On January 20, Donald Trump made history as one of two US presidents to be sworn in for a second, non-consecutive term. Elon Musk took to the podium at the Capitol One arena, where, after a few seconds of dancing, he put his hand to his heart and thrust his arm out in the air with a straight elbow and fingers close-pressed. He turned and repeated the action to the crowd behind him.

The response the next day was divided along partisan lines. But among those responses, one emerged that, at the time, was entirely unexpected: dozens of Reddit communities began proposing their subreddits ban links to X. A disproportionately high number of the subreddits we viewed are dedicated to sports teams — particularly, early in the trend, UK Premier League football teams. Posts proposing the banning of X links in these subreddits often received more upvotes than posts celebrating major victories for those teams, like historic championship wins or the recruitment of once-in-a-generation star athletes to the team.

Stranger still, at least 35 of the posts had identical or nearly identical post titles, many of which were posted within minutes of each other. Over 20 of these posts shared extremely similar, and often identical, language in their post bodies.

“The only subreddits I really follow are r/soccer and r/Everton, and on r/Everton the Twitter link ban had an absurd number of upvotes (more than any other post I can remember),” said one Redditor we spoke to. “Anybody questioning this in the daily discussion was immediately downvoted to oblivion and had their comments hidden. I just remember thinking how strange it was that it had magnitudes more engagement than any post related to the actual club.”

Given Reddit’s scale (roughly 1.35m new posts per day in the first half of 2024, according to some estimates), and the nature of viral social dynamics, it’s difficult to say with a high degree of conviction what drove the trend. A skim through our (comparatively small) dataset reveals a large number of what appear to be genuine, totally unsuspicious X link ban posts. For example, another Redditor we spoke to explained that they posted a proposal to ban X links out of frustration with having to log into Twitter to view links, and a genuine disgust reaction to Musk’s gesture at the inauguration.

Could the X link ban proposal wave just be an instance of an extremely homogeneous platform tacking to the current thing in real time? Or were the social dynamics at play kickstarted by a third-party coordinated effort? Again, difficult to say — but that a pattern itself exists is unmistakable.

One of the first mainstream news outlets to cover the Reddit X ban campaign was Mashable, which identified the trend beginning in the r/hockey subreddit. The proposal to ban X links was published on r/hockey at 4:10 am PST on Tuesday, January 21. In the following days, over 100 more subreddits would either propose to ban X links or carry through the proposal.

Though outlets like the New York Times and BBC cited r/hockey and other sports subreddits like r/NFL, r/NBA, and r/formula1 in their reporting on the trend, the reality is most of these communities were (relative to the speed of the unfolding trend) latecomers. Hours before the r/hockey proposal, at 1:51 am PST, Reddit user TedHughesGhost posted a ban proposal to r/avfc, a subreddit dedicated to the Aston Villa Football Club, a Premier League team in the UK. The title was “Proposal to ban X.com links and screengrabs.”

Two hours later, another subreddit — this one also dedicated to a British Premier League football club — posted its own ban proposal. This time it was r/liverpoolfc, the subreddit for fans of the Liverpool Football Club. At 3:57 am, under the title “Proposal to ban X.com links,” u/Yopeman wrote: “Seen this on a few other football club subreddits - seems like a no brainer to me, especially given the values of our club.”

Both of these posts — the first that Pirate Wires was able to identify — went massively viral. In the Aston Villa FC subreddit (which, with 48,000 members, is a relatively small sports community), the X link ban proposal drew in 3,800 upvotes, making it not just the top post of the year, but of all time.

The response to the post in r/LiverpoolFC — which, with 592,000 members is a much bigger subreddit — dwarfed it. With 40,000 upvotes, it too became the subreddit’s most popular post of all time. For context, the second most popular post of all time, an “upvote party” celebrating Liverpool’s championship win of the British premier league in 2020, its first such win in 30 years, received 8,000 fewer upvotes than the X ban post.

After the Aston Villa and Liverpool posts came the post in r/hockey that Mashable had misidentified as the first in the sequence of posts. With 34,000 upvotes, the r/hockey post became the fifth most popular of this year — and the 17th most popular of all time. Of the top 20 (or 30 or 40 or 50 — you can pick a number) most popular r/hockey posts of all time, the X link ban proposal is the only one that has nothing to do with hockey.

After r/hockey came a cascade of sports subreddits posting various forms of X ban proposals. This included a post in r/SquaredCircle, a pro wrestling subreddit, on January 21 at 4:23 am, which cross-posted the r/liverpoolfc post. Fifteen minutes before, at 4:08 am, the user who had posted the ban proposal on r/SquaredCircle had commented on the Liverpool post, just 11 minutes after it had gone live, writing “1000%.” At the same exact time, (4:08 am), another crosspost of the r/liverpoolfc post hit, this time in r/AFCBournemouth, another Premier League football team.

At 4:38 am, an X link ban post was published in r/BlueskySocial, the subreddit dedicated to the Bluesky social network, with the title, “Proposal to ban Twitter/X links.” The body of the post read only, “For obvious reasons.” The post, by u/MrInternetInventor, seems to be that user’s very first, and got 5,100 upvotes.

