Reddit bans Alt-Right Group
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
"There is a website I can't link that is taking money to crowdfund doxxing efforts. After the admins banned that domain, the mods on /r/altright continued to manually approve submissions to that site and added them as sticky/announcement posts. My guess is that is the reasoning behind the ban."
So they got banned for repeatedly and intentionally, with moderator support, circumventing Reddit's rules -- not for 'suppression of free speech' or anything like that. I'm sure the admins were glad to be rid of them, but, they really brought it on themselves.
Wesearchr was banned from twitter for looking for information about the guy who sucker-punched Richard Spencer live on video. Is this ban for the same incident?
This seems a little different from how I normally use the term "doxxing", which is posting real-life information about a person who would prefer to remain anonymous. I mean, I'm sure the guy who assaulted Spencer would prefer to remain anonymous, but others have good reason to oppose that.
Mods of such a controversial sub flagrantly participating in doxxing is basically forcing the admins to ban them.
Searching for someone who committed a crime vs senseless "doxxing" (someone who hasn't committed a crime) are two different things. However, when it suits the reddit admin's purposes they'll outright ignore it or use a heavy hand and ban people/communities.
They're heavy leftists, so you can guess where this tends to lead things on that site.
If someone has a tip, they should bring that information to the police, not their local internet conspiracy group.
They (and many others) were pointing people to police if they found anything out. The pictures were all over the internet and it's impossible to keep your ID hidden once your face is out there for the world to see.
After all, white supremacists have a long history of being fair and impartial fact finders, simply looking for the truth. /s
Can you back all of this up? Otherwise it's just more empty accusations on the Internet. Personally, I really don't like to see it on HN.
And it's not just reddit, but also sites like twitter don't mind anti-white/anti-police hate groups, terrorist organizations, but if there is some right winger doing even half of the same stuff what these previously mentioned people did, they'll get banned, censored etc.
Right, but legally the only people responsible for investigating this person are the police and other lawful authorities.
enabling a vigilante justice system is exactly why anti-doxxing rules exist in the first place. do you not remember reddit after the boston bombing?
You can always start one that isnt called "altright" but you're less likely to get eyes on it which may be the entire point.
They're well within their rights to ban whomever they want, but they should be upfront about deleting subreddits that dont align with them politically rather than this game they're playing finding some TOS reason to remove an entire topic from the site. It doesn't make sense otherwise to punish everyone for the actions of a few.
That site has turned into an utter hole in the last 10 months, regardless of the fact that it was on a steady decline already. I'm not sure if it can be brought back to center where it used to be or if it's better to "nuke it from orbit."
For example the famous Milo Twitter case where Milo himself got banned, but all the radical black hate groups and the actor herself who was posting tons of racist content didn't even get warning but instead tons on sympathy.
I'm not a fan of alt-right, but for news and social media websites, being so disgustingly biased and trying to help the radical leftist agenda is one of the major reasons why things like Trump and Brexit happen.
Their subreddit is purely just linking to comments they disagree with and find the most "disgusting". They can put as many disclaimers as they want but I just don't see how a subreddit that is purely there to link to comments they absolutely hate, can lead to anything but harassment.
The ban also seems slightly prejudicial, because on the other side there is /r/antifa where people are bragging[1] about the assault which /r/altright was trying to solve with this bounty. Granted, /r/antifa seems to be mostly dissent against this stuff, so it wouldn't be a subreddit shutdown.
I think that assaulting people you disagree with is a far more serious charge than posting a reward for information which leads to the arrest of a criminal. The latter is something befitting of a police agency.
I don't think you have to be a neo-nazi to appreciate how pathetic and sad antifa are. I do not think you have to be a neo-nazi to have a knowing laugh about the thumb-sucking intellectual fragility they represent.
>Vigilante justice often describes the actions of a single person or group of people who claim to enforce the law but lack the legal authority to do so.
Sure, reddit started as a sort of "libertarian dream" but it's pretty clear at this point that some groups choose to abuse that.
Edit: now i've read the comment by 'ajkjk and that makes more sense
Generally I strongly favor free speech and believe the answer to 'bad' speech is more speech. However, there always are limits such as slander, harmful deception (yelling 'fire' in a crowd), provocation to crime ('assault the man in the front row!'), and more. I think there may be a way to clearly and justly draw a line for white supremacist and other hate speech, if and when we want to do it.
Tolerate all but intolerance itself.
