this seems like a pretty standard enforcement of their policy - since real-life information was being shared on that community for the purposes of targeted harassment, banning has always been their primary recourse
danjoc said that freedom of speech is only for those who own the press. zdw replied and said Reddit is privately owned and can do whatever they want. I presume that danjoc interpreted "privately owned" as an instance of "those who own the press", which does not seem to be a stretch at all.
Everyone always equates "freedom of speech" with the First Amendment. They're not the same. Free speech is a moral principle, which different people support to different extents, but of which the First Amendment is merely one, US-centric, embodiment.
That said, Reddit didn't ban this subreddit for being alt-right, so the point is fairly moot.
"Freedom of speech is only for those who own the press" implies that only owners of the press have freedom of speech. That is not true -- everyone has freedom of speech vis a vis the government as zdw pointed out, whether they "own the press" or not.
Free speech outlined in the Constitution is constrained by how loud you can shout. Groups like the alt-right are fueled, in part, because of the belief that they are subjected to unfair and targeted censorship on platforms like Reddit. If they are not able to participate in the discussions being had there, other groups are able to control the narrative to the alt-right's detriment.
Being able to defend yourself with your voice is a moot point because, in the age of the Internet, that is not where the discussions are taking place.
I think you're right about that. It's rarely a popular statement among nationalists in this country. Some people really do think they have free speech in every context and get angry when you point out they aren't really as free as they seem to think. The alt-righters would mod me down too, but it's a sharp pointy stick. I like to jab it into people to make them think.
There's more to free speech than one country's constitution. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
I'm hellbanned on HN and my only comments that reach your filter bubble are those manually approved by a moderator (out of a maximum of 4-5 I can make in a day, due to draconian rate limiting).
So no, there's nothing resembling free speech here - just moderator approved speech in the PR extension of a VC firm.
Is a printing business allowed to refuse to print gay wedding announcements, because they do not support gay weddings? Maybe you're consistent, but I feel like this would often draw out contradictory positions. Is it morally different if one is a paying customer and the other is a non-paying user?
Honestly, how many more hundreds of times am I going to read this facile straw man, in these exact same tired words? You can't possibly believe you're saying anything original or enlightening regarding the actual issue, can you? Why am I on this site writing this comment? What am I doing with my life?
If I was the owner of an ISP, and just for this exercise assume that I am providing my services in an area where there is at least one competitor (so I don't have a monopoly). And as a human being, I disliked certain topics; for this example, the topics are radical Islam websites, pornography sites and cat pictures.
Now the question; As I am the owner of a private company, am I entitled to block access to all the sites that show pictures of Bin Laden, boobs or kitties?
I might be sued by site owners and some of my clients... but isn't this situation similar to the way some cable network can choose to broadcast certain channels and not others?
I am all in favor for free access to information, and against censure, even when I might dislike certain topics. But I can only see a blurry line between people's right to access something and the owner of a network to block said access.
That is to an extent what regulated as a utility was about (there was other parts), it's also why net neutrality is important for more that just a fair market argument.
The 1st Amendment of the United States applies to Congress, not everything. Even in that context, freedom of speech has limits (e.g. libel, slander, child pornography, sexual harassment, etc.).
It's a ban on doxxing, not on hate speech. There are plenty of things on reddit people consider hate speech, but they remain. r/altright was worse than plain hate speech, it was simply hate (in the form of harassment, through doxxing).
/r/altright was banned for doxing. An example can be found on imgur http://imgur.com/a/pZ8yN where you can see not only doxing, but crowd funding to support doxing of an individual they disagreed with.
I would disagree with somebody sucker-punching a community member in the face. If there are no other targets this seems entirely legitimate.
The ban also seems slightly prejudicial, because on the other side there is /r/antifa where people are bragging[1] about the assault which /r/altright was trying to solve with this bounty.
Granted, /r/antifa seems to be mostly dissent against this stuff, so it wouldn't be a subreddit shutdown.
I think that assaulting people you disagree with is a far more serious charge than posting a reward for information which leads to the arrest of a criminal. The latter is something befitting of a police agency.
/r/antifa is run by neo-nazi squatters who want to make antifa look bad. They probably should be shut down, and there are other places actual activists organize.
