![]() (HanAssholeSolo reportedly attempted to edit his past posts to remove some of his more offensive comments, including racial slurs, but not before people captured screenshots of several of his most objectionable statements.) Trump posted a GIF that apparently originated with this Reddit user, who regularly uses the N-word. The official r/The_Donald Twitter account celebrated by posting additional GIFs of Trump wrestling CNN: “Wow!! I never expected my meme to be retweeted by the God Emporer himself!!!” HanAssholeSolo responded, while the rest of r/The_Donald waxed gleeful about their moment in the spotlight. “Congratulations /u/HanAssholeSolo, your dankery has been tweeted by the President of the United States,” ran the most popular response to the original GIF thread. And that’s when it apparently found its way into the hands of the president, who tweeted it. However, at some point in the four days after HanAssholeSolo’s original post, someone modified HanAssholeSolo’s GIF by adding audio and converting it to a video format. And there is no shortage of anti-CNN GIFs floating around The_Donald. GIFs like this one, in which one or more “characters” are labeled in a way that transforms the action of a GIF into allegory, are common meme parlance. Initially, HanAssholeSolo’s post attracted typical reactions from other forum members and gained no further attention. And despite the prevalence of racism and extremism present within the forum, Trump’s campaign staff have said that they monitored The_Donald and other alt-right communities on Reddit and elsewhere throughout the election. The_Donald has also been a major conduit for alt-right fringe conspiracies like Pizzagate and other rumors to find their way into the mainstream. A New York Times profile of the subreddit published in November called it “one of the most influential communities within one of the most significant websites on the internet” the Times characterized it as “home to copious Islamophobia, trolling of liberals and near constant bashing of Hillary Clinton.” ![]() At one point, right-wing extremism within The_Donald was so intense that it caused the forum to fracture, before growing even more popular and solidifying its position as Reddit’s main alt-right hub. The_Donald is a huge and hugely controversial part of Reddit that exploded in popularity over the course of 2016, as Trump’s presidential campaign gained momentum. That’s the atmosphere into which Reddit user HanAssholeSolo released the original GIF version of the clip in the president’s tweet, posting it to Reddit’s largest alt-right community, r/The_Donald, on Wednesday, June 28 he would later claim to have edited and watermarked the GIF himself. But his ire for the network seems to have hit a fever pitch in the wake of CNN’s recent retraction of a story related to the FBI’s ongoing investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and debate over the president’s relationship to the news media as a whole and to CNN in particular has been frequent on both sides of the aisle. Trump has long targeted CNN in his general war on the news media, famously labeling CNN “fake news” and frequently bashing the network in speeches and on Twitter. The GIF in Trump’s tweet was originally posted to Reddit’s largest pro-Trump alt-right community In that context, the tweet takes on a new meaning, one that has little to do with whether it was explicitly threatening, or what Trump’s intentions were in posting it. Trump July 2, 2017īut it quickly spawned outrage from many progressives, politicians, and media outlets - including CNN itself, which issued a statement noting, “It is a sad day when the President of the United States encourages violence against reporters.”Īnd while Twitter and the White House both defended the tweet against such claims, things took a turn once the source of the GIF was discovered to be a Reddit forum known for Islamophobia, racism, and frequently violent hate speech. #FraudNewsCNN #FNN /WYUnHjjUjg- Donald J.
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