HN Explorer

Reddit is cracking down on political talk tonight

21 points by erkt ↗ HN
Reddit is actively filtering political subs from users home pages and comments/posts are not displaying on politically oriented subs. Regardless of your opinion on the debate I feel like we should support the right to free and open discussion. This post feels rather immature for HN but I am curious how everyone feels about this form of tech censorship.

17 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 47.2 ms ] thread
orionblastar
There is no such thing as free speech on a private platform. Certain things are censored and banned. The Mods and Admins decide what is censored and prohibited and are usually left-wing.
[dead] vt85
[dead]
al_borland
Are they trying to hide that Biden didn’t do well? That seems problematic. People have a right to know. It’s all CNN has been talking about, and they would typically try to spin things in his favor.

I don’t think Reddit can be trusted as a news source if they suppress news, options, or ideas.

seydor
Reddit has done so many shenanigans over the years that there's a legitimate case for banning reddit in the US for election interference
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
proc0
Reddit has been super biased for at least 8 years, that is not a surprise.
swatcoder
Alternately: janky site that breaks all the time breaks, as it does, all the time.

Comments and searches stalled, as they've done before, all over the site and not just on political subs.

I guess it's possible that the large public company that trades most profitably on controversy, contention, and sensation decided to hide pointless censorship under the cover of the same kind of bugs they regularly encounter, but you'd kind of have to assume the admins of this janky site are secretly very technically adept and just keep the site fragile in case they need to make pointless and ineffectual exercises of covert censorship.

Is that really what you think?

pikseladam
reddit is slow for all subreddits. i sometimes think they only care ads.
skilled
Just had a look, it is worse than this post implies. Actually crazy that a platform the size of Reddit can essentially eliminate a narrative altogether for no reason other than to hide and quiver behind reality.
keernan
I didn't see the debate. Nor have I listened to the news. But I've been saying to my family for weeks that the best thing that could happen for Democrats right now is for Biden's incapacitation to be exposed to the world at the debate, forcing him to withdraw from the campaign, and for Dems to get behind a young candidate that energizes the country.

From what I understand, that's looking increasingly likely to be what occurs over the next 30-45 days. If I am correct, then that is going to dominate the news over the next 6 weeks and bring talk about exercising the 25th Amendment if Biden refuses to step aside.

The thing that worries me most is the risk China, Russia, Iran, or Israel try to take advantage and do something stupid during the next 6 weeks. For that reason, I believe it is critical to the country for the 'powers that be' step in and pretty much force Biden to step down as President within the next 48-72 hours. It is a very dangerous time.

dingosity
oh man. i came here to forget about politics tonight.

still... thanks for just commenting about reddit rather than making a political jeremiad.

Zren
https://www.redditstatus.com/

> Comment tree processing is delayed

* 19:17 PDT Investigating - We are aware that newly posted comments are not showing up immediately in comment trees. We are currently investigating this issue.

* 20:26 PDT Identified - We've identified the underlying problems and are working on addressing them.

* 21:08 PDT Update - We are continuing to work on addressing the issues causing comments to be delayed.

* 21:31 PDT Update - A large spike in traffic caused some scaling issues, which delayed new comment display across the site. All comments posted during this time will be displayed as the servers work through the backlog.

* 22:05 PDT Resolved - Comment processing has now fully caught up. Thank you for your patience!

This makes sense why https://old.reddit.com/r/all/comments/ worked but the nested comments in threads don't.

dappergravitons
Social media networks supposed to be the "voice of the people" but instead they became an extension of the White House narrative. I was banned on reddit for sharing a meme about Zlenski and the reason was "sharing content related to terrorist activities", and it said I could appeal the decision but the appeal option was disabled for me. You may not agree with what's going on in Ukraine but if Russia and China wanted to incorporate Mexico in their military alliance, started regular military drills on the border with the USA, started killing Americans in Mexico and started talking about giving Mexico nuclear weapons the USA would carpet bomb Mexico. You may not agree with my point of view but it is wrong to silence me.