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Comment by hashberry | Hacker News Reader

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.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c4miq0/insider_...

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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.

https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion

I am being harassed. You are receiving blowback. They are discovering freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

This is of course the same company that fired an employee when other employees threatened him enough for him to stay home. Damore.

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).

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...

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.

It does suggest what so many non-progressives feel, which is that anything that is to the right of the extreme left is being targeted.

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.

@krapp

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.

>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.

Ah right, American democrats, the "extreme left"

Howard Schultz was a moderate Democrat, and that didn't save him from the ire of the media and his former allies.

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.

Regarding censorship, reddit quarantine removes The_Donald from search and prevents future content from being indexed by search engines.

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.

https://twitter.com/thedonaldreddit/status/11439265704086446...

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.

[0]https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...

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.

Right-wingers call anything that makes them look bad a false flag nowadays. It's like the "Boy who cried Leftist."

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_...

Generally we judge entities based on similar past behavior. Why would this instance be an exception?

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