Not to get too far into it, but it's hard to make antifa look any worse than they actually are. A bunch of cowardly, destructive, eyes-shut communist nincompoops parading around in crowds because they are too timid to stand alone for their indefensibly stupid beliefs; that is, if they're not just there to fit in.
I don't think you have to be a neo-nazi to appreciate how pathetic and sad antifa are. I do not think you have to be a neo-nazi to have a knowing laugh about the thumb-sucking intellectual fragility they represent.
if you want to investigate criminal activity, become a police officer.
>Vigilante justice often describes the actions of a single person or group of people who claim to enforce the law but lack the legal authority to do so.
It is still doxing. It doesn't matter if it is a criminal or not. Reddit doesn't have a place being involved in this. Look at how the Boston Bomber situation turned out.
If you think someone commited a crime and you have evidence take it to the police. If they want community help in hunting someone down then they will ask the community.
>It is still doxing. It doesn't matter if it is a criminal or not.
The term "doxing" is almost exclusively used for outing people using pseudonyms online. I've never heard it applied to an attempt to identify a random criminal.
>Reddit doesn't have a place being involved in this. Look at how the Boston Bomber situation turned out.
And how did that turn out? I mean, in the end. A lynching? I must have missed it.
>If you think someone commited a crime and you have evidence take it to the police. If they want community help in hunting someone down then they will ask the community.
Sometimes the cops need to be prodded into doing their jobs. I know there are people on the left cheering this assault because they don't like the victim, but I'd really rather not see political violence become commonplace in the US.
EDIT: By the way, I like your "If you think someone committed a crime..." formulation, as if there's some question whether or not something illegal happened.
"has a reputation" is pretty strong; their CEO did it like 4 times in a few hours. That's not a small thing, but there was appropriate outrage and an apology. Also, breitbart link, really?
Well, they do have a reputation for deleting sub-reddits they don't like. It would be better, I think, just to come out and say, "we will delete sub-reddits we disagree with."
"There is a website I can't link that is taking money to crowdfund doxxing efforts. After the admins banned that domain, the mods on /r/altright continued to manually approve submissions to that site and added them as sticky/announcement posts. My guess is that is the reasoning behind the ban."
So they got banned for repeatedly and intentionally, with moderator support, circumventing Reddit's rules -- not for 'suppression of free speech' or anything like that. I'm sure the admins were glad to be rid of them, but, they really brought it on themselves.
What's the actual incident? Does anybody have details?
Wesearchr was banned from twitter for looking for information about the guy who sucker-punched Richard Spencer live on video. Is this ban for the same incident?
This seems a little different from how I normally use the term "doxxing", which is posting real-life information about a person who would prefer to remain anonymous. I mean, I'm sure the guy who assaulted Spencer would prefer to remain anonymous, but others have good reason to oppose that.
In my experience moderating a popular (default) subreddit, the admins and other mods will brush under the carpet actions done by the political left that would have the political right put under notice/(shadow)banned/sub-closed, and it's gotten worse exponentially show since the heat of the election season last summer.
Searching for someone who committed a crime vs senseless "doxxing" (someone who hasn't committed a crime) are two different things. However, when it suits the reddit admin's purposes they'll outright ignore it or use a heavy hand and ban people/communities.
They're heavy leftists, so you can guess where this tends to lead things on that site.
Thing is, it's not a conspiracy group's effort, nor was it a witch hunt (which is looking for something that isn't there).
They (and many others) were pointing people to police if they found anything out. The pictures were all over the internet and it's impossible to keep your ID hidden once your face is out there for the world to see.
> the admins and other mods will brush under the carpet actions done by the political left ... They're heavy leftists, so you can guess where this tends to lead things on that site.
Can you back all of this up? Otherwise it's just more empty accusations on the Internet. Personally, I really don't like to see it on HN.
And it's not just reddit, but also sites like twitter don't mind anti-white/anti-police hate groups, terrorist organizations, but if there is some right winger doing even half of the same stuff what these previously mentioned people did, they'll get banned, censored etc.
r/altright was openly a neo-nazi subreddit, with hitler posters and calls to kills jews, at some point you need to draw a line on what should be there.
