I rarely drop in on T_D but when I last looked it was kinda ludicrous. I had a head-scratching Poe's law moment with most of the comments. /r/politics does have some unreasonable frothing-at-the-mouth comments but not ones that seem like they're trolling.
/r/politics has become a race-to-the-bottom of polarization, but it's nowhere near as bad as T_D; a civil defense of Trump on the former will be tolerated (even if downvoted/flamed), whereas any anti-Trump sentiment on the latter results in an instant ban.
One could perhaps attribute to the difference to a supposedly neutral framing vs. an explicitly partisan one; but much of the opposition to Trump (including from conservatives) has to do with flaunting democratic norms and other such "meta-politics", rather than policy positions, which I think is certainly fair game for the /r/politics hivemind to have an explicit opinion on.
>/r/politics has become a race-to-the-bottom of polarization, but it's nowhere near as bad as T_D; a civil defense of Trump on the former will be tolerated (even if downvoted/flamed), whereas any anti-Trump sentiment on the latter results in an instant ban.
The problem is /r/politics pretends to be a general politics subreddit, while /r/the_donald is explicitly just for Trump supporters.
Wasn't that subreddit also quarantined a while ago? No idea what its current status is, but when I tried to click-thru a post there a while back it wouldn't let me in.
Edit: the Chapo one is out of quarantine. Apparently there were a bunch of posts soliciting violence towards slaveholders and once the mods removed them they lifted the quarantine.
I've definitely seen people there advocating for the deaths of police officers, often in the same roundabout ways that violence is referred to in the far right subreddits
I feel like reddit ends up playing whack-a-mole with toxic subreddits because it's not like the problem users disappear - they just move onto another subreddit and slowly turn it into some flavor of the place that got banned/quarantined. This might be an unsolvable problem long-term without something like real IDs tied to user accounts, which brings its own slew of problems.
> I feel like reddit ends up playing whack-a-mole with toxic subreddits because it's not like the problem users disappear - they just move onto another subreddit and slowly turn it into some flavor of the place that got banned/quarantined.
On the contrary, at least one study found that what you describe does not happen. Rather, a quantitative reduction in hate speech was observed when Reddit banned a number of toxic subreddits in 2015.
Inhabitants either moved off the platform entirely (accounts that frequented those subs ceased to be active) or those that stayed appeared to modulate their behaviour to conform to the norms of less-toxic subs.
The dynamics may be different with 750,000 subs (on T_D) compared to ~20,000 in the ones mentioned in the study. Political-related speech won't disappear from Reddit, especially with an election year coming up.
> The dynamics may be different with 750,000 subs (on T_D) compared to ~20,000 in the ones mentioned in the study.
They may be, they may not be. So far we have evidence that, in general, banning a sub doesn't result in it simply diasporaing into other subs. "Something different will happen this time because I feel like it will" isn't a terribly compelling counter-argument in and of itself. Absent new evidence, and given the evidence already in hand, this seems like a reasonable move to me.
> Political-related speech won't disappear from Reddit, especially with an election year coming up.
I don't think Reddit is attempting to "eliminate political-related speech" in general so much as the "I'm ready and willing to put a bullet in an Oregon cop's skull" speech that was being given free-reign in this subreddit?
> I just think people may be less likely to give up on sharing political speech
But again, that's probably not what they're trying to do so much as get people to give up on talking about organizing ad-hoc assassination squads of law enforcement officers
Among social sciences a single study has very little weight. Given how often it is quoted despite this signals a flaw in popular cultures relationship with the field.
> Among social sciences a single study has very little weight.
Sure. "I feel like ..." has absolutely no evidentiary weight, though, so in this case, a little weight is strictly preferable to nothing.
> Given how often it is quoted despite this signals a flaw in popular cultures relationship with the field.
I'd say rather it signals a blind spot in the social sciences, where researchers are failing to investigate emerging online phenomenon wrt communities and moderation in significant numbers.
More studies confirming or disproving the results of this one would, of course, be preferable. But we should hardly apologize for turning to what little study and evidence there is rather than pulling "this will cause X to happen" assertions directly from our asses.
>I'd say rather it signals a blind spot in the social sciences,
Apologies, it appears I wasn't clear. I meant the extent that psychology and sociology studies in any part of their fields are quoted when there is only a single study, not just in relationship to internet/social media.
>But we should hardly apologize for turning to what little study and evidence there is rather than pulling "this will cause X to happen" assertions directly from our asses.
The difference is in the latter case we are well aware of the origin, while in the former case many can mistaken think there is the full weight of science behind the findings comparable to the theory of gravity or evolution. They shouldn't make the mistake, but I've seen it made enough times.
You can only draw conclusions from available data, whether that's one or a dozen data points. Being a single data point doesn't invalidate the study though.
One of the hardest things to do, I think, for a platform like reddit is to get users to curate and specialize the content and create real communities that people can be involved in.
For reddit, that's their specialty. That's a solved problem. In their specific case their subreddit user groups don't act as filter bubbles. By some miracle they largely act as intended... As communities for like minded individuals to share their interests and largely in a positive context.
The money and advertising and focus is always on the "front page" and the jockeying for position to make headlines and drive traffic to affiliates but this is a huge distraction.
Reddit should focus on investing in the positive and great communities that are built on the site. Build tools to help these communities do what they do even better and use more front page real estate to drive people to these positive experiences since they already exist today. That's the real value of reddit.
Some censorship is inevitable, some bad actors need to be expelled from the site, but ultimately you need to lift up the good examples, not just play "bop a troll"
"It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse... But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all."
I have the feeling that organizational energy isn’t cheap, and that repeated banning or asymmetrical resource burning will eventually cause organizations to decay.
When did reddit change their frontpage behavior? Previously you'd only see posts from the default subreddits on reddit.com, now you have a chance of seeing something gamed from an alt right subreddit? Why did they ever ditch the whitelist model?
Interestingly that article continuously refers to the sub as ‘r/TheDonald’ (which is about Donald Glover) instead of ‘r/The_Donald’ (which is the sub that’s been quarantined).
It also refers to two posts on a thread which are impossible to find, because it doesn't reference user names, and the posts are apparently deleted now, and were not captured in the google cache of the page, or common reddit archiving sites(ceddit/removeddit).
What if those two posts referenced in the article were written by the same person, and generally downvoted?
Yup, thanks for linking this. These allegations seem quite serious, and contra claims by TD users on that subreddit, they actually go far beyond what we've seen on leftist, socialist etc. subs wrt. hostility towards police. (I've also seen some allegations that The_Donald's custom CSS was being used to hide/disguise the "report" links that are normally used to flag rules-violating comments - if so, this is clearly backfiring for them right now!) It's easy to say "T_D is toxic, blah blah" but this sort of extreme rhetoric is on a wholly different level that really wasn't there before.
Dont you think "hostility towards police" and "violence against police officers" as phrases themselves are purposely under contextualizing whats going on, in a biased sort of way?
'A worldwide community supporting the violent threats of local militia backing their civilly disobedient politicians efforts to evade the government use of police force to mandate participation and speech' is a super interesting power dynamics story. Whos the oppressor in this story, government use of police force, militia chaos, insubordinate politicians holding process hostage? Is the use of police FORCE to strong arm their votes itself violence? Shouldnt people be banned for supporting police force?
To Godwin's law this topic, would reddit choose to ban advocating prisoner violence towards auschwitz guards, in their efforts to escape? Would the rebels be banned for advocating destruction of the empire and violence towards storm troopers? It doesnt seem like there is a line drawn anywhere, it does appear arbitrary, or biased against violence they disagree with. The actual policy seems more like "ban what gets us bad press." If the rules were enforced consistently, rap music would be banned. I'm not pretending there are easy answers, even the supreme court has been looking at whether rap music is artistic or a credible threat, maybe they arent mutually exclusive. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/politics/supreme-court...
Comparing the commentators calling for violence on the_donald to holocaust victims is both a stretch and a minimization of what the holocaust victims actually went through. Having a subreddit be quarantined is not the same as being under threat of genocide.
You are complaining about phrases that are purposely under contextualizing what's going on, but then go on to commit the same thing in your third paragraph by contextualizing it to the holocaust.
I didnt make that comparison. I dont know how you took from my comment what you did. The Commentators and victims are not analogous at all, they arent even the same part of the anlogy.
I brought up two similar but different types of speech, observers advocating violence towards oppressive authority. If this were an elementary school analogy, prisoners would be the militia not the reddit commentators. The guards and police are both blindly following government orders, whether those orders are right or wrong. Is advocating violence wrong regardless of if the target of said violence is behaving morally or immorally? The topic at hand is where reddit does (or doesnt) draw the line of acceptable speech regarding advocating violence.
The subreddit was in violation of Reddit's rules. I can only guess that they finally did something because the mods were too slow to respond this time.
Read reddit’s linked description of what a quarantined community is - it explains the answer to your question.
It’s not about people who want to go to fan sites (or don’t want to go) - it’s about misinformation / inappropriate content leaking out to folks who might inadvertently view it and not understand the rat hole they’re about to go down.
Putting the subreddit into the quarantine just means that there’s an extra disclosure and opt-in before viewing content from that subreddit (and content won’t be shown in popular, /r/all, etc.)
According to the post about this in SRD [0], this was because of repeated calls to violence (something that has been well-documented), and the final straw was repeated incitements to commit violence over the situation in Oregon.
The following is an excerpt of the message the Reddit admins sent the moderators of /r/The_Donald:
(Edit: I originally posted an excerpt of the message from the OP in the SRD post. I've since found the full message in a comment [1], so I'll be replacing it here with that version. Of note is that the admins have disabled /r/The_Donald's ability to use custom styling, as they abused CSS to hide the report button in order to prevent people from reporting violent content to them. The comment also mentions that one of the moderators of /r/The_Donald was stripped of most of his permissions as well.)
> Dear Mods,
> We want to let you know that your community has been quarantined, as outlined in Reddit’s Content Policy.
> The reason for the quarantine is that over the last few months we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community and an over-reliance on Reddit admins to manage users and remove posts that violate our content policy, including content that encourages or incites violence. Most recently, we have observed this behavior in the form of encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon. This is not only in violation of our site-wide policies, but also your own community rules (rule #9). You can find violating content that we removed in your mod logs.
> As we have discussed in the past, and as detailed in our content policy and moderator guidelines, we expect you to enforce against rule-breaking content. You’ve made progress over the last year, but we continue to observe and take action on a disproportionate amount of rule-breaking behavior in this community. We recognize that you do remove posts that are reported, but we are troubled that violent content more often goes unreported, and worse, is upvoted.
> User reports and downvotes are an essential way that Reddit functions to moderate content. Limiting or prohibiting them prevents you from moderating your community effectively. Because of this, we are disabling your custom styling in order to restore these essential functions.
> As stated in our Moderator Guidelines, our goal is to keep the platform alive and vibrant, as well as to ensure your community can reach people interested in it. Accordingly, here are the specific terms of the quarantine and the next steps we are asking from you as a mod team to resolve this situation.
> Quarantine terms:
> Visitors to this community will see a warning that requires users to explicitly opt-in to viewing it. This messaging reminds users of the importance of reporting rule-breaking content.
> Custom styling has been disabled to restore the report and downvote buttons.
> We hope both these changes will help improve the signal around rule-breaking content and improve your ability to effectively address it.
> Next steps:
> You unambiguously communicate to your subscribers that violent content is unacceptable.
> You communicate to your users that reporting is a core function of Reddit and is essential to maintaining the health and viability of the community.
