Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers
wsj.com
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[1] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
Based on an (admittedly imperfectly) related paper with Stevie Chancellor & Munmun De Choudhury [1], I would expect that the spillover to other sites results in a 1) smaller, but 2) more committed group of users.
http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw16.thyghgapp.chance... (see Summary of Findings, page 10)
Which is good - concentrate the hate speech into a single place and then take it down.
And tbh, this does sound very aggressive and Nazi-like; round up the [group we don't like] and exterminate.
It's quite a hateful philosphy to have.
Never mind that the slippery slope argument is a known logical fallacy, never mind that these companies are private entities and can do what they like, never mind that if Nazis ever gain power they will literally, physically exterminate people they don't like, never mind that people are still free to express their own views on public platforms, never mind all of that. Ugh.
The only consolation is that these communities are being censored, taken offline, and driven onto platforms where they cannot reach nearly as many people as before, and that this will continue to happen, no matter what HN libertarians say. And that the tech community is not nearly a-ok with hosting racist speech as HN would make you believe. We are moving forward, and what you're seeing is a last-ditch reaction to pro-racism, neo-nazi communities being marginalized.
No, I think it's unhealthy and may lead to such a society, not that we live in such. Do not confuse a fear of a possible future with an irrational fear of a present that isn't.
>Never mind that the slippery slope argument is a known logical fallacy,
I hope you're aware of the fallacy fallacy, yes? I think that might clear things atleast partially up.
The problem I see here is that this is a slippery slope that my country has gone down in the past already and it pains me to see tendencies of this happening in the us.
>never mind that these companies are private entities and can do what they like
An argument can be made that sufficiently large social networks (2 million users or more, for example) should be held to the same standard as a government by the nature of exerting a real power over the people in the network.
>never mind that if Nazis ever gain power they will literally, physically exterminate people they don't like
I think you misinterprete the argument. My worry is not Nazis. Not that I would consider the US citizens who claim to be Nazis to be real Nazis (they're more like kids playing lets-pretend in comparison).
My actual worry is people who will be hurt by this that you don't see because you and people who want to silence Nazis are wearing blinders on each side of your head.
If you want to prevent Nazis from taking power, the easiest solution is to find out why these people are doing the things they are doing and going against the root cause. Nazi-ism is merely a symptom.
>never mind all of that
First they came... I think you know how the rest goes. I forgot.
>and that this will continue to happen, no matter what HN libertarians say
The daily stormer is on Tor now, no? Can you censor Tor?
All the pitchforks do is to drive these people into places where they are safe from them and where the most dedicated of their followers can fester and boil the ideology.
>We are moving forward, and what you're seeing is a last-ditch reaction to pro-racism, neo-nazi communities being marginalized.
Maybe. Maybe people are reacting to things you don't want to acknlowedge and not to actual neo-nazi communities being banned.
There are risks there and I do hope you recognize that people who say this is bad are not automatically defending Neo-Nazis. As that too would be a fallacy.
It also raises questions about whether modern societies should expand notions of private and public divisions over digital infrastructure, so that the tools for public assembly might be adapted for the norms of modern communication.
Your country has literally banned Nazis, mentions of Nazis, symbols of Nazis, etc. Hell, even Twitter blocks Nazis in Germany.
Has it descended down the slippery slope into authoritarian disaster?
You may hold any opinion which does not violate the dignity of humans, no matter right or left. And we do have a fairly active right and far right.
I appreciate that you're trying to trivialise this into some kind of "different sports team" difference of opinion to score a cheap point but you're wrong - these people want others dead, removed, or subjugated purely because they're different.
And that is something that in 2017, the human race should be saying a very strong "No, get to fuck, you scrotes" to.
And the other sports team just wants different things to be done. Admittedly not as drastic... yet.
>And that is something that in 2017, the human race should be saying a very strong "No, get to fuck, you scrotes" to.
In 2017, almost 2018, the human race should have learned how to control these kind of ideologies without using brutish tribe mentality.
It hasn't. Therefore we can either shrug our shoulders and let people get on with their subjugations and violations or we can accept that we're not an enlightened race of ubermensch ripped from a Star Trek episode and utilise our "brutish tribe mentality" to protect those who need it.
Not that you are wrong because of that but you are wrong for different reasons. Possibly because Star Trek has little to do with an Übermensch and considering the context you also used the word wrong.
Love this idea!
But I get to decide what's permitted and what's not.
We're going to start with art that I don't understand, then off to literature that I don't care for, when all of that filth is cleaned out, it's on to expressions of thought that everyone intuitively knows are wrong, then we progress to purge politics of incompatible policy and incorrect voting patterns.
Ok?
In compromise toward the middle-ground, I'll only eliminate art that I don't value.
With some simple common-sense, I think we can really fix the art world.
What are your credentials for this job?
See here for a deconstruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlRFoYr-XuY&t=306s
This kind of censorship is nice, until it turns into censorship of "things the company dislikes", versus "bad / illegal things."
See recent vidcon for an example. Despite rules against harassment, a panelist out-and-out harassed an attendee... and the organizers did nothing.
This shows that power and political agendas trump peopl's alleged morality.
You seem to have misplaced the context which I'm sure was unintentional - the panelist, having been harassed and dogpiled for many years by the racist misogynist attendee, who specifically sat on the front row with many of his fellow harassers to make a point, called him a shithead.
That, sir, is why the organisers did nothing - because he is a verifiable shithead and calling him such in front of an audience is not harassment in any sense of the word.
... which is, of course, not true.
> sat on the front row with many of his fellow harassers
Who also didn't harass her.
Honestly, this isn't rocket science.
If I make a video calling someone an idiot, asshole, etc. That in no way is harassment. They don't need to see it. It's not directed at then.
The same goes for other form of communication. Were these people sending harassing messages directly to her? The answer is "maybe once or twice, but there was absolutely no pattern of harassment".
I think you (and her supporters) are misconstruing criticism, and hostile criticism for outright harassment. It's not.
In contrast, there is no question that her behavior violated the rules of vidcon. There is no question that the behavior of the alleged harassers did not violate the rules of vidcon, while they were at vidcon.
