Here's the most recent thread (16 days ago) on this issue. /u/spez (the CEO of Reddit) responded [1] to a long list of unreported calls for violence on /r/the_donald, saying:

> Many of these links are probably in violation of our policy, but most are unreported, which is what alerts the mods and our team, especially when there are few votes. We'll consider them reported now.

> Generally the mods of the_donald have been cooperative when we approach them with systematic abuses. Typically we ban entire communities only when the mods are uncooperative or the entire premise of the community is in violation of our policies. In the past we have removed mods of the_donald that refuse to work with us.

> Finally, the_donald is a small part of a large problem we face in this country—that a large part of the population feels unheard, and the last thing we're going to do is take their voice away.

The reporter's response [2] said:

>> most are unreported, which is what alerts the mods and our team

> I don't accept that excuse. These were gathered by searching for phrases that should be included in their AutoModerator config. These calls for violence are mod enabled.

There's definitely some validity to ignoring cherry-picked violations of low ranked comments and threads. But many of these should be caught automatically, just by watching for words and phrases like "kill", "hang", and "shoot". You'd have a lot of false positives, but a moderation and administration policy that was less tolerant of these calls for violence would not have this track record.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...

Ah yes, "whataboutism" - it's almost like we're on The_Donald right now!

Probably referencing a bestof post that popped up a week or two ago. Someone found like 30 ban worthy comments.

Only think is, the vast majority were 1 point comments, some were negative, and the only one that had considerable upvotes was an anti-muslim comment on the thread about a terrorist attack (if someone's going to overreact, that's when).

> What about r/The_Donald violates the rules

Literally googling that will yield plenty of results with posts that are far, far outside the rules and aren't being taken down.

Furthermore, nothing about "left-wing subreddits" is relevant regarding whether r/T_D violates sitewide rules or not.

Supposedly it's been blocked from reaching the front-page. But no one cares that <insertantidrumpfsubhere> gets to the front-page with 40k points and only 10k subscribers

It's not blocked, some posts do make it there occasionally. Previously they were able to rocket things to the front page by taking advantage of the fact that Reddit places a huge weight on the first few upvotes, so getting a lot of votes quickly almost always meant making the front page. Reddit had since changed the algorithm so that technique isn't as effective anymore. I would wager they just don't have the actual numbers normally to make the front page without gaming the algorithm. They have lots of subs but there active user count was always very low for the number of subs they have.

I don't see why people care so much. Its just another echo chamber that can be completely ignored. Clearly the benefits of free flow of information outweigh the drawbacks so its best to just accept the drawbacks.

It's hardly a sandbox, but more of an inlet with a lot of spillover. There's anecdotally been a HUGE spike in bigotry and white supremacy on what used to be good subs since last year when that sub grew in numbers. Looking at the post history of these users, it almost always includes t_d.