The inside story of Reddit’s struggle to deal with its most toxic pro-Trump users

The company’s fierce internal debates over how to handle The_Donald, one of its most popular subreddits, are recounted in this excerpt from Christine Lagorio’s new book, We Are the Nerds.

Donald Trump’s internet virality engine lurks deep in a section of Reddit known as The_Donald. It has more than 600,000 subscribers and was–along with Facebook, Twitter, and other sites–one of the spawning grounds for the Russian disinformation campaign in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Reddit noted much later, as other social media platforms were answering tough questions from Congress on foreign influence online in April 2018, that it had identified 944 user accounts it believed were associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, noting that it had banned them all, the majority prior to the election.

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