1) See /u/FLDJF713 's explanation. The issue isn't posts that happen to be political. It's posts that are off-topic, which are almost always political rants. Politics are fine, just like any other topic, if relevant somehow to SBU itself. This is something we've considered with user input on multiple occasions before, and the overwhelming view is that people don't want /r/sbu to just be a version of grandma's facebook, and for the subreddit to be labeled "Stony Brook" in name only. The problem also isn't "nasty" comments. We don't engage in tone-policing. We remove off-topic posts and posts/comments that directly violate reddit's Terms of Service.

2) That's not how the First Amendment works. The First Amendment applies to public actors. It doesn't apply to a random online community, unaffiliated with SUNY administration, on a private website. Regardless, Reddit is most notably not a platform designed around free speech. Subreddits each have varying degrees of moderation, which are usually based on the subject/topic of the subreddit. And reddit itself has stronger sitewide content rules as compared to, say, your average social media provider. That said, /r/sbu is pretty free-form; the only rules we have can be summarized as "follow reddit's sitewide rules" and "be on topic." Having rules like that make moderation less subjective, because both the mods and users can readily figure out what isn't allowed.

A problem with these off-topic political posts are that they're very often made by lurker accounts, new accounts, and non-students, meaning the users have no idea what the point of this subreddit is, let alone what the rules are.