Here's the most recent thread (16 days ago) on this issue. /u/spez (the CEO of Reddit) responded [1] to a long list of unreported calls for violence on /r/the_donald, saying:
> Many of these links are probably in violation of our policy, but most are unreported, which is what alerts the mods and our team, especially when there are few votes. We'll consider them reported now.
> Generally the mods of the_donald have been cooperative when we approach them with systematic abuses. Typically we ban entire communities only when the mods are uncooperative or the entire premise of the community is in violation of our policies. In the past we have removed mods of the_donald that refuse to work with us.
> Finally, the_donald is a small part of a large problem we face in this country—that a large part of the population feels unheard, and the last thing we're going to do is take their voice away.
The reporter's response [2] said:
>> most are unreported, which is what alerts the mods and our team
> I don't accept that excuse. These were gathered by searching for phrases that should be included in their AutoModerator config. These calls for violence are mod enabled.
There's definitely some validity to ignoring cherry-picked violations of low ranked comments and threads. But many of these should be caught automatically, just by watching for words and phrases like "kill", "hang", and "shoot". You'd have a lot of false positives, but a moderation and administration policy that was less tolerant of these calls for violence would not have this track record.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...