The vote totals aren't anything like any other subreddit has been. They were also using the pinning in a way no other subreddit did.

Just google – the_donald upvote script – to get an idea. Several tools were released for users to upvote or downvote everything targeting a subreddit or user. It's a sort of grassroots vote manipulation scheme.

One of the issues the admins were upset about was pizzagate. Basically they found some emails where Podesta mentioned pizza and cheese. So after a lot of time investigating they decided that Podesta and Clinton were deeply involved in a child sex trafficking ring centered a local D.C. pizzeria. There was an NYtimes story about how the owners been receiving death threats. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this....

This whole witch hunt/conspiracy started and kept going with trolls from the_donald. People getting death threats from getting doxxed on reddit threads should not happen. Also, during this trolls kept accusing spez of being a pedophile. While changing user comments is extremely inappropriate, I think that the_donald has some extremely toxic trolls. So I'm definitely ok with reddit admins shutting some of that activity down. I would have found it completely understandable if reddit had shut the_donald down with that with the whole pizzagate thing. But that sub has a ton of activity with a lot of politically active posters, and so I don't think reddit really wants to shut it down.