Many Republican lawmakers have accused social media companies of censoring conservative viewpoints on their sites. Mr. Huffman said banning “The_Donald” was not an attempt to specifically target conservatives.
“Absolutely not, full stop,” he said.
In a statement on Monday, Tim Murtaugh, director of communications for Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, did not address Reddit’s move but directed people to Mr. Trump’s app or to text the campaign directly.
The new bans follow the resignation this month of Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit’s co-founders, from the company’s board of directors. Mr. Ohanian, who said he had been moved by the protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis who was killed in police custody last month, asked to be replaced on Reddit’s board with a black candidate.
“I’m writing this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks: ‘What did you do?’” Mr. Ohanian, who is married to the tennis star Serena Williams, said in a blog post at the time. “To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: Do not stop.”
Michael Seibel, the chief executive of the Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator and an African-American, has replaced Mr. Ohanian on Reddit’s board.
Reddit executives said the site remained a place that they hoped could be a forum for civil political discourse in the future, as long as users played by its rules.
“There’s a home on Reddit for conservatives, there’s a home on Reddit for liberals,” said Benjamin Lee, Reddit’s general counsel. “There’s a home on Reddit for Donald Trump.”
Kevin Roose contributed reporting.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/technology/reddit-hate-speech.html
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