The Trump forum was banned because it too often hosted content that broke Reddit's rules, including encouraging violence, and “antagonized” the company. It had previously tried to discipline the forum.

The pro-Trump forum was banned as San Francisco-based Reddit took down a total of 2,000 of the forums, or subreddits, most of which it said were inactive or had few users.

Social-media companies have long struggled to deal with hate speech on their platforms. A growing number of companies have said they are pausing social-media spending after a campaign by a group of civil-rights and other groups called for an ad boycott of Facebook, saying it has failed to curb racist and violent content and misinformation.