> because he is a verifiable shithead
Uh.. is THAT against the rules of vidcon? No?
It is true. Stop lying about this.
All this stuff unfolds in public, the non-stop harassment of people like Anita Sarkeesian by people like that person she called out.
There is no mystery here, no ambiguity about the wretchedness of the behaviors of the guys dogpiling on people like her.
Seriously?
Since you have so much evidence, you can easily show it here.
I won't hold my breath.
The organizers have given an apology to Sarkeesian for allowing a group that has dedicated itself to harassing her over the years to come and monopolize the front seats of that panel.
You would think someone so concerned about the harassment of a key figure supporting the GamerGate movement would actually report the situation in its entirety. It's almost as all of this might not be about ethics in video game journalism after all.
I've looked... is there any proof of this?
- phone calls from those people to Anita
- emails...
- twitter messages
- facebook messages...
If there are, I'll be happy to label them harassers. But until then... I have this weird idea that
the rule of law is more important than feelings
The vidcon people (among others) have made it clear that they will violate their own rules in order to "get" the bad people. People who, according to their own rules, have done nothing wrong.
Witch-hunts end up in one place, and only one place. The people who previously were accusers, on trial, for the same offenses.
So again, is there any reason to believe these accusations? If not, why do you believe them?
Edit Apparently asking for evidence was the wrong thing to do.
I'm not familiar with the incident, but I don't think it proves this. If the harassment was real, the organizers could just be incompetent/afraid of interfering/incapable of reading the situation. In which case they're perhaps not suitable for organizing, but doesn't mean it's political.
The harassment was excused because the harasser was traditionally a victim, and the harassed person was a white male.
I could see someone being ignorant of the truth and believing the very surface-level description you give here, but your subsequent comments reveal a willful ignorance on your part.
Censorship of nasty harassers would have been welcome in that case, and describing that nasty harassers as she did was hardly harassment, no matter how it might give one the vapors.
I think this observation summarizes even this thread:
> do not violate harassment policies, but the result is often that the vitriol of their followers ends up focused not on ideas, but on people
I was looking for any attempt at a neutral-ish video of the incident but came up empty.
Were they forbidden from attending vidcon because of their alleged history of harassment of the panelists? No.
Do they get kicked out of vidcon for violating the rules? No.
Does the panelist violate the rules by calling them out and insulting them publicly? Yes.
So... let's say Sargon and his ilk are terrible people. Shall we destroy the rule of law to "get" him?
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Bolt
---
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
---
I am disturbed by the fascination with witch-hunts. My attempts here to ask people to explain themselves have resulted in no explanations (of course). Just accusations.
Well, if those people are so bad, then the rule of law should allow them to be banned and/or punished. If they're not that bad, then the rule of law should be followed. If we're not going to follow the rule of law, then why pretend to have rules?
Maybe I'm weird... but none of that makes any sense to me.
Our founder, Hank Green, talked with our panelist and said two things:
1. He told her that her comment had violated our policy, but that he understood that there was a broader context (which to be clear, we were blissfully ignorant of until this weekend, and remain inexpert in.)
2. He apologized to her for not having been more aware of and active in understanding the situation before the event, which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for.
> If we're not going to follow the rule of law, then why pretend to have rules?
Rules are an imperfect tool. People behaving badly while carefully staying within the limit of the rules often run afoul of the intentions of the rule makers; it boils down to trusting those responsible for rule interpretation and enforcement.
Ah... so the rules don't matter, because excuses.
Look, if Sargon and his ilk did something, fine, punish them. But so far, the only response to my request for evidence is insults.
And side-stepping the topic.
> a broader context (which to be clear, we were blissfully ignorant of until this weekend, and remain inexpert in.)
Which means that they didn't talk to the victim in this case (Sargon). Only the abuser (Anita). Sargon said as much on Joe Rogan's podcast.
i.e. accusation of guilt is assumption of guilt. Evidence be damned.
> which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for.
People who showed up and did nothing and said nothing to her. OMFG, crucify them.
Look this whole victim complex is appealing. But did any of it happen?
According to everyone in this thread? Nope.
> it boils down to trusting those responsible for rule interpretation and enforcement.
Nope. If they show they're biased, I don't trust them as far as a shit-flinging monkey can throw poo.
Anita Sarkeesian and Sargon of Akkad?
Or, Twitter banning people because they didn't do anything, but someone who claimed to like them did things?
And as always... the "good" people engage in harassment, and they don't do anything. The "bad" people don't harass, and get banned.
Only the subs with obsessively strict moderation like the science subs (or /r/Canada politics) seem to succeed in discussing issues without hatred.
Meanwhile, Twitter maintains mainstream acceptance despite being the online home of David Duke and various other infamous white supremacists.
Yet none of these subs are any worse than the New York Times comment section
There happens to be a middle ground on many issues. Debating immigration policy isn't racist. Hell, even Emmanuel Macron and Merkel have started to control migration. No country can accept all the world's poor. It's simply not feasible. And the truth is, that is the concern that most Canadians are having. The economy's not great, working class wages and jobs are disappearing, the few places with good jobs have unaffordable housing, and Trudeau's talking about increasing immigration.
You guys can talk about how everyone that wants to debate certain topics is racist, but that doesn't change the fact that politics all over the west are moving a certain direction. The only question is whether we'll simply adjust policy, or wait too long and elect someone extreme as a knee jerk reaction.
It can definitely get hairy, sadly.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
For me personally, the echo chamber on both sides is enough to keep me far away from both /r/politics and /r/The_Donald.
For example, you cannot say anything positive about Trump on /r/politics. Nothing. There was a screenshot showing that there were 231 negative articles posted and zero positive articles. It's literally propaganda, but from the other direction.
Now, you can argue that you should fight the good fight and that it's immoral to say anything positive about him. Sure, I sort of buy that: If Trump was equivalent to nazis, then we should resist that from becoming a reality.
And yet he's not. From what I've studied of history, the climate today is similar-ish to 1920's Germany. But if you examine the details of how the Nazi party seized power, you'll find they held guns up to people's heads in order to get various statesmen to vote a certain way. The German political institutions were captured by popular vote, then by force. And as long as we avoid the latter, the former isn't necessarily an indication that fascism is on the rise.