> Following that, we will continue to monitor your community, specifically looking at report rate and for patterns of rule-violating content.
> Undertake any other actions you determine to reduce the amount of rule-violating content.
> Following these changes, we will consider an appeal to lift the quarantine, in line with the process outlined here.
For context, the admin logs show that the Reddit Corporate Admins only bothered to remove on average one comment per few days. It wasn't a deluge. The Oregon post is an anomalous casus belli.
> only bothered to remove on average one comment per few days
Does this effectively measure the incoming complaints/requests to reddit admins? If those went up, but their admins' capability to moderate was already saturated maybe the rate of comments removed would stay the same.
A regular subreddit would see almost no admin interaction, so if the admins are needing to correct failing moderation every couple of days that's a very bad sign.
I helped moderate a large subreddit teaching people how to buy drugs on the darknet and we had zero admin interactions despite being very close to the line of what was allowed because we were aggressive with our moderation. The subreddit only ended up being banned after SESTA/FOSTA passed.
Edit: It's important to note that there isn't a report function that bypasses subreddit moderators, unless you directly message the admins. So if the reddit admins are having to step in on reports it means that the moderators are ignoring them, either deliberately or due to a poorly managed moderation team (not enough members or time zone coverage).
It should require zero admin oversight. The moderators should ensure that it follows the reddit rules and there will be nothing for the admins to intervene about. In this case the moderators weren't even following the subreddit rules that they had created which say "No Threats towards Government Officials".
Interesting, because the The_Donald has always been toxic, but now action is finally being taken. The narrative on The_Donald this week has been about Google's interference with the political process such as manipulating search results (e.g. the Project Veritas Jen Gennai video)[0], and why the media is ignoring this after obsessing over Russian interference.
Referring to TLA, the rationale for quarantine may have been calls by T_D users for violence against police officers, not (if you're implying this) an attempt censor news about Google.
r/politics is equally bad, seriously. Look through a police thread. r/chapotraphouse is insane, far worse than any subreddit today. Breaks every reddit rule.
Even assuming that were true for the sake of argument, it doesn't suggest /r/The_Donald shouldn't be quarantined. At best, it means other subs deserve to be quarantined along with it.
But non-progressives never admit that anything on the extreme right deserves to be targeted, they only cry conspiracy when it is. When the left calls for violence, the right will claim it's because leftists are violent. When the right calls for violence, the right will justify it with the Second Amendment and call any attempt to stop them an attack on their free speech.
What seems like a desire for fair and equal treatment is still applied under a double standard.
It's a petty and immature way to see the world, and maybe non-progressives should look at getting their own house in order.
I'm not sure what your news sources are but I haven't seen anyone, right or left, call for physical violence to the other. There has been violence done "in the name of" the right or left, but Donald Trump cannot and should not be blamed for Charlottesville and Bernie Sanders cannot and should not be blamed for the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting. And if either side had they should be arrested, but it doesn't happen. And no, dog whistling is not a thing. That argument is a non-starter and is the sign of someone trying to warp the language to best fit their ideals.
So for the things that are non-physically violent: the right certainly has it's problems but to suggest that the left, and especially the most extreme versions of it, isn't doing underhanded or otherwise despicable things (like when YouTube demonetizes channels or Twitter shadow bans accounts) is willingly turning a blind eye. At least with the NRA someone on the left knows where they stand. Google/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter and now maybe Reddit seem to be taking a much more selective approach to how they apply their rules. And even those rules are hazy at best.
If you haven't seen violence being called then I suspect you may not be paying attention to national media (not necessarily a bad thing). The President himself has called for violence numerous times at campaign rallies and against political rivals. There's been numerous shootings at churches, clubs, synagogues, schools, etc. that inflict real violence on people. You literally have to not pay attention to not see that politics has become radicalized. Whether things like the movement that inspired President Trump and his reverents or they are merely a symptom is debatable. The fact that /r/The_Donald still exists after the numerous brigading episodes, doxxing, and malice they've brought the platform speaks widely to the latitude that they've been given.
I'm generally supportive of free speech, even speech I disagree with but The_Donald censors a ton of speech they disagree with and they aren't even really being heavily punished here.
@krapp
I don't believe anything deserves to be targeted for canceling. It's basically the main thing that polarizes me against progressivism, the obsession with speech control.
There is far more violent rhetoric from the left than the right for the first time in my life. Regardless, your comment is extremely naive because violent rhetoric will always be present in any political party. If only 1 in 10,000 are nut jobs then we have thousands of crazies in both political parties and in any other group or ideology that represents a large population.
If there is far more violent rhetoric coming from the left, then you would expect to see the rise of said nutjobs committing murder and what not.
Yet curiously, we've seen the rise of mass murders and hate come from the far right. How does that work with the idea that the left is somehow more violent than the right? Why is it okay for the right to normalize violence?
The Colorado STEM school shooters were far-left. So was the "nutjob" who shot Republican lawmakers. The Dallas sniper was far-left as well. See where this type of argument leads?
It's irresponsible and wrong to claim that people you disagree with are responsible for the actions of violent killers. The responsibility for killings lies with the killers themselves, and the failures of law enforcement.
The Dallas shooter wanted to kill white people and cops. That's not a left or right position. Especially when you consider the Dallas Police have been some of the most proactive and one of the most well regarded police forces by the BLM movement.
The Colorado STEM shooters never had a motive released. Not sure where you got that from. One of the shooters was literally registered Democrat for less than a year. The other wasn't even old enough to vote. There's some suspected bullying that went on but that's about all anyone knows so again not a "left wing" shooting.
The only one on your list that's actually verifiably a left wing violent act is the guy who shot at Republicans. That's absolutely verified.
Contrast that with the church and synagogue shootings where people literally admitted that they were on the right. Contrast that with the pizza shop incident where Hillary and left wing people were supposed to be hiding slaves in the basement of a building with no basement, which was circulated by the right. Literally bombs sent to Democrats by people on the right. Finally the President himself calling for his supporters to beat people up at rallies.
The only way one denies the violence is more common on the right is if one is predisposed to believe it. Are there some cases where it's unclear why violence happened that have been misattributed to the right? Sure how could there not be, but there's also overwhelming evidence of violence on the right.
> There is far more violent rhetoric from the left than the right for the first time in my life.
No, there's not. Moreover there is, as has been true for many decades, far more violent political action in the US by the right (even excluding state action, though some of the longtime violent rhetoric of the right from outside of government, particularly against actual and suspect unauthorized migrants, is now manifesting as state action.)
>I just don't fear violent rhetoric. It's not something that merits a reaction, in my view.
So you're not concerned about it if it doesn't target you personally. Fair enough, not everyone has empathy for their fellow human beings.
>Basically, if an author can say it in a book, then random citizens ought to be able to say it on the internet.
As far as I know, authors can't attempt to incite real violence in books, either. But imminence is a relevant factor you're ignoring. A book may take weeks, months or years to publish, whereas a death threat on the internet can be acted upon almost immediately.
I agree with you or agree with none being quarantined. The favoritism based on ideology but difference in punishment for the same violations rubs me the wrong way.
Cite your work. I've seen plenty of police threads and nothing in them with any sort of highly upvoted and popular comment backing calls for violence. coupled with the fact that you can report things(and they didn't disable reporting/downvoting via css) and they have heavy moderation I don't believe you.
This has happened several times in major subs. /r/technology was pretty bad during the Ajit Pai net neutrality stuff. Tons of death threats, including discussion of tracking down his family. People were really angry obviously but it got out of control. It's been a long time since then and there's still a mod sticky on that sub in response to the number of violent posts.
shitty people exist in any community of large number however they course corrected for that. same with r/politics there exists some shitty people but it's handled via reports and downvotes so the bad stuff falls away from view or is outright removed/banned.
r/technology did a few things to correct for it by posting that sticky, banning users, removing comments, not hiding the downvote and the report buttons so that the community can self police a bit. all of those were not done by /r/t_d. on t_d they had people actually agreeing with those posts/comments and upvoting them.
The death threats in /r/technology were also being agreed with and upvoted. This wasn't a brigade but the result of the level of political anger. Any community that has a lot of people is going to have tons of bad ones that try to rationalize violence. T_D has 700,000 people. This includes many trolls and angry people but like it or not, many that are perfectly fine with following the rules.
It's an average of less than 1 per day in a very busy subreddit. That is an impossible standard to meet. It would be trivial for a false flag operation to post that often, and there clearly is a motive for that.
Meanwhile, as rhegart commented below, far worse is permitted in other subreddits. The bias is clear as could be.
It's not crazy to think this has something to do with Google. Immense pressure is being applied by Google. Nobody dares risk being blacklisted from Google search. We've partially lost our ability to have public debate that might negatively impact Google.
For those interested in the source, the admin logs show that the Reddit Corporate Admins only needed to remove on average one comment per few days going back 30 days. Then they removed 9 comments on one day on a post about Oregon - a somewhat anomalous casus belli. Apparently that was enough to quarantine a subreddit of 750k subscribers.
That belies the point that admins are not having to do this with other communities. they simply don't need to step in unless it's overly egregious as it seems to be here. admins are not there to moderate communities; that's the mods job.
It is one per day if we are to believe the TD mods who honestly don't have the best track record in the world of being honest or enforcing their own rules consistently.
> It's an average of less than 1 per day in a very busy subreddit. That is an impossible standard to meet.
On the contrary, I'm a former moderator of r/science which had an order of magnitude more traffic and am unaware of an admin ever having to step in during my many months tenure.
The justification also ran much deeper than the fact that they had to step in at all, and discussed the fact that the community moderators took actions which actively prevented the community from policing itself. Downvote buttons being hidden and renaming the report button increase the probability of these posts staying up and visible for longer periods of time.
By "T_D users", you mean one user who made one post in a thread, right?
I read T_D, and a lot of other sites on reddit. T_D is 99% of the time pro-police. You are much more likely to see anti-police sentiment and posts which encourage violence against police officers on other subs on reddit(usually, the more liberal ones like /r/politics).
> By "T_D users", you mean one user who made one post in a thread, right?
This Media Matters article[0] contains screenshots showing more than one user supporting violence against the police.
Of course, any such comments have been deleted from Reddit proper, now, and you may well consider them faked, but given the number of outlets reporting on this, and the fact that no one here seems to be denying that these comments actually ever existed, I think it's safe to assume that more than one user and one post was involved.
I never said they were faked. In another post I said that I couldn't find any reference to them to be able to judge if they were particularly popular content on the sub or if they were heavily downvoted.
Isn't this the same sub reddit that had the admins edit comments on a database level? Calling something fake/false flag seems a lot more reasonable when there is already a confirmed case.
The Project Veritas Reddit account was suddenly banned (even though they rarely used it), and Youtube removed all of the long-form video interviews with the Google whistleblower.
Imagine trying to shield your own employees from doxxing and threats of rape and violence from the same set of people that included a gunman that went to investigate Pizzagate by firing a few shouts at a pizza shop, and that is known to like gun ownership a lot.
The Reddit account of Project Veritas appeared to have used self promotion per their own screenshot, which is banned on Reddit. Not sure if the ban was prior to the new release or not.
At some point the argument has confused 'freedom of speech' with 'right to reach'. The right to reach hundreds of millions of people that use private social platforms isn't remotely the same as freedom of speech.
Sure, but content creators are also waking up to said "private platform"'s true colors as essentially a hostile landlord, and are taking steps to move to other platforms and revenue streams.