I have no problem with them being in the streets screaming there message. In fact i prefer it then its easy to spot the crazy. For a private company like reddit i don't blame them at all for shutting them down. Even if reddit leans left (i am a libertarian) its there site/company they can do what they want. If people don't like it they will move elsewhere. I agree with you private companies and citizens shouldn't have to tolerate this non sense in the name of free speech.
Indeed it makes sense, sorry if I came a bit abrupt. It's just people assumed r/altright was something a bit like r/the_donald but in reality it was more like r/european (which also got banned for doxxing/harrassment of other users as well). I personally not welcome this kind of extreme free speech but I guess everyone has a different ideal of what free speech should be!
six weeks ago I would have regarded the idea of doing this as inimical to the principles of free discourse and debate that I feel are fundamental to democracy and indeed to small-l liberal civilization in general.
now I find myself wondering whether my principles are being contaminated by the immense personal anger I feel, or whether perhaps my principles weren't as rationally derived as I had previously believed.
six weeks ago I would have regarded the idea of doing this as inimical to the principles of free discourse and debate that I feel are fundamental to democracy and indeed to small-l liberal civilization in general
Living in an open society does not mean tolerating those who aim to end the open society. The altright, as a rewarming of white nationalism, which is a rewarming of Nazism, seems to not be such a huge fan of our open society.
What assumption laden, lazy use of words. You throw them around as smears and pretend they have specific meaning rather than the emotive symbols they are.
Nigel Farage who convinced a majority of Brits to exit the EU is generally regarded as being altright. Do we therefore conclude that this British majority went along with someone who supports a 'rewarming of Nazism'. This is vile garbage.
Identifying targets precisely and offering arguments is preferable to sloppy innuendo.
Though you have many insults, it seems that the heart of your argument is:
"Nigel Farage is altright. Altright can't be white nationalism because then Farage would be white nationalist."
However the alt right is not defined by Nigel Farage, rather if Nigel Farage wraps himself in that term than he is defined by it rather than defining it, as it predates him.
Reading anything about the alt-right will show that my estimation of it as white nationalism is correct. Look at
This idea that "this idea is bad, and my politician accepts this idea, therefore this idea can't be bad" is classic backwards thinking. Your insults may reveal that this has hit a sore spot for you. We need to be able to talk about these things rationally, and not emotionally.
That is just about the textbook definition of doxxing. Hunting down the real life information about a person and posting it on the internet.
This has blown up in reddit's face before (boston bomber) and so the site has a very very strict anti-doxing rule. It isn't up to reddit to hunt down that individual, it is up to the police.
Then why on earth is /r/shitredditsays still around? They have been getting in trouble for doxxing for years along with constantly brigading which apparently is another bannable offense.
As someone who has been dogpiled by that sub with people attempting to doxx me for the crime of having a different opinion in /r/worldnews, I have absolutely no idea why reddit turns a blind eye.
I think the difference is, if the moderators respond to reports of doxxing by removing the offending material, the subreddit can stay, even if the members keep submitting new material. If the moderators refuse to do anything about it, or, in this case, actively encourage it, then the subreddit itself must go.
That said, I've never visited SRS, so I don't know how their moderators respond to reports of doxxing.
SRS is where you can get doxxed, and the admins turn a blind eye to their behavior on a regular basis. They'll give them the proverbial slap on the wrist and things will cool down for a while, but they're the admin's pet subreddit so they get away with everything. Brigading, vote maniuplation, doxxing, etc.
The entire admin team needs to go, and almost all of the mods on the default subs as well.
It probably is their rationale, but it's just showing how reddit admins seem to be taking sides and turning a blind eye to parts of the community they agree with and banning the parts they don't.
Reddit used to have vibrant discussion in most threads, everything now is either completely hostile back and forths or completely a circlejerk. Rarely any middle ground seems to exist anymore and it's a real shame.
To reddit, those are one and the same. Making any sort of public information available about someone who isn't a public-facing personality is a bannable offense.
Publishing a person's real-life contact details in association with an online witch hunt absolutely is doxxing. "Trying to find out the identity of a person" in a public forum is guaranteed to result in a person's details (not necessarily that person) being made public knowledge.