But it's hard to make that argument in this climate. If you try, you're shouted down or misinterpreted or outright framed. And that's the central issue here: When you become a zealot, you lose the ability to take advantage of the opposition's good ideas. Are you sure it's true that Trump's entire political franchise has had zero good ideas?
I'm worried that in the process of fighting Trump, we'll lose reason and rationality.
You're not wrong in that its important to hear both sides, but its also important to hear an appropriate amount from each side corresponding to the acceptableness of the ideas. Minority voices are important. When we find ourselves in the majority, we should be responsible for ensuring that those minority voices have a way to be heard. But not that they should automatically be heard equally to majority voices in all spaces.
Trump is a minority voice. The election results and polling are clear on that. So the question becomes more about how much weight we, as the majority, should give to those ideas. And like, I hate to be that guy, but... not much. He doesn't actually seem to have any substantive policies to debate, its just slogans and ideas. The substantive stuff either gets mentioned and then forgotten by the next news cycle (what happened to the national emergency on opioids?), changes on a whim, or is just him talking and other people in his administration (or party) ignoring him and doing whatever they wanted.
I just don't see the value in spending a lot of time/cognitive load considering that perspective on a regular basis, though I do venture into T_D sometimes to see what they are thinking. The current dichotomy of /r/politics vs /r/the_donald seems to have balanced itself out pretty well, I think.
I think this is actually irrelevant; it doesn't matter whether someone's ideas are in a minority, only whether they are good ideas, bad ideas, and the proponent is interested in constructive engagement.
I always try to make sure I give a politician as much credit for their intent as possible not just those I agree with but everyone.
No one is just a bag of evil or only good. Yet when we discuss politics we always end up there as this thread is a good example of.
Whatever legacy Trump will end up leaving we don't know yet. It might lead to something amazing even if it wasn't on purpose (certainly happened to Reagan) or it might be that just the right kind of irrationality is actually quite rational in hindsight.
Political decisions often have decades of decay. It's impossible to say what Trumps (the few he has actually made) are going to mean.
It's never that simple.
3 top post from /r/politics (right now):
* 17 women have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. It’s time to revisit those stories * South Carolina women’s hoops team decline invite to White House * Nobody knows where Trump's leftover inauguration funds went, causing outrage and change in Washington
One sided: yes. Something that is problematic for advertisers: probably not.
On r/the_donald:
* Raise your hand if you're the greatest shitposter of all time! GOD-EMPEROR * MRW I wake up to GEOTUS shitpostsGOD-EMPEROR * Stand, Never Kneel! They Deserve Our Respect #fucktheNFL#StandForOurAnthem
Now try to be impartial. Is that advertiser friendly? Is that quality content?
It's something of a myth that T_D needs to be banned in order to appease advertisers. They keep to themselves.
Fortunately spez is smart. Bringing down the hammer on T_D could very well start a civil war. He seems to be wary of this.
If there's enough eyeballs. Probably.
To imply that those two are equal, is disingenuous.
As is required to maintain what I would call a "democracy" with "individual rights". We have to be vehemently intolerant of intolerance and marginalization (in general), and this is more important than free speech. Free speech is an artefact of-, not a requirement for democracy. Tolerance is required, however. Some people get this backwards, usually the kind of people who can't keep their foot out of their mouth.
That seems like a pretty grand statement to make offhand and pretend like it's objective.
Free speech is in the very first amendment. #1. Yet you feel so comfortable hand-waving it away.
Freedom of Association implies just the opposite of your argument, that intolerence is specifically protected.
Being intolerant isn't always a bad thing either.
Everything is not black or white. Move the pieces around and the minority become the majority in different contexts.
> Racism and misogyny are terrible enough that if you hate it, you must be correct.
This isn't about correctness.
The viewpoint is:
Racism and misogyny are terrible enough that if you support them, you must be evil and desire harm to others, at very least indirectly.
Even if the racists/misogynists of the world were 'correct' I wouldn't want to live in world where we legitimize that. And that's why a lot of us reject him and his policies wholesale.
Saying "well he's right about free trade" (I don't believe this, but as an example) undermines the rhetorical context of fighting something much worse than bad economic policy.
Also because someone in your view is misguided about race or gender does that mean you should treat them as I am assuming you believe they treat people of other race or gender?
Why is it a better world to live in where you ban one view rather than the other when the result is more less the same. Someone is getting oppressed.
Not true. There was positive commentary about Trump's speech in South Korea. I think you just misestimate how often the thing he does is perceived by the general public as bad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7bldfo/trump_mad...
on /r/the_donald accepting criticism of Donald Trump.
In what respects? As far as I can recall, the US did not just move from a monarchy to a democratic republic 15 years ago as a result of a revolution after loosing a world war.
I think the populist discontent behind Trump is real and concerning, but Pre-WWII Germany and current day US are very, very, different places. I think its fair to request that if you wish to make a parallel with Nazi Germany, you substantiate the claim with specific historic evidence.
there was dropping the tpp... maybe. that's probably good, but i have mixed feelings. anything else?
Some of the stuff he said on the campaign sounded great - in fact enough to get him elected. It appears he has no intention of implementing it. Does that make it worth discussing? No.
As we say about startups, ideas are cheap and execution is everything.
It says more about Trump's fans that they're willing to overlook his egregious failings and attack and undermine quasi-impartial institutions just to point score than it does about bias.
Which of his actions shows that he is that bad.
You don't have to be a Trump supporter to see that you are proving the parents' point.
Your hypocritical hivemind tends to overlook that your queen bee accepted tens of millions from the KSA/Qatar in campaign contributions with the knowledge that, in her OWN words, they provide clandestine and logistic support to ISIL. It's OK to be white, it's OK to be American, and it's OK to love your country.
Especially since in most accounts, Trump is more alike with Obama than not. Obama send home hundreds of thousands of immigrants, both back a shameless war machine (in fact Trump was more reluctant about that and more isolationist until the republican establishment forced his hand -- and then press found him instantly, if temporarily, more "presidential"), both have advanced the interests of corporatists, etc. If you didn't have the Obamacare repeal (which I'd call bad) they'd be 99% alike in their results.