They were nowhere near that proactive about deleting the account of the person who ACTUALLY shot up Youtube (I know because I watched some of the content days after the shooting...most of it was bizarre or just outright low-quality nonsense).
Your first sentence implies that the subject/content of your second sentence is somehow toxic or factually incorrect. Can you clarify what you mean?
The last time I checked, (about 12 hours ago), MSNBC/CNN/NYT/WashingtonPost/Vox/HuffPo....not a single one had an article about this latest Google situation. There are Federal Senators and Congressmen grilling Google about this and issuing statements and NOBODY thinks it should even be worthy of public attention or discourse, except for Tucker Carlson on FOX and YT journalists such as Tim Pool (a center-Left Bernie voter)?!?!
The perception of bias from liberal tech platforms will lead to a large group becoming “conservative” when in actuality they are just contrarian and go for the counter culture underdog side. It’s a real phenomenon. The artificial religious right in bush era constantly pushed in our faces led to liberal values completely dominating mainstream society partly because it all felt too fake and suffocating it forced average person to think and the right turned into a joke. I predict liberal values that are mainstream today will be met with the same fate. They are filled with as many fallacies if not more than the religious right and the more suffocating almost religion like feel they get when someone tries to argue against one aspect, the more people will rebel and fall into the arms of conservatives.
From what I gather, the reason was that there were calls to violence that weren't deleted sufficiently fast by the mods. Someone correct me if this is wrong.
This seems like it would be easy to replicate this on any subreddit, doesn't it?
Get a group of people and deliberately target subreddits in various hours of the day with calls for violence, and then report them to the admins of reddit.
Wouldn't this, in theory at least, quarantine any subreddit?
The Against Hate Subreddit orchestrated similar false-flag attacks last year and successfully shut down many other subreddits.
During 2016 on Facebook, similar spamming tactics were used to shut down many pages promoting Bernie Sanders.
If it really were something orchestrated by users of T_D, then why would they report it to reddit? It's more likely that outside forces had a hand in this.
So I think we're on the same page. Not sure why you got downvoted, but that wasn't me. I was only trying to list a couple of examples that might add to your theory.
Media Matters a Political action group with the mission of "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." posted this[0] article just 2 days ago. I'm pretty sure this same source has been banned from the politics subreddit for self-promotion and astroturfing comments but I can't find the source. Amusingly, all of the wayback archives for the r/politics blacklist have been purged from existence.
Judging by the fact that there are multiple watchdog-style subreddits dedicated to policing Reddit content (Against Hate Subreddits, Top Minds, SRS, plus others) I wouldn't be surprised at all.
What part of my post do you find it to be 'conspiracy' ?
That's the reason they stated for the quarantine - that's official and confirmed. I quote: “encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon” [0]
Since they remove all such posts from there (also can be proved by searching through the subreddit), that must mean that the speed of removal was the ultimate reason, right?
The mods said something similar I believe: “It would seem they’ve set up an impossible standard as a reason to kill us before the 2020 election.” [0]
I think "impossible standard" means that nobody can delete the posts faster than that.
If you accept all of this on face value (guy posts on subreddit, mods don't react "quick enough", subreddit gets quarantined - end of story), then good for you!
Interesting, I've saved multiple comments on r/politics that explicitly call for violence against trump supporters that I've reported and they still aren't deleted. It is also unfortunate that reddit doesn't think it needs to provide any evidence for this action, considering that it is the beginning of Trump's 2020 campaign and on the eve of the Dem primary debates.
No he filed his new campaign the day s/after/of taking office.
> Trump began his reelection campaign unusually early for an incumbent President. He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration.
The operative word is 'officially', whatever that means. From your link we see both:
> He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration.
and
> On June 18, 2019, Trump held an official campaign launch event at the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida
It's easier to police threads than comments... there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of comments on thousands of different threads, the T_D is known to allow full threads devoted to violence, and they just leave them up. They are known to let slide MANY innuendos of violence, I'm sure if you did a statistical analysis of violent enacting comments across r/politics and r/The_Donald that you'd find way more on the donald than politics. Would you find 0 on poltics? probably not, some probably get overlooked and go unreported or overlooked, doesn't mean they shouldn't be moderated, just means there's not enough resources all the time to get the job done.
TD has always been toxic, racist, and bigoted, it was just a matter of time before this happened. I think it happening near an election cycle is just coincidence, I think more the civil-war inciting of the current events in Oregon is at play here.
The conservative reaction to such things used to be "it's their property and they can do what they want with it, so if you don't like it go build your own". I guess they don't feel that way anymore.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain /r/The_Donald already didn't have ads on it as the article implied it did. Reddit only allows ads in white-listed subs and T_D was never white listed AFAIK.
Edit 2: my comment was moved from a different thread that was on a TechCrunch article on this. TechCrunch claimed that this quarantine would mean that ads would no longer run on T_D.
Quarantine also prevents their posts from showing up on the front page or in the /r/all feed and (I think) you can’t access the sub if you aren’t already a member and are on the mobile app.
The subreddit moderators provided the admin logs, showing that on average, 1 post per day was actioned on by reddit admins. "Biggest headache" yeah, right.
For admins thats a high amount, They require moderators moderate for the reddit rules as well as the subreddit rules to ensure they don't have to step in.
To be fair, in the same logs it shows they removed mod permissions from one of the mods. The picture it paints is that the Admins were making it harder for them to moderate the subreddit.
The mod was removed because they violated Reddit rules of not using mod positions to promote financial gain. The mod was promoting his gofundme campaign and broke the rules. This same mode also delisted three other mods, which was making it harder to moderate the subreddit.
Interpreting these actions as site admins intentionally making it more difficult for moderators of that subreddit is cognitive dissonance.
The members of the the_donald had a history of breaking rules and crying foul any time any sort of administrative action was taken against them for it. Whether it was for brigading and harassment, or flooding modmail in other subreddits, or other actions.
The result was that after the banning of the just as toxic "fatpeoplehate", admins were loathe to interfere with t_d. Any administrative response was met with charges of politicization, "liberal bias", and more rule-breaking.
I'm surprised it's taken this long, but it appears that Reddit's staff waited until they had an obviously non-partisan reason for doing it. In this case, threatening police officers. I think they wanted to wait until they had a reason that would be difficult for people to turn into a partisan brawl that would give Reddit bad publicity.
Imagine if you will the difficulty conservative sites may have in threading the needle that t_d is simultaneously being persecuted here for their conservative, pro-Trump political views, and that the particular views they were banned for were making violent threats to law enforcement.
I don't think there are many subreddits that praise and love law enforcement more than the_donald. They used a Media Matters hit piece to censor and contain one of the most popular subs, for purely partisan reasons.
If I make a sockpuppet and post the same comments in r/politics, does that mean it should get quarantined?
A lot of those screenshots are "1 point, 11 minutes ago" or "2 points, 17 minutes ago". If that's being expanded to cover an entire subreddit, then no sub would be safe when applied consistently.
Age is not a good determination of sockpuppetness, at least with competent opponents. Past activity might be, since that at least costs something, while age just costs prep time.
I don't doubt that many of the accounts screenshotted in the article linked are actual, active accounts on /r/The_Donald. I doubt that you can usefully distinguish real accounts from fake ones for the purposes of identifying false flag attacks in other subreddits.
My impression reading the article was the more blatant the call to violence, the lower the score. I haven't exactly done a proper study of that, of course.
Reddit is composed of tens of thousands of subreddits, and relies on volunteer moderators to police them. For a single subreddit to demand at least one admin intervention a day is absurd.
Comparing the amount of intervention the admins would not be a useful indicator of anything except their bias.
As evidence of that bias, consider their curation of r/popular, where they choose what to show.
They actively promote posts from the left and actively hide posts from the right. For example, this 18 hour old Democrat talking point [1] with 10k net upvotes is displayed before numerous posts that received 3x to 8x as many net upvotes in less time.
And extreme left wing subs continue to be featured on r/popular (many brigading and harassing right wing subs) while reddit restricts right wing subs.
> Comparing the amount of intervention the admins would not be a useful indicator of anything except their bias
So first you claim that any other popular subreddit would have as much admin intervention, but then you say that we shouldn't actually investigate this claim because even if we found that you were wrong, you're still right?
Also the "net upvotes" that Reddit displays are not literal net upvotes. Those numbers are fudged in order to prevent conveying too much information. Reddit skews liberal, this is no surprise. The height of a post depends on what subs you are subscribed to, and on r/all it depends on the preference of everybody else. Which skews liberal.
No point in talking with you if you're going to put words in my mouth. I didn't claim that "any other popular subreddit would have as much admin intervention".
It's clear that TD suffers much more scrutiny and restriction from the admins.
I was simply refuting your "tens of thousands of subreddits" comment.
> One of reddit's most active subs would naturally demand more than most of those ten thousand mostly niche subs.
This clearly implies that the amount of admin intervention in r/The_Donald is highly correlated with its popularity rather the relative toxicity of the subreddit, no?
Compared to the "tens of thousands of subreddits" you mentioned in the comment I replied to, yes. A sub with 750k users will generally have more intervention than a sub with 750.
Now you're changing the subject to "any other popular subreddit" which was not in the comment I replied to and thus was obviously not what I was talking about.
To make that clear, I'm saying there's a correlation between popularity and number of interventions, but that's not the only factor. Admin bias is another factor, and I'm sure there are others I can't think of at the moment.
As for "relative toxicity", TD isn't any more toxic than other political subs on reddit. The whole place is a cesspool. Unless you fit in perfectly with the group on any political sub you'll be treated badly. But right wing subs suffer additional toxicity from the admins.
I mean, the fact that you can get banned on TD immediately for commenting anything even remotely critical of the president suggests that it is very unlikely that TD "isn't any more toxic than other political subs on reddit." There were entire threads in TD calling for violent intervention in Oregon; similar posts are not found in any of the other political subs. Even in response to the quarantine, there are plenty of comments suggesting violent revolution.
This claim that "other subs are just as toxic" seems to be a common refrain among TD supporters (as well as white nationalist hate subs). Do you have any evidence to support this?
Where are these "entire threads in TD calling for violent intervention in Oregon"? All I've seen cited here are isolated comments with a handful of points.
So I spent a few minutes yesterday reading part way down the comments on a single post in r/politics and found similar comments advocating violent resistance to the government.
> Just do a 180 turn on gun reforms. They’ll take an armed population more seriously.
If someone were as motivated as Media Matters I'm sure they could find much, much more. If you doubt that I encourage you to investigate a bit yourself.
Doesn't the fact that such a heavily modded subreddit required administrators to intervene on a daily basis show it is a problem? Reddit admins shouldn't have to do almost anything to any highly trafficked and moderated subreddits. A different subreddit might be able to claim "Well there wasn't enough mods to catch a few comments falling through the cracks", but on the most heavily moderated subreddit on the entire site? I find it hard to believe that no mods saw the comments with calls to violence. Especially since T_D had been warned multiple times previously about poor moderation. Their response to such warnings in the past has always been some form of "Yeah well what are you going to do about?! We have lots of viewers!"
And Hacker News is a terrible sub to discuss this. Most tech workers tilt far-left - so likely any discussion here talking about neutrality will elicit downvotes and hatred.
But here is the thing though. While reddit owners and hacker news represent one worldview which aligns left, the reality is that a large part of America, who stay quiet and are not active, tilts right. And by banning subreddits and downvoting anything which attacks left, we just create an environment where discourse is prevented - but the feeling is not.
