On Saturday morning, a Reddit user who has posted about living in Minneapolis for years shared a video on the city’s subreddit, r/Minneapolis, with the title “Another ICE murder in front of Glam Doll Donuts.”
The 40-second clip showed a group of federal agents tackling 37-year-old Alex Pretti to the ground and beating him. About 20 seconds in, one of them begins shooting Pretti. At least ten gunshots go off, from multiple agents, and a person can be heard yelling “Did they fucking kill that guy? Are you fucking kidding me dude? Not again.” (The agents who fired on Pretti have not been charged, nor has ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good on January 7. They have been moved to “other locations,” according to CBP official Greg Bovino.)
The video was upvoted more than 60,000 times, reaching the top of Reddit’s homepage. Over the past month, as the Department of Homeland Security has deployed thousands of armed, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the r/Minneapolis subreddit has become a vital news and information hub for both residents and outsiders. Previously, the user who shared the shooting footage posted about a missing dog poster and about trees being cut down near a local lake. “I just wanted a local subreddit to know what was happening in my city, and now all of a sudden, we’ve turned into this de facto hub of information for basically how to fight fascism,” says one r/Minneapolis moderator, who has been in the volunteer position for close to a decade and spoke on the condition of anonymity due to safety concerns.
For many of the longtime r/Minneapolis users, ICE agents have occupied their backyards. But even outside of the local Minnesota subreddits, rage against ICE has reached a boiling point. A majority of posts in r/all, where top posts across all subreddits are ranked, was devoted Saturday and Sunday to mocking and criticizing ICE for killing Pretti. In the Reddit community for cross stitching, the top post this weekend was a “Fuck Ice” embroidery, and there were multiple variations of the same slogan in the stained glass subreddit, too. “FUCK ICE” was painted on an acrylic set in a nail polish subreddit, where other users offered dupes to get the look of a woman’s bright pink nails in a picture where her hand was pressed against a prominent right-wing influencer’s face during a downtown Minneapolis clash. When the moderator of camera subreddit r/Leica prohibited “partisan comments” on photos of ICE officers in Minneapolis, a user wrote “HATE the censorship of this sub.” (Photojournalist John Abernathy—who went viral after tossing his camera to another photographer while being tackled by ICE agents.) Even users in r/massivecock, where most of the posts are images of erect penises, railed against ICE in their captions.
“I think it’s just like this awareness of the level of injustice taking place,” said the r/Minneapolis moderator, adding that people outside the state are increasingly worried about being targeted by ICE. “They’re testing things here. They’re coming for you next.”
Americans have become significantly more in favor of abolishing ICE since Donald Trump’s second administration began unprecedented raids of blue cities. Before the 2024 election, polling showed only around 1 in 4 people surveyed supported abolishing ICE—now, the same polls show 43% support it. Anger has peaked over ICE’s brutal occupation of Minneapolis, especially after officer Ross killed 37-year-old Good. After another officer killed Pretti, even people who rarely share positive sentiments about Minneapolis, like fans of competing football teams in Minnesota, Chicago, Detroit, and Green Bay, are increasingly protesting ICE in their shared subreddit. “The ruling on the field is that this is a meme football sub,” said one of the top posts this weekend in r/NFCNorthMemeWar. “HOWEVER… FUCK ICE and fuck any bootlicker who supports them.”
Even the moderator of r/catbongos, a subreddit for playfully patting your cat like you’re playing the bongos, posted an anti-ICE screed—and it quickly became the subreddit’s most-upvoted post ever. “The nice thing about owning a subreddit is I can use it as my personal soapbox, so after the blatant murder by ICE today in Minnesota, I wanted to say something,” the post, titled “If you still support Trump/ICE even slightly, you’re not welcome in this sub,” began. “We are reaching a point where we can no longer tolerate the people who are supporting or making excuses for this, or have them be a part of our lives.” Many of the top replies to the post said they were joining r/catbongos because of it.
The popular backlash against ICE over killing Pretti extends well beyond Reddit and other social media platforms. Even Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer suggested that Trump should pull ICE out of Minneapolis, while Fox News host Maria Bartiromo said there was no evidence Pretti was threatening law enforcement, and a guest on the channel said that the White House misrepresented the facts of the shooting. Plus, since Pretti was concealed carrying a gun, the National Rifle Association and other gun advocacy groups that are usually pro-Trump have called for a full investigation—while the subreddit for concealed carry weapons lambasted Trump’s posts about Pretti’s set up.
The longtime r/Minneapolis moderator is reminded of what happened after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd roughly 17 blocks away from where Pretti was shot, inspiring the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. Both times, the subreddit became a front line for news, on-the-ground footage, community resources, and supporters from around the world. She and her fellow moderators work “easily 20 hours a week,” unpaid, to keep up at peak times. They respond to reports and messages, weed out duplicate posts of the same videos, and guard the subreddit from agitators and trolls.
“We’re filtering the comments, we’re banning problematic users before they can really spread out and go into multiple threads and harass multiple people,” the moderator says. “You are literally dealing with the worst types of people … They’re trying to misrepresent what happened or just straight up make fun of them. They find it funny.”
Another r/Minneapolis moderator who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity started volunteering around a month ago, as activity on the subreddit was ramping up. He has had to force himself to take a break after spending hours staring at screenshots of the moment when Pretti was shot. To prevent users from seeing something graphic they may not want to, the moderators require these posts to have a NSFW (Not Safe For Work) or “spoiler” filter. But the horror of what is happening makes it harder to compartmentalize elsewhere on the platform, this r/Minneapolis moderator thinks, leading to more people in other subreddits posting about ICE.
“Logically you’re like ‘Yeah, of course, people wouldn’t post political stuff there,’ but the people who are moderating and using these communities are people and they’re still seeing that content in other places and they’re still wrestling with the moral questions of this time,” he says. “And if that means they’re going to do it in ‘catbongos’ or some ‘Not safe for work’ sub, that’s where they’re going to do it.”
Reddit offers moderators resources during times of increased traffic of attention, a Reddit spokesperson told WIRED, including a suite of automated filters related to crowd control and harassment. Reddit’s internal safety teams can also take action against rule-violating content using automated tools at scale.
Both r/Minneapolis moderators bear the additional toll of seeing state violence committed against their own neighbors. For the longtime moderator, using r/Minneapolis started as a way to find “some drinking buddies from a website.” Then, her city became the epicenter of police and ICE accountability movements.
“I drive by there,” she says, of the location where Pretti was killed. “We go to get donuts. I eat pho a block away from there. That hurts. That’s the knife twist.”
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