One had better table manners and is a better (still ho-hum and totally fake) actor (in the kind of low quality populist soft-PR video like "the President interviewed by Zach Galifianakis" and "Another day at the office", etc that presidents feels obliged to put out post Clinton who popularized that BS to show us how funny and/or everyday people they are) compared to the vulgar billionaire, but that's more or less it.
There's a fundamental imbalance in how the standard is applied, and it's clearly ideological.
If the people that liberals want thrown from helicopters ( fascists ), are only in that group because they want to throw people from helicopters....
Isn't that the same logic as "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun"? The liberal subs HATE, HATE groups. They aren't calling for random white people, religious people, or fiscally responsible people to be thrown from helicopters.
Both sides of that fight seem to have legitimate cause to claim self-defense.
>They aren't calling for random white people, religious people, or fiscally responsible people to be thrown from helicopters.
No, but they do seem to be a hair away from actively endorsing subjugation. A lot of them seem to have already taken steps to make sure that that demographic can't have a voice in their movement. They also seem to have set the precedent that any criticism of their activism from outside their movement makes you an enemy. I get the feeling that a lot of them would do all those terrible things, if they could. There are fundamental tenets of the movement that give people an excellent excuse to do horrible things.
Instead, we could just, not? I liked the "judge people by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin" thing we had going on. That's an easy rule to enforce, but less so when you start carving out special exceptions that mostly benefit your voter base.
FWIW, I hate the left and the right movements in equal strides, the left want me to feel terrible for being born a straight white male in a western post-colonial society, the right want the poor and under-priviliged to suffer and horde things like medical care.
Understanding that there is a grey-scale and that ideologies are not absolute is the only way to proceed in my opinion. Being polarised only turns into fighting because nobodies view gets represented properly instead both sides put up strawmen.
I think it may be time for Reddit to experiment with removing the downvote button, or maybe give it 25% of the power it has now, or something along those lines.
13 out of 25 of the front page of /r/politics right now (sorted by hot) are Trump news. 16 out of 25 if sorting by top.
That doesn't seem excessive, considering how vocal Trump is.
When /r/anarchism (left leaning sub about anarchism, antifa, communism, ...) mods refused to enforce reddit's rules relating to the incitement to violence, reddit only removed the mods in question instead of closing the sub.
When /r/physical_removal (right leaning sub about pinochet 'memes') mods refused to enforce reddit's rules relating to the incitement to violence, the sub was removed.
When /r/nazi (third position leaning sub about national socialism) - well, I don't actually know whether the mods there refused to enforce reddit's rules. It's been removed.
How does your speculation or the fact that you simply have heard these things make your argument any persuasive? What is the actual ground reality?
/r/anarchism is a slightly more complicated case. They do advocate violence in a "bash the fash" way. But their intended victims are often those who advocate for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other racist or misogynistic methods. Their violent earnestness is also often mocked by the rest of political Reddit.
/r/LeftWithoutEdge was a sub formed for serious discussion for lefties without resorting to violent speech. It doesn't get enough traffic so I urge any leftists / anarchists here to visit it occasionally.
Edit: I should add that one reason /r/anarchism and /r/socialism are still on Reddit is because they took the warnings of the admins seriously. /r/anarchism dialed their rhetoric back after being told they were on the verge of being banned. Most of the banned right wing subs ignored the warnings, and often doubled-down.
/r/strikeaction
/r/militant
are some of the more obvious choices.
Of modern left is too sensitive and too unable to accept that other have different opinions. Point of view depends on point of sitting...
Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality".
It's pretty easy for a tech platform to be politically neutral. All you need are objective rules for how content "get to the top" and equal opportunity for whatever system is in place to be abused.
That last one is the problem though. Regardless of which side is doing it, there's a sense of unfairness felt by the other side when they see the system get gamed. And it invariably will. Hence the knee jerk reaction to rebalance things, which leads to calls of bias from the other side, and the cycle continues.
> Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality".
Do you seriously consider unconsenting upskirt photos of women[1] political speech? Not just, free speech, but specifically "political speech"?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
> > Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality".
> Do you seriously consider unconsenting upskirt photos of women[1] political speech? Not just, free speech, but specifically "political speech"?
No, and I'd kindly ask you not to attribute such a position to me.
But I'm willing to bet someone does think it's political speech. See also NAMBLA, etc. And consider that gay rights boosters would have been put in the same basket a while ago.
this happens when you're unclear with words or leave a lot of wiggle room. saying "[it] could be argued" and then suggesting you're unhappy with being associated with that position is a bit of a time waster.
We can’t effectively reason about social media censorship by analogizing it to meatspace.
Just as virality mechanisms amplify “good” content, they also change the equilibrium state of whose ideas can spread.
Censorship programs work like a squirt of insecticide into a beehive, they kill off some functional parts of the hive organism and eventually lead to the destruction of all of the bees inside.
Similarly, censoring “fake news” or “abusive content” poisons the environment for ideas in a similar way. Ideas are not evaluated objectively. We each react to them emotionally and experience them via the social meaning we associate with them. Prejudices are not rational and are countered by ample evidence, yet there is much prejudice and much religious faith... such beliefs carry a meaning payload enjoyed by their host.
The fear suffered by social media firms (like reddit) is that someone will screenshot a piece of offensive speech alongside an ad paid for by an advertiser, and the advertiser will worry that his/her brand is being associated with that speech.
This is why Colin Kaepernick doesn’t have a job.
Social media firms are thus following in the path of other media firms and are (like The NY Times) putting ad revenue ahead of the first amendment. This isn’t unexpected, these firms are the “tories” of our day.
Second, society has always been self censoring, but the internet has thrown a wrench into that by allowing people to escape into pockets of like minded individuals. And you might have noticed that hacker news is fairly heavily censored, and as a result has managed to avoid turning into a cesspool like much of reddit. I think that reddit is worried about advertising, yes, but I also think they are concerned about a decline in engaged usership.