It is disingenuous to suggest that these subreddits are being banned simply because they "attack the left". T_D was banned because of a consistent pattern of rhetoric that violates Reddit's ToS, the most recent cases being outright calling for taking up arms against the government and killing police officers.
r/frenworld, r/clownworld, and r/honkler were all banned for similar reasons, being hotbeds of violent white nationalist rhetoric.
Well, that's certainly what the people telling you what they want you to believe want you to believe. People have been saying that all my life, and it wasn't any more true in the '70s for the Moral/Silent/whatever Majority than it is now.
I don't think discourse is hurt by quarantining r/the_donald. It has a tendency to show racist/misogynistic/conspiracy theorist memes and isn't really a good place at all for actual discourse.
That you characterize AOC, who espouses policies that are considered centrist literally everywhere else in the developed world like a living wage and universal healthcare, as "extreme left," and a community that openly fosters discussions of genocide, racist doxxing, and threats to journalists as just "pro-right" is a symptom of how far the Overton Window has been shoved rightward in this country.
It is a fascist strategy to pretend like every pushback is an existential threat.
So it would be fascist to argue with someone that climate change is going to end the world in twelve years? I don't agree but if you apply the same logic to AOC then she's a fascist in your opinion.
>climate change is going to end the world in twelve years
That a position that is supported by nearly all peer-reviewed evidence is not considered centrist, is another sign we've shifted the window towards an ideological rather than rational/observational politics.
I would disagree. Most people believe in man-made climate change. It is a centrist belief. The ability to turn that topic into a fearful subject where you can rake in tax dollars is where it becomes an issue and a platform for the left. I work building software for climate research and lean to the right.
It is fine. This is part of the problem. The moment you talk about right, you label them as racists, abortion banning a-holes. While AOC's views, who even Democrats label a Socialist (with policies such as green deal, 70% tax rates on high income earners, free college etc.), is now centrist! I hope you realize how different our views are - in that we aren't even on the same page to start the conversation.
But of course, we should ban the right since they are racists and misogynists. And then we act surprised when Trump wins again.
"capitalism is irredeemable" or "green deal" are positions that even in germany would be considered very left or far-left, not centrist. Where in the world would they be considered centrist?
The entire thread is going to be about partisan flamewar Dang given the context. It might be best to flag the thread vs. flagging my comment individually.
HN is about as balanced a site as you'll get (which isn't to say it's perfectly balanced). You just have to make your case substantively, no inflammatory stuff, etc. For instance I've seen reasonable debates with climate change skeptics here.
Well no objectively it is not. that's why better keep politics away from it
e.g. i lean libertarian and i just deleted 2 of my comments which were beginning to get downvoted fast (no replies). The last thing i care to do is argue with a mob, and this is not the first time it happened. I 'm testing the waters repeatedly and it's not working. I would encourage you to do an experiment.
Show me something better. I'm not saying it's as balanced as you _could_ get.
Again, it's about how you post it. I've posted at least a handful of libertarian or conservative ideas that have gotten upvoted. You just have to make your case carefully. Snark gets downvoted, for instance. Rightwing or libertarian snark gets downvoted more, granted. They police tone here, not so much ideas. I think it's a fruitful policy.
i hear there are subreddits for rational political discourse. i dont remember their names, i use r/goldandblack for libertarian matters, (it is often frequented by leftists too). In fact i dont remember any substantial political debates in HN for years now, do you?
> it's about how you post it
I dont use snark but my posts are blunt. If i have to preface all my comments with social engineering fluff , i already know it's not the place to post it.
That's true, when and if liberals make it to libertarian places, it tends to be a pretty fair discussion (of course I could be biased as a fellow libertarian). But, there aren't many liberals there, and I'd guess HN is left-of-center overall.
Representative quote: A user wrote, “Rifles are the only way we're going to get any peace in our lives ever again,” adding, “It's either war and we get rid of these guys or a lifetime of listening to this shit over and over again start getting yourself ready.”
Sure, but you didn't have to visit it. The worst part of the increasing corporatization of the public-facing internet is that we no longer seem to be content leaving well enough alone.
The problem with that subreddit was more that it made headlines. If it wasn't named in dozens of articles, all over the news, and an overall very public embarrassment for reddit for three years now, everything would be all fine and dandy for the donald.
Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population.
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
Have you tried searching reddit for threads about a current event, only to find pages of results of vitriolic/psychotic ("trolling!") /r/The_Donald posts? I'm pretty tired of it and I hope they ban that sub and similar ones. I couldn't care less about the political aspect, it's the 4chan lulz crap that has to go. From reddit's point of view these users are parasites, who basically deface the website in an attempt to control it. That's their M.O., good riddance.
I can't say I've ever experienced this. In fact, I would occasionally browse r/T_D just to temper the overtly left-leaning bias of /r/news and /r/politics.
/r/news is not left-leaning by any reasonable metric (there is frequently blatant racism heavily upvoted).
/r/politics is only left-leaning because of how heavily skewed right american politics is. Most of their opinions are centrist at best. Their obsession with trump is a bit annoying, but it's only annoying, not actively harmful.
"these users are parasites, who basically deface the website in an attempt to control it."
That's a great and concise way to describe what those people have done, or are trying to do. I've seen it on several old forums or games, like the Something Awful Goons invading Eve Online with the stated aim of ruining the game for everyone else.
It's this weird immature streak of "everyone pay attention to me" that these hateful vandals thrive upon. They have to be the only ones making noise, and everyone must listen to that noise. If things don't happen exactly like they want, they throw fits, threaten, and whine as a group so much that people give in just to shut them up. And since it's just attention that is being sought, any actions are valid, good or bad. Appeals to admins/moderators, spamming, arguing in bad faith, harassing others, defacing the site or simply breaking as much as they can. How that attention seeking validates these people, I have no idea.
I suspect this isn't going to accomplish much of anything and may even backfire. According to published statistics by Reddit as of this writing, this subreddit has 755k subscribers and over 45,000 members online right now. For comparison, the official politics subreddit has 5.2 million subscribers but fewer online members (42,000). r/the_donald has an extraordinarily high level of activity and engagement. So long as r/the_donald exists and is maintained, it can act as a sort of black hole so that official subreddits can be heavily moderated to support certain platforms, politicians, and advertisers. If it were actually shut down, though, the users there are so numerous and active that it probably wouldn't be possible to maintain r/politics or other official subreddits in their current moderated state.
Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn't accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.
In my experience when Reddit banned the more toxic subreddits many of the other subreddits I actually did frequent became better. I think the people who would be in those subreddits are already there and when there are bans in subreddits some of the people leave and the community is better for it.
The thing is that those people are also on other subreddits, people generally don't frequent just one. So those people always bring in Reddit to comment on the Donald is also leasing to more engagement on other subreddits. It's possible that the Donald would organize more and be more of an issue in other subreddits but that wasn't how it worked in the past.
Is there actual evidence of this? My experience is those in r/the_donald claim the numbers are artificially deflated by Reddit, and those on the other side claim r/the_donald is mostly bots. I suspect both views are wrong.
Unlike most subreddits, their upvote count to comment ratio is really out of whack.
Usually a pretty reliable sign of botism. You see it on corporate driven posts on movie promotions a decent amount too. (Along with some pretty lame top voted comments)
The subreddit's culture for years has been based on aggressively upvoting everything posted there. This started back when it was small and the community tried to get pro-Trump posts on the front page of Reddit, which invariably caused a lot of drama. So I don't think this means anything.
Your position seems to have backtracked from concern over bots to... disliking lots of upvotes within a community. Forgive me if I think you're being disingenuous with this latest statement.
Reflexively upvoting everything that comes into a sub is a bad cultural value. It may even break reddits' usage policy.
I'm not backtracking, you're the one who brought up that reflexively upvoting might be indistinguishable from botlike behavior. It's a feature (cultural value), not a bug.
The fact that the activity has been happening for years doesn't invalidate that it could be bot related. Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic.
> Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic.
It implies it's unusual traffic, but it does not imply it's inhuman traffic -- doubly so because the difference has already been explained in a way that doesn't require invoking bots.
Somewhat amusingly, after r/the_donald discovered it could push pro-Trump memes onto r/all by making every post on the subreddit about upvoting content, some other subreddits managed to pull off the same stunt in protest.
Would they be that obvious? There was an absence of actual discussion on the_donald threads I read. Just agreement or telling dissenters they were idiots. It was weird but could that be because of bots or just a lower level of discourse.
And you think that doesn’t happen in liberal subreddits? I’ve been banned from /politics /News /worldnews all for disagreeing with people. All near instant bans. I’ve even been banned from non political forums because I shared unpopular view points, such as “femisnism has hurt dating dynamics”. Yes that got me banned. So you know full well wrongful and politically motivated bans happen all the time from both sides. So it’s a moot point.
At one point reddit had an inconsistency between the normal interface and the one shown to advertisers. This revealed that the counts in the normal interface were being suppressed by a factor of 10, likely related to keeping the posts off of /r/all.
I guess an alternate explanation is a 10x inflation in the advertising interface, but that would be defrauding the advertisers.
A large amount of the content promoted on the_donald subreddit correlates with Russian political propaganda agencies in the U.S., which are notorious for using bot/cyborg accounts on social media - https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/24/17896586/reddit-the-donal...
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by a government[5], private institutions, and corporations.
That's the first definition I found when I googled the word. Reddit, a private institution, considered the content harmful. Seems to fit the definition.
Based on that definition it cannot be assumed that censorship is always wrong. For example, removing a post that was doxxing an individual would be considered censorship but could also be the moral thing to do.
I would also point out that the_donald has a very aggressive moderation policy where most comments critical of the president are removed, so I don't think there is much room for them to complain about censorship.
Deplatforming, shadow banning, deboosting, demonetization are all modern forms of censorship. It might not be exactly like the Chinese or other types of censorships we have seen in the past but it is a valid form of censorship. Definitions aren't everything, context matters. If you want to see a rising power filled with authoritarianism, look towards Google.
Brand new accounts posting trollish or flamebaity stuff get treated differently. Software filters some of those, and we shadowban some of them, especially if there's evidence that this is someone we've banned many times before. The converse is also true: if software has filtered out a new account that's not posting trollishly or flamebaitily, we restore their posts and mark the account legit so it won't happen again.
I think this is a reasonable balance between transparency and defending the site against abuse. If we tried to give every banned account the same high-effort attention that we give established users, we'd do nothing else all day and still not get through them all. That would just be a new vector for people to DoS the moderators. A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions. Shadowbanning is an appropriate tool for those cases.
Edit: there is also a significant amount of spam, and if we told spammers we were banning them, they would spam us with emails demanding attention, asking why, and telling us how high-quality their articles really are. Actually they do this a lot already, and it's a pain.
> A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions.
Yes, just like a small number of censors can cut off a suicidal Ian Murdock's last communication channels so he runs out of excuses for postponing his suicide, only to assure themselves the next day that they did nothing wrong.
China kills people who speak out against the government killing people. Reddit is literally still broadcasting everything /r/the_donald wants, they just aren't linking to it as much. I don't think that's the same as murdering individuals for political speech.
The same reason if I go to a stranger's house and start debating with them about my own political opinions they are free to kick me out.
Free enterprise and private property are generally considered fundaments of modern civil society.
Im all ears if you have an argument to the contrary.
I'm talking about private property and the right to do with it as one pleases so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others.
When a group of people create a business this doesn't magically go away.
> In the context of business, California has already made that argument for me, making it illegal to discriminate based on political views.