There's a reason we have paid professionals to investigate this sort of thing. Not only are they less likely to get swept along by the mob, but their preliminary findings and suspicions are not published and so the mob doesn't seize on someone who "looks guilty" (or even someone who is guilty but who still has a right to due process and a fair trial) and punish them for something they probably didn't do.
Disagreed. The name "altright" itself is now banned. You can no longer make a subreddit named that so effectively, the speech and beliefs are now banned under the guise of TOS violation. Usually when moderators misbehave they tend to trade out moderators, they made a special exception to make sure the subreddit isn't remade. They also tend to selectively enforce these rules on subreddits that dont align with their own political views.
You can always start one that isnt called "altright" but you're less likely to get eyes on it which may be the entire point.
They're well within their rights to ban whomever they want, but they should be upfront about deleting subreddits that dont align with them politically rather than this game they're playing finding some TOS reason to remove an entire topic from the site. It doesn't make sense otherwise to punish everyone for the actions of a few.
This now the default social media censorship tactic. Apply the TOS harshly to your opponents and loosely to your allies. When an Alt Right sub doxxes people, they get banned; when an SJW sub doxxes people, they get ignored.
It is a conspiracy, and one I've witnessed many times outright on /r/politics where they ignore those who solicit (both in sending/receiving) people's information via PM.
That site has turned into an utter hole in the last 10 months, regardless of the fact that it was on a steady decline already. I'm not sure if it can be brought back to center where it used to be or if it's better to "nuke it from orbit."
This looks very much like an angry, obsessive Internet rant in some kind of war. I don't find those things convincing or even worth reading. Is there something more reliable?
Is this a serious question? It's happening everywhere.
For example the famous Milo Twitter case where Milo himself got banned, but all the radical black hate groups and the actor herself who was posting tons of racist content didn't even get warning but instead tons on sympathy.
I'm not a fan of alt-right, but for news and social media websites, being so disgustingly biased and trying to help the radical leftist agenda is one of the major reasons why things like Trump and Brexit happen.
Myself. I've been harassed by two different subs including SRS with people trying to dig up info on me for daring to post to /r/worldnews comments about global warming. Not even denying it but pointing out how climate science is mostly based on computer models.
Their subreddit is purely just linking to comments they disagree with and find the most "disgusting". They can put as many disclaimers as they want but I just don't see how a subreddit that is purely there to link to comments they absolutely hate, can lead to anything but harassment.
no, shame on those who dox with malicious intent, and they got what they deserved for violating the T&C of Reddit, but still deserve a kick in the short and curly's for doxing. Alt Right is a turd blossoming community filled with misinformed hateful people of little merit, who have incredibly fragile egos.
I don't remember reddit banning anyone when a subreddit falsely accused some kid of being the boston bomber. Infact I don't remember the admins even saying a word about it.
(as always on Reddit, don't vote if you arrive with an external HTTP Referer header or you risk being banned 3 days on the whole site for participating in a voting brigade)
Who honestly gives a shit? Not me. There are a veritable army of unproductive losers who spend all their time on the Internet. Nearly every occasion where I've seen people complain about "censorship" from a website, it's unproductive drivel from these people.
Good riddance, I say. When productive people don't like their speech being suppressed they create lobste.rs. But these people aren't productive at all. They're useless wastrels, for whom the psychological kick of receiving an upvote from their feeble-minded brethren is sufficient to drag them through the day.
I will continue to use reddit for /r/rust and whatnot and it will be good.
Normally, I wouldn't even enter this conversation but there's this trend where people assume that these worthless fools are the majority simply because they spend every waking hour whining about some thing or the other. And then people act as if they must be placated. When really they should just go away.
Note that they were banned for doxxing, not for intolerance or hatred.
Generally I strongly favor free speech and believe the answer to 'bad' speech is more speech. However, there always are limits such as slander, harmful deception (yelling 'fire' in a crowd), provocation to crime ('assault the man in the front row!'), and more. I think there may be a way to clearly and justly draw a line for white supremacist and other hate speech, if and when we want to do it.
Tolerate all but intolerance itself.
There is some theoretical support:
* Think of tolerance as a social contract: I tolerate you if you tolerate me; or, everyone tolerates you if you tolerate everyone. If you break that contract then you have no claim on everyone else's toleration.
* Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.[0]
On the other hand, the always incredible Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes some good arguments against it, especially that humanity will abuse this new authority.[1] Partly for that reason and partly to err on the side of individual liberty, I would apply this rule only when there is a practical necessity. One requirement would be that the intolerant group poses a threat. For example, a group of intolerant Jainists in Los Angeles isn't a threat - they are too few to threaten anyone in that environment. In a tiny town where they are the majority, or in a locked room with one Confucian about whom they are saying intolerant things, it would be a threat.
But this all is my personal analysis; I'd be interested in some established standards such as workplace law, neo-Nazi speech in Germany, etc.
altright was doxxing, which is against the ToS. Doxxing, regardless of who, is generally a bad idea. For background, see the reddit Boston bomber debacle. You're going to get it wrong and end up harassing or harming innocent people.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] thread*To those who own the presses.
Reddit is privately owned and run, so they get to make whatever rules they want.
danjoc said that freedom of speech is only for those who own the press. zdw replied and said Reddit is privately owned and can do whatever they want. I presume that danjoc interpreted "privately owned" as an instance of "those who own the press", which does not seem to be a stretch at all.
Do you still not see it?
That said, Reddit didn't ban this subreddit for being alt-right, so the point is fairly moot.
Being able to defend yourself with your voice is a moot point because, in the age of the Internet, that is not where the discussions are taking place.
There's more to free speech than one country's constitution. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
I'm hellbanned on HN and my only comments that reach your filter bubble are those manually approved by a moderator (out of a maximum of 4-5 I can make in a day, due to draconian rate limiting).
So no, there's nothing resembling free speech here - just moderator approved speech in the PR extension of a VC firm.
If I was the owner of an ISP, and just for this exercise assume that I am providing my services in an area where there is at least one competitor (so I don't have a monopoly). And as a human being, I disliked certain topics; for this example, the topics are radical Islam websites, pornography sites and cat pictures.
Now the question; As I am the owner of a private company, am I entitled to block access to all the sites that show pictures of Bin Laden, boobs or kitties?
I might be sued by site owners and some of my clients... but isn't this situation similar to the way some cable network can choose to broadcast certain channels and not others?
I am all in favor for free access to information, and against censure, even when I might dislike certain topics. But I can only see a blurry line between people's right to access something and the owner of a network to block said access.
*Doesn't mean freedom from consequences
Also Freedom of Speech does not mean Freedom from Consequences.
It's not unreasonable to ban hate-speech.
In the US it is, in general, unconstitutional to ban hate speech (except when it also happens to be unprotected speech, such as a threat).
But that has absolutely no bearing on the subject at hand, of course, so I'm not sure why you bring it up.
[0]: https://github.com/reddit/reddit
The ban also seems slightly prejudicial, because on the other side there is /r/antifa where people are bragging[1] about the assault which /r/altright was trying to solve with this bounty. Granted, /r/antifa seems to be mostly dissent against this stuff, so it wouldn't be a subreddit shutdown.
I think that assaulting people you disagree with is a far more serious charge than posting a reward for information which leads to the arrest of a criminal. The latter is something befitting of a police agency.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/antifa/comments/5r5rlp/
I don't think you have to be a neo-nazi to appreciate how pathetic and sad antifa are. I do not think you have to be a neo-nazi to have a knowing laugh about the thumb-sucking intellectual fragility they represent.
>Vigilante justice often describes the actions of a single person or group of people who claim to enforce the law but lack the legal authority to do so.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/vigilante_justice
If you think someone commited a crime and you have evidence take it to the police. If they want community help in hunting someone down then they will ask the community.
The term "doxing" is almost exclusively used for outing people using pseudonyms online. I've never heard it applied to an attempt to identify a random criminal.
>Reddit doesn't have a place being involved in this. Look at how the Boston Bomber situation turned out.
And how did that turn out? I mean, in the end. A lynching? I must have missed it.
>If you think someone commited a crime and you have evidence take it to the police. If they want community help in hunting someone down then they will ask the community.
Sometimes the cops need to be prodded into doing their jobs. I know there are people on the left cheering this assault because they don't like the victim, but I'd really rather not see political violence become commonplace in the US.
EDIT: By the way, I like your "If you think someone committed a crime..." formulation, as if there's some question whether or not something illegal happened.