It's also been 'incorporated' against the states (and their sub-governments like municipalities).
But free speech, as a political value, isn't restricted to the U.S. Congress. That may be why you keep repeating something that's mostly irrelevant.
Wanting to "escape into pockets of like minded individuals" is pretty much what Reddit is. I can sympathize with the idea that Reddit, or similar sites, should host anything, as long as it's restricted to 'pockets' that accept it.
A lot of the worst behavior is basically people from one pocket invading other pockets and posting unacceptable content. I think it'd be great if Reddit provided (more) effective tools for the mods to police that.
I agree with you about reddit.
He was talking about censorship done by powerful organizations. Literally nothing to do with the constitution of the USA.
Obviously. I'm referring to the general values that led to the US having protections on free speech.
> society has always been self censoring
You are seemingly idealizing the process by which social shaming encourages conformity.
> the internet has thrown a wrench into that by allowing people to escape into pockets of like minded individuals.
So you either have an idealistic view of an ideologically homogeneous society, or you think that the internet making economies of scale possible for non-mainstream beliefs is broadly a bad thing, regardless of what those beliefs are.
> And you might have noticed that hacker news is fairly heavily censored
I have, and in most cases (other than explicit griefing or bullying) I think this is quite harmful to HN. The content discussed on HN is simply not interesting to most people, which is why HN has survived. It's easy to suffer from hindsight bias and determine that since HN has aggressive moderation HN is better that it would otherwise be.
Someone recently did a study of title edits and found that articles typically drop precipitously after the editors meddle with the title. This is typically because the author's title fails to communicate why the article is interesting to HN readers, while the user-submitted title often does (when they differ).
Worse, the study showed that mods actively bury specific discussions from the site. We really don't know what we're missing due to this, but chances are it's political. This very discussion (critical of social media companies) is of high risk for being censored simply because the main reason for HN article burying is that the article triggers comments that are viewed as overly political in nature.
This view (that political discussion is harmful) is dangerous and naive (and dangerously naive) because it assumes that HN readers are incapable of acting both as techies and as citizens simultaneously, and that with political beliefs nobody will ever change his/her mind based on the merits of someone else's argument. I enjoy HN discussions precisely because I learn a lot. What I learn is not linked to the topic, or to the political nature (or lack of it) of the discussion.
> has managed to avoid turning into a cesspool like much of reddit.
I think the biggest cespool in reddit is /r/gifs and similar fluff that is used by spam marketers to get their content viral. Yes there are things about donald and other obscure and idiotic groups that I've found at random now and then when clicking on the random subreddit button, those are easily ignored.
In fact, the only reason a normal reddit user encounters the morons is because /r/gifs (or similar) are among the default subreddits subscribed to automatically for new accounts, casting a wide net but drastically lowering the bar of discussion.
Gifs are not posted to HN because the community has no interest in that rubbish or any of the similar rubbish it attracts. Reddit would not have a problem if it were not so focused on creating a mass market for ad sales rather than just letting people associate with people they wish to associate with and easily block the bad apples or griefers.
I am idealizing a process in which social shaming encourages conformity. That is the only reason society works, we learn how to interact with other people through this process.
Yes, I think the the internet allows people to isolate themselves from ideas that differ from their own, and that this is a bad thing.
You might be right about HN moderation. I don't know, but I think the mods do a good job. I also don't think the mods have any problem with discussion of political ideals.
I sort of agree with your comments about reddit.
But if I want to really see what these people are writing, I am free to browse any sub, sort by controversial, and expand the collapsed threads. Win - Win.
Hacker News, OTOH, just seems to 'disappear' wrong-think.
There's a big difference.
Marshawn Lynch has never stood for the national anthem. Not once; even before Kaepernick. He still has a job because he is a great player.
Kaepernick is a whiner.
That is a dangerous road. Today they might be taking down otherwise legal content with which advertisers do not want to be associated. Tomorrow they are being asked to remove content with which advertisers disagree. Suddenly my 1000-word rant on the evils of Microsoft's latest OS is being taken down. Rather than being a free space for discussion, reddit will have become just another moderated online forum where nothing of note ever happens.
Reddit's power comes from negative posts. Facebook and twitter makes headlines when people 'like' things a billion times. They lack the capacity for users to express anger objectively. Reddit makes headlines when it empowers 50,000 gamers to dump on EA. Advertisers like EA should be be paying for such feedback. They evidently already listen to it.
Reddit has already shown that they had the capability and the will to edit users posts, not just removing them. Reddit and other social sites already uses all sorts of algorithms to move content they want to the top and to bury content they don't want. Companies don't want negative PR about themselves or their products. Companies advertising on Reddit are Reddit's actual customers.
You put those facts together and being afraid of Reddit eventually censoring posts critical of customers doesn't seem like fallacious thinking.
You don't throw a chicken into a cage with a starving tiger and call it a slippery slope to say that the chicken is going to get eaten
It already is. Even if you removed the mods, the hive-mind would moderate unpopular ideas to oblivion anyway.
However, a lot of the top posts are ultimately factual claims. Sweden has a rise in grenade attacks and sexual assaults, British police looked the other way when Muslim Men formed a pedophilia group, most terrorism is motivated by Islam, and there are Islamists whose purported goal is to destroy western civilization. Is it Islamaphobic to highlight these things?
Islamists are right wing themselves (or at least their views map better to right wing views than left wing views) so we need a better lens than "left vs right" to determine the boundaries of the conflict.
Snopes says the increase in reported sexual assaults in Sweden could possibly be to do with the definition of "sexual assault" changing in 2013[0]
Regarding the Paedophile ring, I haven't read any material on it - but there have been several high profile non-Muslim paedophilia cases in Britain, and it would be unsurprising to me if police didn't turn a blind eye at some point. There are some claims that police didn't properly investigate reports in the Jimmy Saville case [1]
Regarding the claim that "most terrorism is motivated by Islam" - are you referring to terrorism globally, or in western countries? And what time period are we talking about here? One interesting data point is that Britain is experiencing historically low rates of terrorism (and most of it was related to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, not Islam) [2]
So the facts above are correct, but the root cause is misattributed to Islam?