Certain protected classes are legally protected from discrimination, yes.
To my knowledge "advocating violence" is not a political view; this is what the r/The_Donald is being quarantined for.
Okay, you've signalled that they do do it, but now there are not enough points of data. How many points of data is your burden of proof, before you agree?
That isn't a burden of proof though, which is what the question asked for.
You're basically saying that Reddit should never ban subreddits, which means that you don't even have a burden of proof for banning a subreddit. This means no matter what you're always against banning a subreddit on a privately owned website, yet you fawn at other reasons to justify it (fringe users, not enough data points, etc.)
Your proposed solution instead is that admins should police every user, when mods fail to, which just isn't scalable. Especially when the barrier to just creating a new account to bypass the ban is so low.
That's not entirely correct. California makes it illegal for an _employer_ to discriminate against an _employee_ based on their political views. It does not make it illegal for businesses to discriminate against _customers_ based on their political views.
Companies are not free to choose with whom they do business. There are many constraints, not the least of which is it being illegal to refuse to do business with someone because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, and, in California, political opinions. Free enterprise and private property might have been fundamentals of civil society in the past, but that ship has long sailed since then.
> Companies are not free to choose with whom they do business.
For the most part, yes they are.
For instance, every online business has a Terms of Service detailing many situations in which they will or will not do business with you.
Race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, etc. are specific situations in which governments/society have decided that its worth restricting this freedom for the greater good.
The existence of these relatively few exceptions does not negate their overall freedom to do business with whomever they please.
I don't think anyone has a scientific answer on what is "representative" of the sub besides it's clear support for the president, but honestly it doesn't seem out of line with my experiences of the_donald.
That's not entirely correct. California makes it illegal for an _employer_ to discriminate against an _employee_ based on their political views. It does not make it illegal for businesses to discriminate against _customers_ based on their political views.
Wouldn’t it be invasive to demand that anyone handle anyone else’s business? There’s two freedoms being negotiated there, and the law origins basically boil down to — by emphasizing the business owners freedom the market should be able to support a solution for the other (or you go build that business, if it is needed). Total freedom in that system is higher than in the one that demands anyone do business with anyone.
R_TheDonald is a forum on someone’s product, there’s a low barrier erected here, they could go buy a url and some servers and continue their speech.
It's a step in the direction to fascism, that doesn't mean it is fascist. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The downvote button is part of a ranking algorithm from the userbase, deboosting is part of the ranking algorithm from the host. Would you like it if a "platform" tied an anchor on your success/views because they didn't agree with your opinions? Since you believe in the paradox of tolerance do you agree that the US shouldn't let Islamic migrants come due to their belief in vile things such as throwing gays off roofs?
The USSR heavily censored content, were they stepping closer to fascism? I don't think you're using facism in the right context here, maybe you meant something else?
As someone else pointed out, Reddit's not a democracy so they're not starting as one either. Unless you count their private corporation as a democracy of sorts, but then they're most likely acting in their shareholders' interests. Maybe you meant the word authoritarian instead of fascist?
The US is a democratic republic and they are a US based company, so they should lean towards the laws under which they exist. I'm not playing this semantics game with you.
> It's a step in the direction to fascism, that doesn't mean it is fascist.
Insisting a private business promote any and all content from anyone whatsoever, no matter how abhorrent or anti-social, in a specific way, seems like a bigger step in the wrong direction.
Content is removed from Reddit every day for violating various subreddit policies; the only thing changing here is the way /r/The_Donald is presented with the rest of the site.
> Since you believe in the paradox of tolerance do you agree that the US shouldn't let Islamic migrants come due to their belief in vile things such as throwing gays off roofs?
You are correct that fascists aren't the only ones who censor. But that doesn't make it something that should be a normal part of a free, democratic society. (Your Soviet and CCP examples highlight that, which may have been your point.)
That's a good parallel actually. There are immune system diseases where the system kills the good cells too because it can't discriminate correctly. You're right!
I disagree completely. This is the same thing as the paradox of tolerance. If you want a tolerant society, you have to be intolerant against intolerance. If you want a non-fascist society you need to be fascist against fascism. Otherwise the intolerant/fascist side gains a platform and turns the community intolerant or fascist overall.
"If you want a non-fascist society you need to be fascist against fascism." This statement says it all, the ends justify the means. Sounds like every terrible dictator or authoritarian society that has existed on the Earth so far.
Read about "the paradox of tolerance" and maybe you will understand what im talking about a bit better.
What parts of fascism are acceptable to society? The intolerance of other groups? The claimed superiority over others? The militarization of civilians and their forced involvement into the military and war? The forced labor of captured civilians to feed the war machine? They literally believe democracy is obsolete and that the government should be run under a single party via totalitarian rule. That is there literal stated goal. They cheer on political violence and imperialism as a goal to 'rejuvenating' their state.
They literally want to dismantle democracy and put us under dictatorial rule.
You could also say that “not listening to speech you despise is a step in the direction of fascism,” and it’s an equally empty statement. I mean, I guess it’s technically true. But it also means that literally everybody is a virulent and unrepentant fascist in their social lives.
Remaining unbiased in the secular/science domain is critical to the future of humanity. If you are going to be biased, please at least do your research. Don't just browse twitter and think you are informed.
These kinds of comments make me so disappointed. You are out of touch. Labeling people that you don’t understand as “fascist” is going to lead you to a shithole.
Get out of your bubble, arm yourself with some compassion, and go try and understand what motivates people to disrupt the status quo. Most trump supporters hate fascism. You are deluding yourself by tossing a mr. yuck sticker on people you don’t understand.
I'm not an American and not in America but I find it hard to mentally integrate comments like this when it is quite clear the Trump government is appealing to fascist ideals.
Perhaps I'm wrong and we should all be putting children in cages.
So the guy tried to swim across Rio Grande, killed himself and his child in the process of doing so, and this somehow means that Trump government is fascist? Well, I guess that would make sense if he tried to swim to escape from the US, but seems like he actually was trying to get inside the "fascist" state. The kids in cages are also there because the parents tried very hard to get them inside the "fascist" state. Seems pretty irresponsible on their side, to put their children in the "fascists" hands, doesn't it?
No, the authoritarian (anti-media, judge filling, etc) and nationalistic (trade wars, rejecting international treaties, etc) policies do. The human stories are just the result of those policies.
Can you explain how the authoritarian and nationalistic policies make humans so eager to get here that try to swim across Rio Grande with their child tucked under the shirt?
It's not the policies, it's the long period of the USA being a high income and (relatively) low crime country in comparison to neighboring countries. Which I don't attribute to any individual president.
Trump supporters are fascists though and Trump is a fascist. Read any European account of the rise of fascism and the parallels are obvious. Eco's is preference, but there are tens of well written analyses.
> Most trump supporters hate fascism.
Most trump supporters have no idea what it is.
> go try and understand what motivates people to disrupt the status quo.
I have. It's a lack of improvement to their material reality from either party. That's understandable and fine. Deciding that you should support fascism because of it is not fine.
I'm not GP, but your straw man is just as disappointing.
- Nobody here is saying trump supporters are fascists.
- Nobody here is even saying that the_donald subreddit represents all of Trump supporters.
So why are you playing that card?
GP is talking about the effectiveness of the deplatforming of hate speech in context to a subreddit that has been reported as inciting violence. The same subreddit that supported the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally that resulted in a Neo-Nazi murdering Heather Heyer.
Whether or not you think that extends to all Trump supporters, and are disappointed by that, is your own inference. Don't attack GP because of it though.
Literally the next comment (at the time I read this, by asdfgasd) literally begins with "Trump supporters are fascists". It's flagged and dead, but it's there (if you have showdead turned on).
asdfgasd is not the GP, who the commenter before me is propping up a straw man against and attacking. They commenter before me is the one talking about all of trump supporters being facist before asdfgasd even commented, so how is what you are saying relevant?
>>Nobody here is even saying that the_donald subreddit represents all of Trump supporters.
So why are you playing that card?
Because of the following comments:
>>“On the contrary. Deplatforming fascism works[1]. This removes a small number of tools that they use to recruit. It is step in the right direction.”
I regret engaging in this discussion. I guess it’s time to give up on trying to understand each other’s point of view, because disagreement is currently seen as a personal attack on HN.
If the Republican party is representative of most Trump supporters, they are very obviously authoritarian, far-right nationalists. I don’t see how you could possibly think otherwise. Given how much graft, debauchery, hypocrisy, and cruelty has been shown by this administration, what sensible argument could still be made for supporting Trump—unless the answer is purely “power?”
I have also not seen a shred of evidence that Trump supporters “hate fascism,” unless you count the various boogeymen that they have labeled fascist (antifa, socialism, feminism).
I thought that would have happened too when other subreddits were quarantined or banned (and it briefly did when fatpeoplehate was banned) but honestly the banned discourse does not show up on the front page or /r/all, as they intended.
However, because of this, Reddit is becoming increasingly sterile, single-minded, and most importantly ad-friendly to the point where its fairly difficult to have an honest discussion about anything remotely controversial.
Unfortunately their selective banning of communities that I would associate with the "far-right" has seriously hurt any attempt to migrate away from Reddit (specifically Voat.co is unbearable for me trying to participate).
I don't know if there will ever be a straw to break the camels back, but I have been actively searching for reddit alternatives for years and have not found a truly viable replacement.
The FPH folks seem to have moved to /r/fatpeoplestories. A similar subreddit all things considered, just a lot less hateful (and not focused on the sort of doxxing that was ubiquitous on FPH), which is pretty much what we'd want I guess. Is a similar dynamic plausible for T_D? Not very clear.
> its fairly difficult to have an honest discussion about anything remotely controversial.
Like most media companies, reddit wants to promote its political agenda. It's natural and common (and expected of the traditional media), but since reddit doesn't pay for their own content, can only be done with censorship.
So they're making it difficult to have an honest discussion about anything they have an opinion about.
That's particularly concerning because reddit seems to be a natural monopoly, having operated for years with no successful competition. Perhaps this censorship will be the impetus that finally allows some competition to break through.
Voat had so much potential... shame how it is today. I still post almost everyday like I did so many years ago to provide actual content rather than vitriol but it's like shouting into a storm.
Still some possibility there, the leadership is open to fairness and free speech. It's the user base that has rotted.
Great point. We'll have to see if it goes down over the next few weeks. My fear and prediction is this will cause it to go up by dramatically enhancing the censorship lore that r/the_donald has been increasingly invoking for a while now.
A lot of those subscribers are sock puppet accounts though, and the quarantine function on reddit prevents accounts without email verification from posting or voting, so there's going to be a hit in activity. There are no quarantined subreddits that have come back from being quarantined, regardless of size, so I think that it's safe to lean towards this subreddit slowly withering away.
So we can push those users out of thier censorship-laden safe space, and into the rest of the 'public' so to speak, thus they can be engaged and in cases of rule-breaking, reported.
Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population.
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
> by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population.
I don't think reddit is the measure of acceptable discourse. If the_donald was banned it would just mean that its users would have to find another subreddit or site to use, it says nothing about what type of discourse is generally acceptable. Further, I think it's pretty obvious by now that reddit's problem with the_donald is not related to their political ideas since there other subreddits supportive of the president that have had no conflicts with the site admins (e.g. /r/conservative, /r/republican).
> Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair?
That's the problem though. The mods were repeatedly hostile to any attempts by the admins to handle the more egregious rule violations. The admins have treated them with kid gloves for years now. They were historically one of the worst sources of brigading of other (much smaller) subs. For instance, /r/legaladvice had huge problems with them in the past.
