TheDonald.win: An Investigation

Everyone by now is familiar with /r/TheDonald, but not everyone knows that after Reddit kicked them out they migrated to different sites. One of the biggest refuge sites is alternately known as “thedonald.win”, “patriots.win” or “communities.win”. In the days up to the storming of the US capital on November 6 the activity on thedonald.win was spiking and I tried my best to archive this content. This post is me combing through what I archived.

First lets look at the history of the site.

The site is more active today than at any point since its founding.

Far more posts have been made since the election than before. Though this is likely at least partly an artifact of how the data was collected (spidering).

Again we see an increase in comment volume, but there’s an odd dip in the days surrounding January 6th.

The most important thing to note here is the dip in activity around the New Year. Maybe some of this could be explained by a holiday slump but if we zoom in we see the slowdown began too early and extends too late.

Traffic dipped on Dec 20 and didn’t recover until Jan 6.

In a period when you would expect a lot of traffic as they prepare for their Washington D.C. protest a lot of comment data is missing. Maybe lots of comments were deleted? Well, we can also track the volume of deleted comments.

Even the volume of deleted comments declined in the period.

Now here is the point where I need to mention how the data was gathered. Starting on January 9th, 2021, I ran spiders over their website trying to capture as much data as possible. At the time the website was using CAPTCHAs to reduce load which made the process more difficult. So some data was collected on January 9th, but the bulk of the data was collected after the 20th. If we re-run the above plots but only include the earliest spiderings things look different.

Now it’s clear what happened. At some point during the spidering process tons of posts were deleted (not just the comments).

Unfortunately this means we have much less data to work with. It also means they had something worth deleting, but didn’t delete it until several days after the attacks.

So to find the “interesting” things I looked at posts from the earliest spiderings with lots of comments that don’t exist in later spiderings. Sure enough those posts are no longer on their website. Some of these deleted posts are in the Wayback Machine (e.g. 1, 2, 3) but many, especially those with fewer comments, are not.

So what’s in these deleted posts? Pretty much what you’d expect: open calls for killings, suggestions to break the law, blatant anti-semitism and anti-muslim rhetoric, etc etc

Some examples:

It’s too late to get them back via political or legal means. It’s obvious the elite don’t care even a little bit about the Constitution or your rights. The only way now is via blood, lots of it, the way our ancestors got them in the first place so long ago.
— JackLemon, 2020–12–23

This one is slightly prophetic but was fortunately wrong about the guns.

It only takes one crazy bastard to start the herd mentality (i don’t mean this in a negative way, it’s just most people are followers, not leaders) to break through the barricade for the rest of the crowd to follow.

As soon as the cops try to tear gas the crowd, all hell breaks lose. Cops are afraid to arrest antifa carrying leaf blowers and umbrellas, you think they have the balls to go against patriots with AR-15 at low ready and glock 19’s on their hip?
— Anubis1, 2020–12–27 on post 11RNtPxnou

It’s clear from their discussions they didn’t see this as just a simple protest.

If you have access to large amounts of supplies such as food, water, soap, batteries, blankets, propane heaters, tents, medicines, and so forth and can transport them to the line, you can be perhaps the most valuable asset we have.

We need to reach territory, secure it, control at minimum one stretch of road into the occupied zone for resupply missions, and we need drivers to bring in supplies

PLAN FOR AN OCCUPATION NOT A SINGULAR DAY OF PROTESTING

— Feddny, 2020–12–27 on post 11RNtPxnou

And there was regular discussion of bringing guns and defying gun bans.

People need to get the hint and carry. I don’t give a fuck if it’s legal put multiple in your trunk conceal carry.ect but don’t come unprepared. Hell come with full gear vest included.

— TheWinningNeverStops, 2020–12–27 on post 11RNtPxnou

I don’t see how anyone could read this and not think they were serious and intending to do something violent. This post is from December 30.

We’re fortunate it seems no guns were actually used. Could’ve been much worse.

They were pretty unambiguous about what they wanted.

Yep, this is what I’ve been saying since this happened. I literally can’t think of a more grave crime against a people and country than rigging their elections.

People. Need. To. Die. Over this.

— SvixGale, 2020–12–22 on post 11RNfKqmBF

It really goes on and on. None of the users who posted this kind of stuff were banned and many continue posting to this day. But apparently by erasing a couple week’s worth of content thedonald.win was able to avoid getting de-platformed.

All the data used here is available on the Internet Archive. See this and this. And of course a substantial amount of content is available just through the Wayback Machine.