[0] https://www.snopes.com/crime-sweden-rape-capital-europe/ [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-21756150
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/many-people-killed-terrori...
> The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors revolving around race, class and gender—contemptuous and sexist attitudes toward the mostly working-class victims; fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism and damage community relations; the Labour council's reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority; lack of a child-centred focus; a desire to protect the town's reputation; and lack of training and resources.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-16/crime-wav...
Be careful about who you try to defend here, just read any top comment. And dont confuse facts with what's really relevant. For instance, a few days ago I saw a discussion about this:
> a police officer is eighteen and a half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be by a police officer
This is true, and tries to paint a picture of black males being violent (should've seen the comments). But it's two incomparable metrics! Actually, a police officer is ~165 times likelier to be killed by a white male given the same rules.
So yeah, "facts", but always distorted in these subreddits.
Using statistics in bad faith is way too effective.
I agree that pointing things out can be bigoted, but to the extent that politics addresses questions between friend and foe, it's natural that political expression is bigoted. Feminism is inherently bigoted to the extent that pointing out male dominance is important to the feminist perspective, but I don't think that feminists should be censored just because their discussions might offend people.
Reddit is an ad-supported system. The moment you take advertising, you are now required to maintain editorial control. And that's fine. Advertisers have strict content guidelines, things like: no blood, no violence, no gore, no porn, etc..
Do you think a company like Calvin Klein is going to want to put their fashion ad next to an image of a dead kid? Yah that's not happening.
Instead of setting the expectation on corporations, we need the public to understand what their support of ad-driven media properties mean. And that it's fine.
Reddit isn't a public service. It's not a charity. It's an ad-driven media property, like a TV show or magazine. That's it.
And if conservatives can't accept advertising-based media, they need to find some other outlet to express their views.
Let me put it another way: Do you really think Calvin Klein is going to want to put ads next to images of dead kids? Is that your expectation? If not, how do you expect Reddit to become a profitable company?
Of course, Reddit & Twitter isn't going to state that they're an ad-driven media property, since they want to "appear" unbiased and neutral, but that's completely false. They are absolutely responsible to their advertisers as their core business plan.
Its like Usenet. Lots of unrelated and related NG's. Some are very palatable and high content. /r/electronics, /r/arduino , /r/news ; those sorts of things.
I think there'd be room for lists of "advertising acceptability" while still maintaining the previous freedom of speech ideals they claimed.
Something like:
"Acceptable for all ages"
"Acceptable for most viewers"
"NSFW content, porn related"
"Abhorrent, no adverts unless explicitly request subreddit"
And then the abhorrent ones (say, /r/watchpeopledie /r/blackpeopletwitter), turn into a users-pay system to keep the subreddit alive. Track the sub and make the users pay their share of advertising.
That way, All groups can stay on reddit. They get their traffic they so desire, and the absolutely horrible groups still can stay, albeit segregated and self-monetized.
You can always find a few dollars from crap local family brands and porn companies, but if you want the big bucks, you need the major brands.
Economics sets the rules. How much of your income goes towards porn? How much of it goes towards food or transportation or housing?
The sizes of each of those is directly proportional to the size of their corresponding advertising industries.
How does Honda avoid placing ads next to a pro-Roy Moore articles that might associate their brand with pedophilia?
Another way to filter pages is to follow it in time, for a longer period and if it has multiple positives, then ban it entirely.
As for content that breaks the law, there isn't much of that in the U.S., for obvious reasons. Elsewhere it's another story.
As to politics, I don't think you can expect any of these sites to be politically neutral. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit -- all show their bias. It's OK, it's part of life in a free market. There is a concern that many voices can be shut out of the market, and so maybe there will, at some point, be a decent rationale for temporary (say, ten years) regulations on digital town squares.
There is no such thing as politically neutral when there is money involved. And Reddit owes VC a lot of money.
There was an interesting segment on NPR sometime after Trump won the Republican nomination, looking back on how they had covered Trump during the primaries.
When they got a sense that they had been running more negative things about Trump than they had about the other Republican candidates, or less positive things about him than about the others, they started skipping negative things Trump did or said that would have been top stories if, say, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich had said or done them, to bring the total number of negative Trump things they ran more in line with the negative things about the others. Same with positive Trump things...they adjusted to keep those at least in the ballpark as those of other candidates.
In retrospect, they realized that they were simply unprepared for a situation where a candidate would have as many negatives compared to others of the same party as Trump had. If they had set some impartial, objective threshold and covered everything from every candidate that crossed that threshold their news segments would have been something like 90% about Trump.
They had implicitly assumed that no candidate would ever be that far out on his party's bell curve, and so killed legitimate, newsworthy stories to try to make the results match that expectation.
When facts become politicized there's no hope of neutrality if you want to remove lies.
First they are prepping for an IPO and need to clean up image.
Second, is being impartial even possible, short of some super-duper AI that after being programmed by biased programmers cleans itself of the bias?
Unless I missed something, there's nothing inherent in /r/politics that requires it to be a dispassionate collection of links that represent all sides of the political spectrum. Don't get me wrong, it's a pit of human misery that I've long since removed from my subreddit list, but it's what users want it to be.
This is coming from a 2x Obama voter and lifelong liberal btw.
It's a horrific source on information on politics, which makes it sad that it is so popular. Unfortunately there are lots of subreddits like that. I can't read a thread in r/conspiracy without feeling bad about the human race. It's a fun (?) game to guess how people can spin any given event. Great rubbernecking material though.
I know it would be incredibly hard to moderate, at least at first. I'm just not sure there is really a desire for such a place since most subreddits seem to be safe-space/echo chambers.
Impartiality can impart political bias if the facts happen to lean one way or the other, as they will from time to time.
What people tend to forget is that all totalitarian systems that came to power, have their origins form reactive movements acting to ineffectiveness or oppressiveness of existing systems. NSDAP was formed in response to worsening national situation. Reds and Whites were formed in response to worsening national situation. Italian fascism was response to political turmoil in post-war Italy. Quite a few European countries romanced with authoritarian rule (or went borderline fascist) in inter-war period.