Even the chapo mods complied with the admins when they were asked to crack down on calls for violence... Even though those calls for violence were about _dead_ slave owners... Hard to kill someone already dead.
1. Openly leftist media outlet [1] sensationalizes posts by a few users, and proclaims a non-sequitur - that the problem lies with the entire sub-reddit, instead of with a few users
2. SV tech company feigns umbrage, cowering behind the sensationalism of said media outlet, legitimizes their false claims and BANS the entire sub-reddit. Instead of banning the offending users.
3. Ecosystem of left leaning outlets (techcrunch et. al.) publish opinions in agreement with the actions, though similar actions from their preferred political faction (say for a few illegal posts by far-left activists on AOC subreddit) goes ignored and free of media amplification.
The frequency of the above steps happening has skyrocketed as the democratic presidential campaign gains steam. If you trained an AI on the above phenomenon, the internet would be rid of any speech not condoned by the left faction of the democratic party.
417 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadhttps://old.reddit.com/r/politics/
One could perhaps attribute to the difference to a supposedly neutral framing vs. an explicitly partisan one; but much of the opposition to Trump (including from conservatives) has to do with flaunting democratic norms and other such "meta-politics", rather than policy positions, which I think is certainly fair game for the /r/politics hivemind to have an explicit opinion on.
The problem is /r/politics pretends to be a general politics subreddit, while /r/the_donald is explicitly just for Trump supporters.
Edit: the Chapo one is out of quarantine. Apparently there were a bunch of posts soliciting violence towards slaveholders and once the mods removed them they lifted the quarantine.
Slaveholders? What kind of violence?
On the contrary, at least one study found that what you describe does not happen. Rather, a quantitative reduction in hate speech was observed when Reddit banned a number of toxic subreddits in 2015.
Inhabitants either moved off the platform entirely (accounts that frequented those subs ceased to be active) or those that stayed appeared to modulate their behaviour to conform to the norms of less-toxic subs.
http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
They may be, they may not be. So far we have evidence that, in general, banning a sub doesn't result in it simply diasporaing into other subs. "Something different will happen this time because I feel like it will" isn't a terribly compelling counter-argument in and of itself. Absent new evidence, and given the evidence already in hand, this seems like a reasonable move to me.
> Political-related speech won't disappear from Reddit, especially with an election year coming up.
I don't think Reddit is attempting to "eliminate political-related speech" in general so much as the "I'm ready and willing to put a bullet in an Oregon cop's skull" speech that was being given free-reign in this subreddit?
But again, that's probably not what they're trying to do so much as get people to give up on talking about organizing ad-hoc assassination squads of law enforcement officers
Among social sciences a single study has very little weight. Given how often it is quoted despite this signals a flaw in popular cultures relationship with the field.
Sure. "I feel like ..." has absolutely no evidentiary weight, though, so in this case, a little weight is strictly preferable to nothing.
> Given how often it is quoted despite this signals a flaw in popular cultures relationship with the field.
I'd say rather it signals a blind spot in the social sciences, where researchers are failing to investigate emerging online phenomenon wrt communities and moderation in significant numbers.
More studies confirming or disproving the results of this one would, of course, be preferable. But we should hardly apologize for turning to what little study and evidence there is rather than pulling "this will cause X to happen" assertions directly from our asses.
Apologies, it appears I wasn't clear. I meant the extent that psychology and sociology studies in any part of their fields are quoted when there is only a single study, not just in relationship to internet/social media.
>But we should hardly apologize for turning to what little study and evidence there is rather than pulling "this will cause X to happen" assertions directly from our asses.
The difference is in the latter case we are well aware of the origin, while in the former case many can mistaken think there is the full weight of science behind the findings comparable to the theory of gravity or evolution. They shouldn't make the mistake, but I've seen it made enough times.
For reddit, that's their specialty. That's a solved problem. In their specific case their subreddit user groups don't act as filter bubbles. By some miracle they largely act as intended... As communities for like minded individuals to share their interests and largely in a positive context.
The money and advertising and focus is always on the "front page" and the jockeying for position to make headlines and drive traffic to affiliates but this is a huge distraction.
Reddit should focus on investing in the positive and great communities that are built on the site. Build tools to help these communities do what they do even better and use more front page real estate to drive people to these positive experiences since they already exist today. That's the real value of reddit.
Some censorship is inevitable, some bad actors need to be expelled from the site, but ultimately you need to lift up the good examples, not just play "bop a troll"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
This article is probably what triggered it.
What if those two posts referenced in the article were written by the same person, and generally downvoted?
'A worldwide community supporting the violent threats of local militia backing their civilly disobedient politicians efforts to evade the government use of police force to mandate participation and speech' is a super interesting power dynamics story. Whos the oppressor in this story, government use of police force, militia chaos, insubordinate politicians holding process hostage? Is the use of police FORCE to strong arm their votes itself violence? Shouldnt people be banned for supporting police force?
To Godwin's law this topic, would reddit choose to ban advocating prisoner violence towards auschwitz guards, in their efforts to escape? Would the rebels be banned for advocating destruction of the empire and violence towards storm troopers? It doesnt seem like there is a line drawn anywhere, it does appear arbitrary, or biased against violence they disagree with. The actual policy seems more like "ban what gets us bad press." If the rules were enforced consistently, rap music would be banned. I'm not pretending there are easy answers, even the supreme court has been looking at whether rap music is artistic or a credible threat, maybe they arent mutually exclusive. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/politics/supreme-court...
You are complaining about phrases that are purposely under contextualizing what's going on, but then go on to commit the same thing in your third paragraph by contextualizing it to the holocaust.
I brought up two similar but different types of speech, observers advocating violence towards oppressive authority. If this were an elementary school analogy, prisoners would be the militia not the reddit commentators. The guards and police are both blindly following government orders, whether those orders are right or wrong. Is advocating violence wrong regardless of if the target of said violence is behaving morally or immorally? The topic at hand is where reddit does (or doesnt) draw the line of acceptable speech regarding advocating violence.
Can't people that don't like the content just not read it?
It’s not about people who want to go to fan sites (or don’t want to go) - it’s about misinformation / inappropriate content leaking out to folks who might inadvertently view it and not understand the rat hole they’re about to go down.
Putting the subreddit into the quarantine just means that there’s an extra disclosure and opt-in before viewing content from that subreddit (and content won’t be shown in popular, /r/all, etc.)
The following is an excerpt of the message the Reddit admins sent the moderators of /r/The_Donald:
(Edit: I originally posted an excerpt of the message from the OP in the SRD post. I've since found the full message in a comment [1], so I'll be replacing it here with that version. Of note is that the admins have disabled /r/The_Donald's ability to use custom styling, as they abused CSS to hide the report button in order to prevent people from reporting violent content to them. The comment also mentions that one of the moderators of /r/The_Donald was stripped of most of his permissions as well.)
> Dear Mods,
> We want to let you know that your community has been quarantined, as outlined in Reddit’s Content Policy.
> The reason for the quarantine is that over the last few months we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community and an over-reliance on Reddit admins to manage users and remove posts that violate our content policy, including content that encourages or incites violence. Most recently, we have observed this behavior in the form of encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon. This is not only in violation of our site-wide policies, but also your own community rules (rule #9). You can find violating content that we removed in your mod logs.
> As we have discussed in the past, and as detailed in our content policy and moderator guidelines, we expect you to enforce against rule-breaking content. You’ve made progress over the last year, but we continue to observe and take action on a disproportionate amount of rule-breaking behavior in this community. We recognize that you do remove posts that are reported, but we are troubled that violent content more often goes unreported, and worse, is upvoted.
> User reports and downvotes are an essential way that Reddit functions to moderate content. Limiting or prohibiting them prevents you from moderating your community effectively. Because of this, we are disabling your custom styling in order to restore these essential functions.
> As stated in our Moderator Guidelines, our goal is to keep the platform alive and vibrant, as well as to ensure your community can reach people interested in it. Accordingly, here are the specific terms of the quarantine and the next steps we are asking from you as a mod team to resolve this situation.
> Quarantine terms:
> Visitors to this community will see a warning that requires users to explicitly opt-in to viewing it. This messaging reminds users of the importance of reporting rule-breaking content.
> Custom styling has been disabled to restore the report and downvote buttons.
> We hope both these changes will help improve the signal around rule-breaking content and improve your ability to effectively address it.
> Next steps:
> You unambiguously communicate to your subscribers that violent content is unacceptable.
> You communicate to your users that reporting is a core function of Reddit and is essential to maintaining the health and viability of the community.
> Following that, we will continue to monitor your community, specifically looking at report rate and for patterns of rule-violating content.
> Undertake any other actions you determine to reduce the amount of rule-violating content.
> Following these changes, we will consider an appeal to lift the quarantine, in line with the process outlined here.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe...
[1] drak0n1c ↗ For context, the admin logs show that the Reddit Corporate Admins only bothered to remove on average one comment per few days. It wasn't a deluge. The Oregon post is an anomalous casus belli. wyldfire ↗ > only bothered to remove on average one comment per few days EpicEng ↗ Likely not given that the sub's custom CSS had all but removed the report and downvote links. goatsi ↗ A regular subreddit would see almost no admin interaction, so if the admins are needing to correct failing moderation every couple of days that's a very bad sign.
I helped moderate a large subreddit teaching people how to buy drugs on the darknet and we had zero admin interactions despite being very close to the line of what was allowed because we were aggressive with our moderation. The subreddit only ended up being banned after SESTA/FOSTA passed. Solvitieg ↗ It's understandable that an engaged, political subreddit revolving around a controversial figure requires more admin oversight. bduerst ↗ Isn't that the job of the mods though? Admins are not moderators. drak0n1c ↗ Over the same period the mods handled 83,000 cases. zo1 ↗ You mean the_donald mods handled 83k cases? drak0n1c ↗ Yes goatsi ↗ It should require zero admin oversight. The moderators should ensure that it follows the reddit rules and there will be nothing for the admins to intervene about. In this case the moderators weren't even following the subreddit rules that they had created which say "No Threats towards Government Officials".
https://twitter.com/thedonaldreddit/status/11439265704086446...
Does this effectively measure the incoming complaints/requests to reddit admins? If those went up, but their admins' capability to moderate was already saturated maybe the rate of comments removed would stay the same.
Edit: It's important to note that there isn't a report function that bypasses subreddit moderators, unless you directly message the admins. So if the reddit admins are having to step in on reports it means that the moderators are ignoring them, either deliberately or due to a poorly managed moderation team (not enough members or time zone coverage).
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c4miq0/insider_...
What seems like a desire for fair and equal treatment is still applied under a double standard.
It's a petty and immature way to see the world, and maybe non-progressives should look at getting their own house in order.
So for the things that are non-physically violent: the right certainly has it's problems but to suggest that the left, and especially the most extreme versions of it, isn't doing underhanded or otherwise despicable things (like when YouTube demonetizes channels or Twitter shadow bans accounts) is willingly turning a blind eye. At least with the NRA someone on the left knows where they stand. Google/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter and now maybe Reddit seem to be taking a much more selective approach to how they apply their rules. And even those rules are hazy at best.
I would politely suggest that you should reassess your priorities.
Yet curiously, we've seen the rise of mass murders and hate come from the far right. How does that work with the idea that the left is somehow more violent than the right? Why is it okay for the right to normalize violence?
It's irresponsible and wrong to claim that people you disagree with are responsible for the actions of violent killers. The responsibility for killings lies with the killers themselves, and the failures of law enforcement.
