_Donald, was banned four years ago.

“Reddit atheism” must be an extra confusing phrase for people unfamiliar with it that go look at the atheist subreddits and it’s like, mostly just progressive politics