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Warning: Reddit is being manipulated concerning the new NSA leak and Israel

22 points by antocv ↗ HN
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1m73n4/nsa_shares_raw_intelligence_including_americans/cc6mi1c and http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1m73n4/nsa_shares_raw_intelligence_including_americans/

The guardians article on NSA giving data to Israel had received more than thousands upvotes in r/worldnews subreddit, then as it approached frontpage it was removed, the second submit on the same article again received thousands of upvotes and mods are again trying to keep it off the frontpage. Now they have also activated the "US news belons in r/news not here" although the US sharing data with Israel is the subject at hand. r/worldnews mods are affiliated with r/israel

There are comments with links showing that any Israel in negative light is being manipulated off of r/worldnews

Keep in mind the IDF has a department/group/force for social media manipulation since a few years back.

13 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 45.7 ms ] thread
mschuster91
I bet my hairy behind on the fact that this is going to be "water on the mills" for Anti-zionist fools. Prime water, to be exact.
antocv
Ill jump over the anti-semitist/anti-zionists nonsense and move on,

Where can we find freedom to discuss on this large and free internet today, uncensored anything we like? Wikipedia?

This whole ordeal makes me feel like I am behind the China wall.

What else are we kept behind from, is there a Tianamen square that happened in France or US?

Why dont we have a public space for the masses that isnt censored, manipulated and controlled?

pathy
> This whole ordeal makes me feel like I am behind the China wall.

Have you tried surfing the web in China? The problems we face here are nothing like the great firewall. You just cannot compare the censorship in China and friends to anything we face.

In the future we may end up like China but for now it is not even close.

antocv
I believe its worse on our side, because we believed we werent manipulated and censored, so didnt make many measures to seek out more, believed the best and swallowed all and any content as this is what it is, but now you see entire discussions on society can and have been tampered with. People in China know they are behind a firewall, and those willing do take measures against it can do it, and they dont trust the internet for anything serious, as they shouldnt.
mcintyre1994
I don't understand why it would ever have been justified to assume /r/worldnews was a free and uncensored environment, knowing that it has moderators who are pseudo-anonymous and whose motives you don't know. Using your analogy, it's never been a secret that some subreddits are heavily moderated.

On another note though, the Reddit moderation system is interesting. I'm not sure exactly how moderation of huge default subreddits works, but I suspect moderator powers over certain subreddits are something some agencies (eg government/marketing) would seriously like to have. I doubt they're running anything major, but I bet they'd like to.

antocv
Do you know where there is a public space to talk with transparent moderation and up/down-vote algorithms?
anywherenotes
I thought reddit is all that. And since people know who got rid of the story from top page, it means moderation is transparent. Although it's fine if you don't agree with the moderation.

In prior messages you said "Where can we find freedom to discuss on this large and free internet today, uncensored anything we like? Wikipedia?" I think it's not a good idea to have no moderation - I have a blog where I post once in few months, and daily it gets few spam comments (no real comments). So my point is all websites require moderation - especially popular ones.

On a personal note, when I hear the phrase "special relationship", to me it implies that more data is shared. For example Russia shared with US that they thought Boston bomber could be a terrorist, yet there's no "special relationship" there - still the countries share data. It would make sense that countries with a "special relationship" share more.

I agree sharing political spy data is terrible, but it's likely that's just a legal clause.

mcintyre1994
Reddit's up/down votes aren't really transparent, they're obfuscated by (imo reasonable) anti-bot measures. It is open source so it's a transparent enough system, but between that obfuscation and pseudo-anonymous moderators I wouldn't say it really matches the request.

I completely agree by the way that moderation is essential on popular and large websites, and I think Reddit has a great balance.

mcintyre1994
Nope, sorry. Isn't up/down-voting moderation by the users though? I guess you could list all up/down-voters and that would be transparent. You'd then have no mods with more power, everyone would use the same transparent up/down-vote?

I'm not convinced that such a website would maintain quality for long, and I can't think of anyone currently trying it.

antocv
The problem I see with no mods and really good algorithms for up/down-voting (with some kind of bot/spam-prevention) is still going to get played by clever people, just like PageRank got played, a human touch is always necessary, just like with most ML algorithms.

As palantir says it, big data, the best results are a combination of good ML algorithms and human guidence. That means moderation. That basically means we have moved the ladder up a bit, a quite step up from irc.

What I think would do better than reddit has done in this situation is much more transparent moderation - no anonymous mods, and mods to be at the mercy of the mass of users. So we could basically ban or demote a mod just as we can upvote a story really high. That system would be more difficult to manipulate.

Do you think this is an interesting venue to try?

mcintyre1994
The issue I see with ban/demote mods is that, as you say, somebody will find a way to play anything without human input, presumably the admins can't be responsible for checking every ban/demote decision so it would become a really good algorithm which can get played. That means that unscrupulous people can wipe out the moderation, and then play the main algorithm which is now lacking mods?

Forcing them not to be anonymous seems like an interesting idea, but could well be dangerous. It's not necessarily a good idea to publish identifying information about people breaking criminal spam/bot rings for example.

lymey
If you're afraid of criminal retribution or bribing that's twice the reason to let in the sunshine.
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