The Colorado STEM shooters never had a motive released. Not sure where you got that from. One of the shooters was literally registered Democrat for less than a year. The other wasn't even old enough to vote. There's some suspected bullying that went on but that's about all anyone knows so again not a "left wing" shooting.
The only one on your list that's actually verifiably a left wing violent act is the guy who shot at Republicans. That's absolutely verified.
Contrast that with the church and synagogue shootings where people literally admitted that they were on the right. Contrast that with the pizza shop incident where Hillary and left wing people were supposed to be hiding slaves in the basement of a building with no basement, which was circulated by the right. Literally bombs sent to Democrats by people on the right. Finally the President himself calling for his supporters to beat people up at rallies.
The only way one denies the violence is more common on the right is if one is predisposed to believe it. Are there some cases where it's unclear why violence happened that have been misattributed to the right? Sure how could there not be, but there's also overwhelming evidence of violence on the right.
No, there's not. Moreover there is, as has been true for many decades, far more violent political action in the US by the right (even excluding state action, though some of the longtime violent rhetoric of the right from outside of government, particularly against actual and suspect unauthorized migrants, is now manifesting as state action.)
I just don't fear violent rhetoric. It's not something that merits a reaction, in my view.
Basically, if an author can say it in a book, then random citizens ought to be able to say it on the internet.
So you're not concerned about it if it doesn't target you personally. Fair enough, not everyone has empathy for their fellow human beings.
>Basically, if an author can say it in a book, then random citizens ought to be able to say it on the internet.
As far as I know, authors can't attempt to incite real violence in books, either. But imminence is a relevant factor you're ignoring. A book may take weeks, months or years to publish, whereas a death threat on the internet can be acted upon almost immediately.
r/technology did a few things to correct for it by posting that sticky, banning users, removing comments, not hiding the downvote and the report buttons so that the community can self police a bit. all of those were not done by /r/t_d. on t_d they had people actually agreeing with those posts/comments and upvoting them.
Meanwhile, as rhegart commented below, far worse is permitted in other subreddits. The bias is clear as could be.
It's not crazy to think this has something to do with Google. Immense pressure is being applied by Google. Nobody dares risk being blacklisted from Google search. We've partially lost our ability to have public debate that might negatively impact Google.
https://twitter.com/thedonaldreddit/status/11439265704086446...
On the contrary, I'm a former moderator of r/science which had an order of magnitude more traffic and am unaware of an admin ever having to step in during my many months tenure.
The justification also ran much deeper than the fact that they had to step in at all, and discussed the fact that the community moderators took actions which actively prevented the community from policing itself. Downvote buttons being hidden and renaming the report button increase the probability of these posts staying up and visible for longer periods of time.
I read T_D, and a lot of other sites on reddit. T_D is 99% of the time pro-police. You are much more likely to see anti-police sentiment and posts which encourage violence against police officers on other subs on reddit(usually, the more liberal ones like /r/politics).
This Media Matters article[0] contains screenshots showing more than one user supporting violence against the police.
Of course, any such comments have been deleted from Reddit proper, now, and you may well consider them faked, but given the number of outlets reporting on this, and the fact that no one here seems to be denying that these comments actually ever existed, I think it's safe to assume that more than one user and one post was involved.
[0]https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...
You're referring to this[0] incident I believe.
No, that doesn't make all subsequent claims of false flags more reasonable or likely.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
The Reddit account of Project Veritas appeared to have used self promotion per their own screenshot, which is banned on Reddit. Not sure if the ban was prior to the new release or not.
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion
This is of course the same company that fired an employee when other employees threatened him enough for him to stay home. Damore.
Maybe that's because said shooter was: female, minority, immigrant, and vegan. Definitely doesn't fit the stereotype of a threat, if you live/work in an SV echo chamber. https://www.celebgossiptoday.com/2018/04/04/watch-videos-fro...
The last time I checked, (about 12 hours ago), MSNBC/CNN/NYT/WashingtonPost/Vox/HuffPo....not a single one had an article about this latest Google situation. There are Federal Senators and Congressmen grilling Google about this and issuing statements and NOBODY thinks it should even be worthy of public attention or discourse, except for Tucker Carlson on FOX and YT journalists such as Tim Pool (a center-Left Bernie voter)?!?!
Some of the liberal values will remain mainstream. Some of them will be abandoned as passing fads.
I think people are not against, subconsciously, to the evolution of some of these values, but to the rate and way they're imposed onto society.
I'm not sure why you think this is better.
> the more people will rebel and fall into the arms of conservatives
So they're not actually "conservative", but they will be? Sure. Unless of course, that already happened, and they actually are.
This seems like it would be easy to replicate this on any subreddit, doesn't it?
Get a group of people and deliberately target subreddits in various hours of the day with calls for violence, and then report them to the admins of reddit.
Wouldn't this, in theory at least, quarantine any subreddit?
Something doesn't add up here.
During 2016 on Facebook, similar spamming tactics were used to shut down many pages promoting Bernie Sanders.
If it really were something orchestrated by users of T_D, then why would they report it to reddit? It's more likely that outside forces had a hand in this.
I was merely commenting how easy is to do this to other subreddits, so any subreddit can get banned etc.
So maybe Reddit should reconsider their position on banning solely because of this, if this is in fact the only reason they quarantined T_D.
[0]https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...
What part of my post do you find it to be 'conspiracy' ?
That's the reason they stated for the quarantine - that's official and confirmed. I quote: “encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon” [0]
Since they remove all such posts from there (also can be proved by searching through the subreddit), that must mean that the speed of removal was the ultimate reason, right?
The mods said something similar I believe: “It would seem they’ve set up an impossible standard as a reason to kill us before the 2020 election.” [0]
I think "impossible standard" means that nobody can delete the posts faster than that.
If you accept all of this on face value (guy posts on subreddit, mods don't react "quick enough", subreddit gets quarantined - end of story), then good for you!
I've got a bridge to sell you :)
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/26/reddit-the-d...
> Trump began his reelection campaign unusually early for an incumbent President. He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2020_presidential...
> He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration.
and
> On June 18, 2019, Trump held an official campaign launch event at the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida
TD has always been toxic, racist, and bigoted, it was just a matter of time before this happened. I think it happening near an election cycle is just coincidence, I think more the civil-war inciting of the current events in Oregon is at play here.
that is not true
links?
Edit: Found where I read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/gro...
Edit 2: my comment was moved from a different thread that was on a TechCrunch article on this. TechCrunch claimed that this quarantine would mean that ads would no longer run on T_D.
This source also shows T_D wasn't on the whitelist, since it was on of the subs being protested by /r/stopadvertising.
Interpreting these actions as site admins intentionally making it more difficult for moderators of that subreddit is cognitive dissonance.
The result was that after the banning of the just as toxic "fatpeoplehate", admins were loathe to interfere with t_d. Any administrative response was met with charges of politicization, "liberal bias", and more rule-breaking.
I'm surprised it's taken this long, but it appears that Reddit's staff waited until they had an obviously non-partisan reason for doing it. In this case, threatening police officers. I think they wanted to wait until they had a reason that would be difficult for people to turn into a partisan brawl that would give Reddit bad publicity.
Imagine if you will the difficulty conservative sites may have in threading the needle that t_d is simultaneously being persecuted here for their conservative, pro-Trump political views, and that the particular views they were banned for were making violent threats to law enforcement.
https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...
Scroll down and read the screenshots. It doesn't quite matter what the subreddit praised before when they still broke the rules.
A lot of those screenshots are "1 point, 11 minutes ago" or "2 points, 17 minutes ago". If that's being expanded to cover an entire subreddit, then no sub would be safe when applied consistently.
You're making a textbook No True Scotsman.
- 49 votes, 9 hours ago
- 27 votes, 7 hours ago
- 53 points, 1 day ago
- 66 points, 1 day ago
Go do a sockpuppet and do the same! That won't last long and you'll get down-voted heavily.
"None of this gets fixed without people picking up rifles." - 49 votes, 9 hours ago
"The only way to get it back is to burn Portland and Eugene to the ground." - 27 votes, 7 hours ago
"No problems shooting a cop trying to strip rights from Citizens." - 53 points, 1 day ago
"Where is the militia to help protect this man?" - 66 points, 1 day ago
They were quarantined, not banned. I honestly doubt they'll get banned at this rate, it was headlines like [0] that got it quarantined.
[0]: https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2019/06/25/you-cant-offer-to-...
I think if other subreddits behaved similarly to t_d, they would have been banned, and much more swiftly.
As evidence of that bias, consider their curation of r/popular, where they choose what to show.
They actively promote posts from the left and actively hide posts from the right. For example, this 18 hour old Democrat talking point [1] with 10k net upvotes is displayed before numerous posts that received 3x to 8x as many net upvotes in less time.
And extreme left wing subs continue to be featured on r/popular (many brigading and harassing right wing subs) while reddit restricts right wing subs.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/c5kuhx/ukrauthammer...
So first you claim that any other popular subreddit would have as much admin intervention, but then you say that we shouldn't actually investigate this claim because even if we found that you were wrong, you're still right?
Also the "net upvotes" that Reddit displays are not literal net upvotes. Those numbers are fudged in order to prevent conveying too much information. Reddit skews liberal, this is no surprise. The height of a post depends on what subs you are subscribed to, and on r/all it depends on the preference of everybody else. Which skews liberal.
It's clear that TD suffers much more scrutiny and restriction from the admins.
I was simply refuting your "tens of thousands of subreddits" comment.
> One of reddit's most active subs would naturally demand more than most of those ten thousand mostly niche subs.
This clearly implies that the amount of admin intervention in r/The_Donald is highly correlated with its popularity rather the relative toxicity of the subreddit, no?
Now you're changing the subject to "any other popular subreddit" which was not in the comment I replied to and thus was obviously not what I was talking about.
To make that clear, I'm saying there's a correlation between popularity and number of interventions, but that's not the only factor. Admin bias is another factor, and I'm sure there are others I can't think of at the moment.
As for "relative toxicity", TD isn't any more toxic than other political subs on reddit. The whole place is a cesspool. Unless you fit in perfectly with the group on any political sub you'll be treated badly. But right wing subs suffer additional toxicity from the admins.
This claim that "other subs are just as toxic" seems to be a common refrain among TD supporters (as well as white nationalist hate subs). Do you have any evidence to support this?
So I spent a few minutes yesterday reading part way down the comments on a single post in r/politics and found similar comments advocating violent resistance to the government.
> Just do a 180 turn on gun reforms. They’ll take an armed population more seriously.
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c5og99/there_are_...
> It's because protests don't achieve anything. ... Riots on the other hand...
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c5og99/there_are_...
If someone were as motivated as Media Matters I'm sure they could find much, much more. If you doubt that I encourage you to investigate a bit yourself.
He posted about it in advance on r/The_Donald. People cheered him on.
But here is the thing though. While reddit owners and hacker news represent one worldview which aligns left, the reality is that a large part of America, who stay quiet and are not active, tilts right. And by banning subreddits and downvoting anything which attacks left, we just create an environment where discourse is prevented - but the feeling is not.
The world extends beyond America where being on the "left" involves drone bombing.
It is a fascist strategy to pretend like every pushback is an existential threat.
That a position that is supported by nearly all peer-reviewed evidence is not considered centrist, is another sign we've shifted the window towards an ideological rather than rational/observational politics.