"There is a website I can't link that is taking money to crowdfund doxxing efforts. After the admins banned that domain, the mods on /r/altright continued to manually approve submissions to that site and added them as sticky/announcement posts. My guess is that is the reasoning behind the ban."
So they got banned for repeatedly and intentionally, with moderator support, circumventing Reddit's rules -- not for 'suppression of free speech' or anything like that. I'm sure the admins were glad to be rid of them, but, they really brought it on themselves.
Wesearchr was banned from twitter for looking for information about the guy who sucker-punched Richard Spencer live on video. Is this ban for the same incident?
This seems a little different from how I normally use the term "doxxing", which is posting real-life information about a person who would prefer to remain anonymous. I mean, I'm sure the guy who assaulted Spencer would prefer to remain anonymous, but others have good reason to oppose that.
Mods of such a controversial sub flagrantly participating in doxxing is basically forcing the admins to ban them.
Searching for someone who committed a crime vs senseless "doxxing" (someone who hasn't committed a crime) are two different things. However, when it suits the reddit admin's purposes they'll outright ignore it or use a heavy hand and ban people/communities.
They're heavy leftists, so you can guess where this tends to lead things on that site.
If someone has a tip, they should bring that information to the police, not their local internet conspiracy group.
They (and many others) were pointing people to police if they found anything out. The pictures were all over the internet and it's impossible to keep your ID hidden once your face is out there for the world to see.
After all, white supremacists have a long history of being fair and impartial fact finders, simply looking for the truth. /s
Can you back all of this up? Otherwise it's just more empty accusations on the Internet. Personally, I really don't like to see it on HN.
And it's not just reddit, but also sites like twitter don't mind anti-white/anti-police hate groups, terrorist organizations, but if there is some right winger doing even half of the same stuff what these previously mentioned people did, they'll get banned, censored etc.
Right, but legally the only people responsible for investigating this person are the police and other lawful authorities.
enabling a vigilante justice system is exactly why anti-doxxing rules exist in the first place. do you not remember reddit after the boston bombing?
Edit: now i've read the comment by 'ajkjk and that makes more sense
now I find myself wondering whether my principles are being contaminated by the immense personal anger I feel, or whether perhaps my principles weren't as rationally derived as I had previously believed.
Then you probably have not read the article.
EDIT: inserted critical "not"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Living in an open society does not mean tolerating those who aim to end the open society. The altright, as a rewarming of white nationalism, which is a rewarming of Nazism, seems to not be such a huge fan of our open society.
Nigel Farage who convinced a majority of Brits to exit the EU is generally regarded as being altright. Do we therefore conclude that this British majority went along with someone who supports a 'rewarming of Nazism'. This is vile garbage.
Identifying targets precisely and offering arguments is preferable to sloppy innuendo.
"Nigel Farage is altright. Altright can't be white nationalism because then Farage would be white nationalist."
However the alt right is not defined by Nigel Farage, rather if Nigel Farage wraps himself in that term than he is defined by it rather than defining it, as it predates him.
Reading anything about the alt-right will show that my estimation of it as white nationalism is correct. Look at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the...
Which points to alternativeright.com
This idea that "this idea is bad, and my politician accepts this idea, therefore this idea can't be bad" is classic backwards thinking. Your insults may reveal that this has hit a sore spot for you. We need to be able to talk about these things rationally, and not emotionally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf008xA1x1Q
This has blown up in reddit's face before (boston bomber) and so the site has a very very strict anti-doxing rule. It isn't up to reddit to hunt down that individual, it is up to the police.
As someone who has been dogpiled by that sub with people attempting to doxx me for the crime of having a different opinion in /r/worldnews, I have absolutely no idea why reddit turns a blind eye.
That said, I've never visited SRS, so I don't know how their moderators respond to reports of doxxing.
The entire admin team needs to go, and almost all of the mods on the default subs as well.
Reddit used to have vibrant discussion in most threads, everything now is either completely hostile back and forths or completely a circlejerk. Rarely any middle ground seems to exist anymore and it's a real shame.
It's part of the reddiquette, and every subreddit that's allowed to remain on the site that has issues with this kind of thing has rules about it that they've worked on with the admins. You can see a great example of how not to go afoul of reddit's sitewide rules on public information at r/KotakuInAction's rules (https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/wiki/rules#wiki_2._n... and https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/wiki/rules#wiki_5._w...)