Let me turn this question around: what if anti-nazi party came into power, and then to assure that no nazi party would ever come into power, it would implement its own authoritarian system? After all a lot of those governments enjoyed popular support during their rise to power, with people willing to give up their freedoms for sake of perceived security.
Back in McCarthyism it was better "dead than red". What if "its good to throw the nazi off the copter" is just a sign of our societies marching to new era of scare?
I would hope that describes virtually every post war western government.
And many of them have implemented various levels of 'authoritarian' systems to prevent the (re)rise of Nazis. Ranging from the banning of books in Germany to more mundane things like the British police spending a lot of time and money infiltrating neo-nazi groups and banning them. In the latter case exactly the kind of thing you are worried about happened - the powers granted to the police were also used to target other non-nazi groups like environmental protestors. Despite being very critical of police tactics in the latter cases, I still have no problem with the police targeting Nazis.
Anyway, western governments don't need to raise the spectre of Nazis to gain support for increased police and surveillance powers. They have plenty of more recent things to talk about (from Irish terrorists to ETA to Islamic terrorists). This comment thread is evidence enough for that - there wouldn't have been nearly the same emotional reaction to somebody talking about bombing ISIS.
So what you are saying is, that all the police have to do is label someone a Nazi, and you'll give them a free pass for whatever it is that they do?
Example:
A lot of folks are flabbergasted at /r/The_Donald, but I've always contended that that subreddit exists and developed into its current culture precisely because right-leaning opinions are treated so harshly on most of the rest of reddit. In other words, there was a feeling of suppression and censorship, which leads to the sort of high-energy, irreverent "shit-posting" that is the mainstay of /r/The_Donald.
Open platforms for discussion are actually one of the
best ways to prevent something like the Nazi party from
coming into power.
I agree that public discussion is a powerful tool for changing people's political opinions - but if I think I'm reading a discussion between your peers when I'm actually reading a discussion between two Kremlin trolls, it puts the powerful tool in the hands of people who don't have my best interests in mind.
It's a tough problem to solve - most of the 'obvious' solutions like real name policies I think come with a lot of downsides.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kvvz3/russian-fa...
I think the biggest problem is that it only works when the other side is willing to play by the rules of the game. If the opposition is willing to blatantly lie even in the face of direct evidence then the normal rules of debate just break down. (I know all politicians lie, but Trump's disregard for political norms is completely different from what you got from candidates like McCain, Obama, Romney or Bush).
Similarly from a UK perspective giving disproportionate coverage to UKIP and Farage just increased their popularity.
Isn't this just an example of the same phenomenon I was describing? Sure, they gave him airtime, but it was virtually never positive. There was a tremendous lack of impartiality in the media's coverage of the two candidates. This led to the idea of "fake news" and ended up boosting his supporters even more, giving them reason to band together.
I dare say the outcome of the election could have been different if the media had spent less time trying to demonize Trump and simply reported equally on the two candidates with minimal editorializing.
Most of the atrocities around the world are justified because of a feeling of victimization.
I think both sides of the political spectrum feel victimized by each other, and that scares me.
When GP asks for impartiality, think GP would settle for reasonableness, which i think both sides have lost track of years ago.
All i say, is think inwardly, question your beliefs, and most importantly don't question other peoples motives.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/milo-yianno...
When?
"He has also recently married his fiance, who is a person of colour."
And? Because a man marries a woman, they can't be misogynist?
You're right. However when there are copyright violations on Reddit, they claim it's a platform and they're not responsible for the content on it - ultimately the users are responsible. And then the courts agree and decide that ultimately the violation rests with the user and not with the platform.
However, as they increase the moderation of their platform, they move closer and closer to being responsible for the content. At some point of restriction, they're completely responsible for the content on their platform.
They're welcome to operate the site however they want, but they shouldn't reap the advantages of a public platform while advancing their private interests.
seems to me that there is no "completely" unless they literally screen and evaluate every single post before accepting them. until that point's it's all matters of degree.
(This is also what I don't get about the Twitter fake-account-number business and the YouTube videos-targeting-children business - if I were an advertiser, I would have no interest in spending money advertising to bots or to young children. I would prefer to pay for ads in front of 4 million users I want to reach than in front of 5 million users, 1 million of whom I don't want to reach. Why are advertisers not pushing back hard on inflation of account metrics?)
And maybe it isn't totally different from newspapers and TV news programs. Just like we don't associate advertising on news media with the often violent and disturbing content of the news itself, we don't need to treat social media advertising as endorsing its user-generated content. And in fact, we haven't been doing that until the recent YouTube controversy.
This has nothing to do with cars. People who buy guns can, and often do, buy cars. No relation. Was your buy going to be wasted?
"I didn't give the killer money for a knife, I bought him lunch!"
Why would anyone think the internet is different? Complaining to advertisers has been very effective for a long time.
If an advertisement for a video tutorial series teaching people how to use the 3d software Blender should happen to show up along a "Will It Blend" video, nobody should lose their job (or your money) over it. This mentality is ignorant of everything we know as technology professionals about how this business is run; so much of this process is automated and there is no conceivable way for it to not be. There are not enough humans needing jobs on this planet to manually sort video for prospective advertisers in the way you expect.
YouTube has since improved their detection algorithm (even if it has more false positive, likely) to keep advertisers on the platform. It they didn't do this, the only alternative would be to WHITELIST advertisers, which would mean that nobody would pick you and only the big names would get revenue.
Please explain. Unlike "traditional social media" Reddit is organized into "like-minded" or themed mini-communities. Advertisers certainly know the type of content posted to these communities.
The whole point of social media is for users to generate the content and to decide for themselves what makes content good or bad. In the past, advertising would fund the service, targeting specific demographics. It was never seen as endorsement of specific content.
Now advertisers want to start dictating the terms, to decide what specific content they approve of. Social media starts to look like traditional, sponsored, top-down media. This defeats the whole purpose.
Social media is selling out, and we are mistakenly cheering this on as a good thing.
“But it’s only 0.002% of the content!”
It doesn’t matter. As soon as a news report says ‘Ford advertises with a site that supports Nazis’ those ads are gone.