But of course, we should ban the right since they are racists and misogynists. And then we act surprised when Trump wins again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well no objectively it is not. that's why better keep politics away from it
e.g. i lean libertarian and i just deleted 2 of my comments which were beginning to get downvoted fast (no replies). The last thing i care to do is argue with a mob, and this is not the first time it happened. I 'm testing the waters repeatedly and it's not working. I would encourage you to do an experiment.
Show me something better. I'm not saying it's as balanced as you _could_ get.
Again, it's about how you post it. I've posted at least a handful of libertarian or conservative ideas that have gotten upvoted. You just have to make your case carefully. Snark gets downvoted, for instance. Rightwing or libertarian snark gets downvoted more, granted. They police tone here, not so much ideas. I think it's a fruitful policy.
> it's about how you post it
I dont use snark but my posts are blunt. If i have to preface all my comments with social engineering fluff , i already know it's not the place to post it.
Representative quote: A user wrote, “Rifles are the only way we're going to get any peace in our lives ever again,” adding, “It's either war and we get rid of these guys or a lifetime of listening to this shit over and over again start getting yourself ready.”
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
/r/politics is only left-leaning because of how heavily skewed right american politics is. Most of their opinions are centrist at best. Their obsession with trump is a bit annoying, but it's only annoying, not actively harmful.
That's a great and concise way to describe what those people have done, or are trying to do. I've seen it on several old forums or games, like the Something Awful Goons invading Eve Online with the stated aim of ruining the game for everyone else.
It's this weird immature streak of "everyone pay attention to me" that these hateful vandals thrive upon. They have to be the only ones making noise, and everyone must listen to that noise. If things don't happen exactly like they want, they throw fits, threaten, and whine as a group so much that people give in just to shut them up. And since it's just attention that is being sought, any actions are valid, good or bad. Appeals to admins/moderators, spamming, arguing in bad faith, harassing others, defacing the site or simply breaking as much as they can. How that attention seeking validates these people, I have no idea.
Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn't accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.
It’s not the only subreddit with large bot populations, I’m just saying it’s one of the more toxic influential ones.
Usually a pretty reliable sign of botism. You see it on corporate driven posts on movie promotions a decent amount too. (Along with some pretty lame top voted comments)
I'm not backtracking, you're the one who brought up that reflexively upvoting might be indistinguishable from botlike behavior. It's a feature (cultural value), not a bug.
It implies it's unusual traffic, but it does not imply it's inhuman traffic -- doubly so because the difference has already been explained in a way that doesn't require invoking bots.
Somewhat amusingly, after r/the_donald discovered it could push pro-Trump memes onto r/all by making every post on the subreddit about upvoting content, some other subreddits managed to pull off the same stunt in protest.
I guess an alternate explanation is a 10x inflation in the advertising interface, but that would be defrauding the advertisers.
1. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...
That's the first definition I found when I googled the word. Reddit, a private institution, considered the content harmful. Seems to fit the definition.
I would also point out that the_donald has a very aggressive moderation policy where most comments critical of the president are removed, so I don't think there is much room for them to complain about censorship.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Brand new accounts posting trollish or flamebaity stuff get treated differently. Software filters some of those, and we shadowban some of them, especially if there's evidence that this is someone we've banned many times before. The converse is also true: if software has filtered out a new account that's not posting trollishly or flamebaitily, we restore their posts and mark the account legit so it won't happen again.
I think this is a reasonable balance between transparency and defending the site against abuse. If we tried to give every banned account the same high-effort attention that we give established users, we'd do nothing else all day and still not get through them all. That would just be a new vector for people to DoS the moderators. A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions. Shadowbanning is an appropriate tool for those cases.
Edit: there is also a significant amount of spam, and if we told spammers we were banning them, they would spam us with emails demanding attention, asking why, and telling us how high-quality their articles really are. Actually they do this a lot already, and it's a pain.
Yes, just like a small number of censors can cut off a suicidal Ian Murdock's last communication channels so he runs out of excuses for postponing his suicide, only to assure themselves the next day that they did nothing wrong.
In the context of business, California has already made that argument for me, making it illegal to discriminate based on political views.
I'm talking about private property and the right to do with it as one pleases so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. When a group of people create a business this doesn't magically go away.
> In the context of business, California has already made that argument for me, making it illegal to discriminate based on political views.
Certain protected classes are legally protected from discrimination, yes. To my knowledge "advocating violence" is not a political view; this is what the r/The_Donald is being quarantined for.
https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...
Featuring comments with as few as 1 point.
Those are just an excuse to further restrict a community they've restricted several times in the past, without admitting it's for political reasons.
Those are comments from a few fringe users, buried so deep that most people never saw them.
Is that a reason to punish a community of hundreds of thousands of people?
That's like quarantining an entire city because a few people there are violent. That's not a good solution in the real world or online.
What's your criteria for that? You're being pretty slippery right now by dodging questions.
Now will you answer a similar question? I spent a couple minutes looking through a single post on r/politics and found a couple of violent comments:
> Just do a 180 turn on gun reforms. They’ll take an armed population more seriously.
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c5og99/there_are_...
> It's because protests don't achieve anything. ... Riots on the other hand...
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c5og99/there_are_...
Do you think r/politics should be quarantined because of those two posts?
Unless that was an extremely unusual post, there are undoubtedly many more. How many more would make you want a quarantine?
You're basically saying that Reddit should never ban subreddits, which means that you don't even have a burden of proof for banning a subreddit. This means no matter what you're always against banning a subreddit on a privately owned website, yet you fawn at other reasons to justify it (fringe users, not enough data points, etc.)
Your proposed solution instead is that admins should police every user, when mods fail to, which just isn't scalable. Especially when the barrier to just creating a new account to bypass the ban is so low.
We've allowed privately owned companies to control the means of communication, without regulation.
It's time to bring back the laws that limited the phone companies and big three TV networks interference in politics, updated for the Internet.
For the most part, yes they are. For instance, every online business has a Terms of Service detailing many situations in which they will or will not do business with you. Race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, etc. are specific situations in which governments/society have decided that its worth restricting this freedom for the greater good. The existence of these relatively few exceptions does not negate their overall freedom to do business with whomever they please.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c5sbpm/reddit_q...
Those aren't representative of the sub. What's the real reason?
R_TheDonald is a forum on someone’s product, there’s a low barrier erected here, they could go buy a url and some servers and continue their speech.
Maybe, but it's a very common demand.
The government is not guaranteeing that they will rebroadcast whatever you want to say, they are just not giving you consequences for saying it.
Businesses aren't imposing consequences of violence on speech, they just are choosing not to be a part of it.
Someone not listening to you is not censorship.
Insisting a private business promote any and all content from anyone whatsoever, no matter how abhorrent or anti-social, in a specific way, seems like a bigger step in the wrong direction. Content is removed from Reddit every day for violating various subreddit policies; the only thing changing here is the way /r/The_Donald is presented with the rest of the site.
> Since you believe in the paradox of tolerance do you agree that the US shouldn't let Islamic migrants come due to their belief in vile things such as throwing gays off roofs?
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Fascism implies censorship, but censorship does not imply fascism.
What parts of fascism are acceptable to society? The intolerance of other groups? The claimed superiority over others? The militarization of civilians and their forced involvement into the military and war? The forced labor of captured civilians to feed the war machine? They literally believe democracy is obsolete and that the government should be run under a single party via totalitarian rule. That is there literal stated goal. They cheer on political violence and imperialism as a goal to 'rejuvenating' their state.
They literally want to dismantle democracy and put us under dictatorial rule.
Get out of your bubble, arm yourself with some compassion, and go try and understand what motivates people to disrupt the status quo. Most trump supporters hate fascism. You are deluding yourself by tossing a mr. yuck sticker on people you don’t understand.
Perhaps I'm wrong and we should all be putting children in cages.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/25/americas/mexico-photo-of-...
> Most trump supporters hate fascism.
Most trump supporters have no idea what it is.
> go try and understand what motivates people to disrupt the status quo.
I have. It's a lack of improvement to their material reality from either party. That's understandable and fine. Deciding that you should support fascism because of it is not fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Nobody here is saying trump supporters are fascists.
- Nobody here is even saying that the_donald subreddit represents all of Trump supporters.
So why are you playing that card?
GP is talking about the effectiveness of the deplatforming of hate speech in context to a subreddit that has been reported as inciting violence. The same subreddit that supported the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally that resulted in a Neo-Nazi murdering Heather Heyer.
Whether or not you think that extends to all Trump supporters, and are disappointed by that, is your own inference. Don't attack GP because of it though.
Because of the following comments: >>“On the contrary. Deplatforming fascism works[1]. This removes a small number of tools that they use to recruit. It is step in the right direction.”
I regret engaging in this discussion. I guess it’s time to give up on trying to understand each other’s point of view, because disagreement is currently seen as a personal attack on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I have also not seen a shred of evidence that Trump supporters “hate fascism,” unless you count the various boogeymen that they have labeled fascist (antifa, socialism, feminism).
However, because of this, Reddit is becoming increasingly sterile, single-minded, and most importantly ad-friendly to the point where its fairly difficult to have an honest discussion about anything remotely controversial.
Unfortunately their selective banning of communities that I would associate with the "far-right" has seriously hurt any attempt to migrate away from Reddit (specifically Voat.co is unbearable for me trying to participate).
I don't know if there will ever be a straw to break the camels back, but I have been actively searching for reddit alternatives for years and have not found a truly viable replacement.
Like most media companies, reddit wants to promote its political agenda. It's natural and common (and expected of the traditional media), but since reddit doesn't pay for their own content, can only be done with censorship.
So they're making it difficult to have an honest discussion about anything they have an opinion about.
That's particularly concerning because reddit seems to be a natural monopoly, having operated for years with no successful competition. Perhaps this censorship will be the impetus that finally allows some competition to break through.
Still some possibility there, the leadership is open to fairness and free speech. It's the user base that has rotted.
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
I don't think reddit is the measure of acceptable discourse. If the_donald was banned it would just mean that its users would have to find another subreddit or site to use, it says nothing about what type of discourse is generally acceptable. Further, I think it's pretty obvious by now that reddit's problem with the_donald is not related to their political ideas since there other subreddits supportive of the president that have had no conflicts with the site admins (e.g. /r/conservative, /r/republican).
That's the problem though. The mods were repeatedly hostile to any attempts by the admins to handle the more egregious rule violations. The admins have treated them with kid gloves for years now. They were historically one of the worst sources of brigading of other (much smaller) subs. For instance, /r/legaladvice had huge problems with them in the past.
Even the chapo mods complied with the admins when they were asked to crack down on calls for violence... Even though those calls for violence were about _dead_ slave owners... Hard to kill someone already dead.
1. Openly leftist media outlet [1] sensationalizes posts by a few users, and proclaims a non-sequitur - that the problem lies with the entire sub-reddit, instead of with a few users
2. SV tech company feigns umbrage, cowering behind the sensationalism of said media outlet, legitimizes their false claims and BANS the entire sub-reddit. Instead of banning the offending users.
3. Ecosystem of left leaning outlets (techcrunch et. al.) publish opinions in agreement with the actions, though similar actions from their preferred political faction (say for a few illegal posts by far-left activists on AOC subreddit) goes ignored and free of media amplification.
The frequency of the above steps happening has skyrocketed as the democratic presidential campaign gains steam. If you trained an AI on the above phenomenon, the internet would be rid of any speech not condoned by the left faction of the democratic party.
Techno-fascism is well and truly here.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759967/reddit-quarantin...
[Citation Needed]