There's a reason we have paid professionals to investigate this sort of thing. Not only are they less likely to get swept along by the mob, but their preliminary findings and suspicions are not published and so the mob doesn't seize on someone who "looks guilty" (or even someone who is guilty but who still has a right to due process and a fair trial) and punish them for something they probably didn't do.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/reddit-...
You can always start one that isnt called "altright" but you're less likely to get eyes on it which may be the entire point.
They're well within their rights to ban whomever they want, but they should be upfront about deleting subreddits that dont align with them politically rather than this game they're playing finding some TOS reason to remove an entire topic from the site. It doesn't make sense otherwise to punish everyone for the actions of a few.
That site has turned into an utter hole in the last 10 months, regardless of the fact that it was on a steady decline already. I'm not sure if it can be brought back to center where it used to be or if it's better to "nuke it from orbit."
For example the famous Milo Twitter case where Milo himself got banned, but all the radical black hate groups and the actor herself who was posting tons of racist content didn't even get warning but instead tons on sympathy.
I'm not a fan of alt-right, but for news and social media websites, being so disgustingly biased and trying to help the radical leftist agenda is one of the major reasons why things like Trump and Brexit happen.
Their subreddit is purely just linking to comments they disagree with and find the most "disgusting". They can put as many disclaimers as they want but I just don't see how a subreddit that is purely there to link to comments they absolutely hate, can lead to anything but harassment.
I'd be concerned of the same thing happening with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf008xA1x1Q
This is what is called doxxing, and it's a direct violation of the TOS.
Sure, reddit started as a sort of "libertarian dream" but it's pretty clear at this point that some groups choose to abuse that.
Like HN users digging for info on Peter Thiel without being accredited as journalists and making public requests to harass the Trump administration?
As a rule of thumb, whenever you feel like justifying abuse, think really hard how it can be applied to you.
I'm sure they'll come up with something. Relevant discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/5riav8/the_admins...
(as always on Reddit, don't vote if you arrive with an external HTTP Referer header or you risk being banned 3 days on the whole site for participating in a voting brigade)
Good riddance, I say. When productive people don't like their speech being suppressed they create lobste.rs. But these people aren't productive at all. They're useless wastrels, for whom the psychological kick of receiving an upvote from their feeble-minded brethren is sufficient to drag them through the day.
I will continue to use reddit for /r/rust and whatnot and it will be good.
Normally, I wouldn't even enter this conversation but there's this trend where people assume that these worthless fools are the majority simply because they spend every waking hour whining about some thing or the other. And then people act as if they must be placated. When really they should just go away.
Generally I strongly favor free speech and believe the answer to 'bad' speech is more speech. However, there always are limits such as slander, harmful deception (yelling 'fire' in a crowd), provocation to crime ('assault the man in the front row!'), and more. I think there may be a way to clearly and justly draw a line for white supremacist and other hate speech, if and when we want to do it.
Tolerate all but intolerance itself.
There is some theoretical support:
* Think of tolerance as a social contract: I tolerate you if you tolerate me; or, everyone tolerates you if you tolerate everyone. If you break that contract then you have no claim on everyone else's toleration.
* Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.[0]
On the other hand, the always incredible Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes some good arguments against it, especially that humanity will abuse this new authority.[1] Partly for that reason and partly to err on the side of individual liberty, I would apply this rule only when there is a practical necessity. One requirement would be that the intolerant group poses a threat. For example, a group of intolerant Jainists in Los Angeles isn't a threat - they are too few to threaten anyone in that environment. In a tiny town where they are the majority, or in a locked room with one Confucian about whom they are saying intolerant things, it would be a threat.
But this all is my personal analysis; I'd be interested in some established standards such as workplace law, neo-Nazi speech in Germany, etc.
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[0] I can't find an authoritative source or discussion, but Wikipedia covers it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/ - Search the page for "paradox of drawing the limits"
Maybe, but allowing professionals to have a monopoly on journalism is even worse.
Setup interest/location based groups and/or install the Chrome extension to comment on every site you visit. Post anonymously or use you Plum Name.