So Ford won’t buy ads there in the first place.
And it doesn’t matter that the amount of content is quite small. Or that ‘supports Nazis’ means ‘doesn’t kick them off’.
Ford doesn’t want that story or any anything like it. And if it does happen you can bet every other big brand is Goni for to quickly figure out if they’re doing the same and pull their ads.
This is business. And VERY few companies of any size want to be associated with violence against women, Nazis, beastiality, or a lot of the other really seedy stuff that exists in the depths of Reddit.
reddit is smart to rid themselves of subreddits where the top front page posts are often threats or even just fantasies of raping people, even if advertisers aren't part of the equation.
The "good guys" can make a new subreddit but do it right this time.
The same companies that kept swear words off of basic cable for decades...
The moderators of The_Donald work with reddit to try to keep the subreddit in line. They do not allow anything that violates the site wide rules, but that doesn't mean low ranked comments on low ranked threads don't go unreported.
I'm not saying there aren't a lot of assholes in The_Donald. There are. Some of them have valid political points to make, but most are just trolling and shit posting which was the entire point of the subreddit to begin with IMHO.
> Many of these links are probably in violation of our policy, but most are unreported, which is what alerts the mods and our team, especially when there are few votes. We'll consider them reported now.
> Generally the mods of the_donald have been cooperative when we approach them with systematic abuses. Typically we ban entire communities only when the mods are uncooperative or the entire premise of the community is in violation of our policies. In the past we have removed mods of the_donald that refuse to work with us.
> Finally, the_donald is a small part of a large problem we face in this country—that a large part of the population feels unheard, and the last thing we're going to do is take their voice away.
The reporter's response [2] said:
>> most are unreported, which is what alerts the mods and our team
> I don't accept that excuse. These were gathered by searching for phrases that should be included in their AutoModerator config. These calls for violence are mod enabled.
There's definitely some validity to ignoring cherry-picked violations of low ranked comments and threads. But many of these should be caught automatically, just by watching for words and phrases like "kill", "hang", and "shoot". You'd have a lot of false positives, but a moderation and administration policy that was less tolerant of these calls for violence would not have this track record.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...
Schwartz is rolling over in his grave.
Only think is, the vast majority were 1 point comments, some were negative, and the only one that had considerable upvotes was an anti-muslim comment on the thread about a terrorist attack (if someone's going to overreact, that's when).
Literally googling that will yield plenty of results with posts that are far, far outside the rules and aren't being taken down.
Furthermore, nothing about "left-wing subreddits" is relevant regarding whether r/T_D violates sitewide rules or not.
Is the Donald even allowed on /r/all anymore?
Some bullying subs have been rightly banned but major ones like /r/cringe /r/srs and /r/cringeanarchy remain.
Some of the most blatant subs will be banned, or quarantined, and despite repeated calls for action things that are still-bad, but slightly-less-bad, will remain. Until the next purge - including /r/srs, /r/the_donald, and similar.
> [truncated]
> Mr. Huffman didn’t give specific numbers, but said Reddit’s ad revenue had grown fivefold over the past two years, from a small base.
I'm sure given the scale of the userbase the property is worth something substantial, but $1.8 billion for a 10-year old company that, AFAIK, has never turned a profit is nuts.
Either 1) investors saw something in the revenue growth numbers that painted a rosier picture about the future, 2) the entire valuation is illegitimate, or 3) the tech world is really that bubbly right now.
Completely unjustified, people just want something to throw money at.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4050332-new-housing-bubble-...
Edit: I'm not in denyal that Russia had nothing to do with the election but I think Russia's involvement is grossly over represented. Its so much easier to say "Russia did it" while ignoring why subreddits like /r/thedonald or the right propaganda caught on so much.
This is a long-running conflict with Russia. There really are issues in the US that need to be fixed (as the Soviets gladly pointed out about Jim Crow in the 1950s/1960s), but Russia is also geopolitically smart enough to attack those vulnerabilities. If you just sit down and consider why and what advantages Russia would have in spreading propaganda, it is hard to believe they aren't doing it.
And the French Intelligence Community. And the Canadian Intelligence Community. And the Netherlands Intelligence Community. And the British Intelligence Community. And the German Intelligence Community...
Dozens more resources that track, analyze and report on Russian trolling / propaganda. It's so easy to find, you must be trolling.
The fringe is emboldened and encouraged and given an artificial air of legitimacy. The challenge or alternative viewpoint is suppressed.
It is still psychological warfare and the key point isn't really the individual composing the post.
Though in all fairness - based on the articles about the IRA and the experiences I've had I do think that that they have individuals posting and writing their own content.
(for those that haven't read about the Internet Research Agency yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency)
Suddenly everything in the (Internet) world can be explained with «Russia». Second coming of McCarthyism.
Of course, if Reddit owners/investors feel they need to fully submit to requirements of their advertisers, there is little they can do, and should just max profit and see if they can survive with a lot less "love" from their users.
I am looking at social media as a form of reinforcement learning, especially the exploration phase; by censoring it the exploration phase is significantly weakened, leading to worse results in the end. So maybe evolutionary argument would be to allow all kinds of crazy ideas (with some requiring a bit more work to read), and let people themselves to decide which ones would be used in exploitation phase? In the past when a single stupid idea was forced upon everyone by authority (e.g. nazis), people didn't have any means to counter it. With open discussion spaces some people might find excellent counterexamples immediately, clearing the issue for millions right away why a certain idea is a really bad one.
This would allow showing advertisers a checkbox when they post an ad that asks whether they are okay with showing their ad on a dirty sub.
Pitch it to advertisers as you'll reach more people for the same cost, but your content may be shown by user posts that some may consider offensive.
But for subreddits that break sitewide rules (doxxing, inciting violence, etc) they just ban the subreddit outright instead of quarantining it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3fx2au/conte...
Or maybe the slope ends with nazis. Just a thought. 4chan will always exist as the bastion for your juvenile ideas of "free speech" (and all of the baggage that comes with it).
What's actually being reported here? Feels like clickbait.
It’s like watching a bizarre caricature of some dystopian satire.