At 4:41 am, a user crossposted r/liverpoolfc’s ban proposal in r/chelseafc, a subreddit for fans of the Chelsea Football Club. That post got 9,000 upvotes, making it the top post of the year and the third most popular of all time, outpacing dozens of posts celebrating major league and game victories by the team.

At 5:18 am, a post in r/reddevils, a subreddit for fans of Manchester United proposed banning X links with a post titled, “Proposal to ban X.com links.” The post, later removed by moderators, got 29,000 upvotes, making it tied for the top post of all time with a post welcoming the world’s most famous athlete, Cristiano Ronaldo, “home” to Manchester United when he rejoined the team four years ago.

Next was r/scottishfootball at 5:59 am, followed by r/coys, a subreddit dedicated to the Tottenham Spurs Football Club, at 6:06 am, which, with 4,500 votes, became its eighth most popular post of all time. The post by r/coys moderators announcing the decision to ban X links got 4,800 upvotes, making it the seventh most popular of all time, and (aside from the ban proposal) the only one among any top post to have nothing to do with either Tottenham Spurs or British football more generally.

These ban proposals were followed by r/TorontoBlueJays, r/NBASpurs, r/Bengals, the subreddit for Real Madrid football, r/LaLiga (which also crossposted the Liverpool proposal), and many more. An hour later came a ban proposal in r/formula1, which received 47,000 upvotes, making it the second most popular post of the year. The top post of the year, with 54,000 upvotes (12th most popular of all time), is the one alerting users that r/formula1 had indeed decided to ban X links.

Looking at these early X link ban proposals as a whole, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that each post not only has nearly the exact same title, but many share language, including verbatim phrasing, in the post body. A template-like structure emerges as posts open with, “Seen this on…”, followed by, “seems like a no brainer”, and capped off with, “given the values of our club/team.”

r/liverpoolfc: “Seen this on a few other football club subreddits - seems like a no brainer to me, especially given the values of our club.”

r/squaredCircle: “Seen this on the Liverpool FC Subreddit... with the rules and values of this subreddit, I think it would be something appropriate.”

r/Juve (Juventus team): “Seen this on multiple other sports team subreddits - seems like a no brainer to me, especially given the values of our sub as a whole.”

Even the user who posted the ban proposal on the subreddit for the New Orleans Saints, an NFL team on a different continent, employed this structure: “I’ve seen this on multiple other sports team subreddits... seems like a sensible move to me, especially given the values of our team.”

This pattern, and several others, repeated across numerous subreddits:

As the ban proposals spread, the topics of the subreddits they were posted into became more diverse. There were numerous posts into subreddits focused on U.S. states (Minnesota, Delaware, Iowa, Connecticut, Hawaii, Texas and others), cities (Los Angeles, Austin, Denver, Seattle, and London, Ontario), countries (Ireland, Scotland, Finland, South Africa, France, Philippines), and some miscellaneous (FuckCars, Cybersecurity, Autism, Poirot, Imaginary Network, WhitePeopleTwitter, dinosaurs).

But, by far, the most prominent of the subreddits on which we saw the ban proposals were sports or game-related. The latter included r/boardgames (where the X ban post was the second-most-popular post of all time) and r/smashbros. In r/magictcg — an 831,000-member subreddit dedicated to Magic: the Gathering — the ban proposal post became the top post of all time.

That wasn’t an outlier. X ban posts in r/Steelers (28,000 upvotes), r/bostonceltics (14,000 upvotes), r/Mariners, and the subreddit for Age of Empires II, r/aoe2 (10,000 upvotes) all became those subreddits’ top posts of all time. The X ban post on r/Mariners got 1,000 more upvotes than the second most popular of all time (posted four years ago) whose title reads: “THE MARINERS ARE GOING TO THE PLAYOFFS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 21 YEARS.”

37 out of 105 X ban posts analyzed by Pirate Wires were locked by mods, preventing further commenting, in many cases mere hours after the posts were initially published. 26 posts were removed, either by mods or by the original poster (with some overlap between the locked and removed posts). Eight X ban proposal posts with hundreds of upvotes to upvotes in the low five figures were totally nuked — that is, OPs not only deleted their posts, but deleted their entire accounts.

It’s possible all this was completely organic behavior. A very high fitness meme catches on in an environment — a social network with a left-leaning userbase — uniquely suited for its spread. Hosts with off-the-charts hatred for Musk are incentivized to replicate the meme because to do so is to show virtue, signal allegiance to the in-group, and tear someone down who they’ve been trained to hate. It’s not out of the question.

According to a Reddit spokesperson, “Vote manipulation is strictly prohibited on Reddit, and we have automated systems in place to detect and action this behavior. We investigated and found no evidence of widespread voting irregularities or coordinated manipulation.”

Still, any of the anomalies detailed above are pretty curious, especially in an information ecosystem where nothing is what it seems. And all the anomalies stacked — the all-time top posts, templated language, rapidity of the early posts, and, more than anything, the fact that the trend unfolded predominantly in sports subreddits — does seem to want some further investigation.

We’ll continue pulling on threads. Stay tuned.

— Ashley Rindsberg

Editor’s note: This article was updated to include a comment from Reddit, and a comment from a Redditor.