Having been on Reddit for more than a few years now, I’ve watched a lot go down on the self-described ‘front page of the internet’. While I wasn’t there for the legendary banning of r/jailbait, the borderline child-porn subreddit, I was around to witness the ill-advised crowdsourced vigilantism that led the hive-mind to falsely accuse a missing student of being the Boston bomber. I also thought it was interesting when Reddit, one of the top twenty-five most popular sites on the web, recently banned six white-supremacist subreddits that had been attracting a lot of negative attention for quite a while.

My own political leanings aside, I’ve always appreciated platforms that take a very laissez-faire approach to regulating speech. That’s part of what I like about Reddit, where disagreements are frequent and subreddits such as r/subredditdrama and r/bestof highlight some of the exceptional interactions that tend to take place between the site’s diverse collection of communities. Additionally, the Reddit community has always been especially averse to censorship, the administrators of the site only ever banning communities that have become long-term, ongoing, impossible to mitigate headaches such as r/jailbait, r/creepshots, and r/fatpeoplehate — among others.

That being said, there is one subreddit in particular that remains a large stain on the site’s overall image. Transplanting a sort of r/circlejerk mindset into a political subreddit, r/The_Donald has evolved into a unique echo-chamber fueled by Trump’s cult-of-personality ever since it was first created over a year ago. With over 300,000 subscribers and at least 10,000 online at any given time, the community regularly sends posts to the top of Reddit’s r/all front page and is easily the most grassroots, under-appreciated arm of Trump’s propaganda machine. It has already become such a headache for the rest of the site that when Reddit introduced a new feature allowing users to filter the fanatical subreddit out of their r/all feeds, a post celebrating the change quickly became one of the highest rated in the site’s history.

The front page of r/The_Donald usually looks roughly the same, with phrases such as “[insert enemy here: liberals, CNN, etc.] on suicide watch”, “don’t be fooled: [insert link to fake news site]”, and “liberal cucks” (I still don’t understand that one, can someone from the subreddit please explain?) appearing frequently. A recent post at the top of the community’s front page read: “Hi my name is Edga Madison, I showed up to Commet Pizza with a rifle to save children. I was arrested and no children were found. I am actually an actor hired to make #Pizzagate look like fake news. My dad works for Hillary Charity in Haiti where allegedly the sex slave children were stolen from.”

In the comment thread, users patted each-other on the back for not seeing through the mainstream media conspiracy that is Pizzagate — although it was unclear whether they’re sticking to their original claim that Comet Pizza is in fact part of a child trafficking ring, or they’re now saying it’s not and Hillary paid off that guy to make them look crazy for thinking it was. It’s also worth noting that Reddit has already banned the r/pizzagate subreddit which was specifically dedicated to promoting the conspiracy.

Although banning a subreddit intended to promote the sitting President would be unprecedented (or as Trump would say, ‘unpresidented’), Reddit ought to at least be considering the effect that this community is having on their site as a whole. While there are plenty of great, well-run subreddits on the site that feature lots of interesting content, there is still a fair argument to be made that sites like Reddit is only as strong as their worst communities. When r/The_Donald shares fake news on a regular basis, promotes conspiracies, and doxxes other users, it’s hard to deny that it drags the rest of the site down. While I understand the tough place that the site’s administrators are in, waiting until Trump is no longer President might not be good enough —in the interest of fairness they need to take an objective look at the actions of r/The_Donald and hold them accountable.