There is some theoretical support:
* Think of tolerance as a social contract: I tolerate you if you tolerate me; or, everyone tolerates you if you tolerate everyone. If you break that contract then you have no claim on everyone else's toleration.
* Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.[0]
On the other hand, the always incredible Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes some good arguments against it, especially that humanity will abuse this new authority.[1] Partly for that reason and partly to err on the side of individual liberty, I would apply this rule only when there is a practical necessity. One requirement would be that the intolerant group poses a threat. For example, a group of intolerant Jainists in Los Angeles isn't a threat - they are too few to threaten anyone in that environment. In a tiny town where they are the majority, or in a locked room with one Confucian about whom they are saying intolerant things, it would be a threat.
But this all is my personal analysis; I'd be interested in some established standards such as workplace law, neo-Nazi speech in Germany, etc.
----
[0] I can't find an authoritative source or discussion, but Wikipedia covers it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/ - Search the page for "paradox of drawing the limits"
now I find myself wondering whether my principles are being contaminated by the immense personal anger I feel, or whether perhaps my principles weren't as rationally derived as I had previously believed.
Then you probably have not read the article.
EDIT: inserted critical "not"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Living in an open society does not mean tolerating those who aim to end the open society. The altright, as a rewarming of white nationalism, which is a rewarming of Nazism, seems to not be such a huge fan of our open society.
Nigel Farage who convinced a majority of Brits to exit the EU is generally regarded as being altright. Do we therefore conclude that this British majority went along with someone who supports a 'rewarming of Nazism'. This is vile garbage.
Identifying targets precisely and offering arguments is preferable to sloppy innuendo.
"Nigel Farage is altright. Altright can't be white nationalism because then Farage would be white nationalist."
However the alt right is not defined by Nigel Farage, rather if Nigel Farage wraps himself in that term than he is defined by it rather than defining it, as it predates him.
Reading anything about the alt-right will show that my estimation of it as white nationalism is correct. Look at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the...
Which points to alternativeright.com
This idea that "this idea is bad, and my politician accepts this idea, therefore this idea can't be bad" is classic backwards thinking. Your insults may reveal that this has hit a sore spot for you. We need to be able to talk about these things rationally, and not emotionally.
I'd be concerned of the same thing happening with this.
Setup interest/location based groups and/or install the Chrome extension to comment on every site you visit. Post anonymously or use you Plum Name.
*To those who own the presses.
Reddit is privately owned and run, so they get to make whatever rules they want.
danjoc said that freedom of speech is only for those who own the press. zdw replied and said Reddit is privately owned and can do whatever they want. I presume that danjoc interpreted "privately owned" as an instance of "those who own the press", which does not seem to be a stretch at all.
Do you still not see it?
That said, Reddit didn't ban this subreddit for being alt-right, so the point is fairly moot.
Being able to defend yourself with your voice is a moot point because, in the age of the Internet, that is not where the discussions are taking place.
There's more to free speech than one country's constitution. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
If I was the owner of an ISP, and just for this exercise assume that I am providing my services in an area where there is at least one competitor (so I don't have a monopoly). And as a human being, I disliked certain topics; for this example, the topics are radical Islam websites, pornography sites and cat pictures.
Now the question; As I am the owner of a private company, am I entitled to block access to all the sites that show pictures of Bin Laden, boobs or kitties?
I might be sued by site owners and some of my clients... but isn't this situation similar to the way some cable network can choose to broadcast certain channels and not others?
I am all in favor for free access to information, and against censure, even when I might dislike certain topics. But I can only see a blurry line between people's right to access something and the owner of a network to block said access.
*Doesn't mean freedom from consequences
Also Freedom of Speech does not mean Freedom from Consequences.
It's not unreasonable to ban hate-speech.
In the US it is, in general, unconstitutional to ban hate speech (except when it also happens to be unprotected speech, such as a threat).
But that has absolutely no bearing on the subject at hand, of course, so I'm not sure why you bring it up.
Good riddance, I say. When productive people don't like their speech being suppressed they create lobste.rs. But these people aren't productive at all. They're useless wastrels, for whom the psychological kick of receiving an upvote from their feeble-minded brethren is sufficient to drag them through the day.
I will continue to use reddit for /r/rust and whatnot and it will be good.
Normally, I wouldn't even enter this conversation but there's this trend where people assume that these worthless fools are the majority simply because they spend every waking hour whining about some thing or the other. And then people act as if they must be placated. When really they should just go away.