I dislike that subreddit as much as anyone, but that’s guilt by peaceful association and can be leveled at a lot of different websites, video games, and political parties.
Let’s not go there.
Everyone - every signle website, author, pundit, politician, etc who finds themselves mentioned favourably in a mass shooter manifesto should at least ask themselves how they got there and what has gone wrong with their messaging. There may not be anything they can do, but a lot of places seem to think that hate never leads to action.
And even if you think they should, it's neither yours nor Reddit's business to enforce it.
> if they try to do that [nominate someone other than Bernie at a brokered convention], forget the "political" part of the "political revolution" [1]
with thousands of upvotes and no moderator or admin action.
And some of the top comments on that post:
> If they do that it's time to revolt.
> This is a peaceful revolution. If they fight against it, they risk violence.
> Okay fine, a socialist revolution it is.
> Yeah the convention is a canary. If the canary dies we riot.
There's enough evidence of unmoderated site rules violations on that one post to shut down that sub if reddit wanted to.
But reddit doesn't want to, they're trying to tip the scales by censoring half of America.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/f7ap56/plouff...
Also, there is a myriad of possibilities between "totally unrelated" and "have direct causal link which imparts responsibility". If somebody is on the left politically, is he "totally unrelated" to Lenin and Pol Pot? Not exactly, they probably share some ideas somewhere. Is he responsible for all atrocities Lenin and Pol Pot committed? I don't think many people on the left would agree to that. And here we have direct link between ideology and actions, acknowledged by everybody. You are extending it to actions of insane people which may be just using ideology to dress up their demented impulses - this is even worse distortion.
People are responsible for their actions. But if some crazy person mentions somebody in a positive sense, that by itself does not impart responsibility on the person they mention.
For that matter, look at the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting - should Pelosi resign over the impact her words had? (Along with the rest of the DNC's leadership?)
Point being, mentally ill people do weird shit for illogical reasons. That doesn't make it the fault of whatever they used to justify their actions.
(What was the essential difference between, say, the occupation of the Malheur wildlife refuge in 2016 by armed extremists and the occupation of the Dublin GPO in 1916 by armed extremists? Which could be considered mentally ill and why?)
(I also find it interesting that the most basic, minimal kind of critique - asking what the effect of the work is on the audience - has generated such outrage. I haven't called for censorship, I haven't even called for self-censorship, not directly attributed moral responsibility. All I said was should think about whether there was moral responsibility or not.)
The root said "The users of that forum have literally been linked to public shootings.", as part of an argument that /r/the_donald is a shithole and deserves to be banned. The reply was that all sorts of people find themselves in mass shooter manifestos, and that this doesn't imply any sort of culpability whatsoever.
You then replied saying that everyone who finds themselves in such a manifesto needs to reexamine their messaging. This would seem to imply agreement with the root - that since /r/the_donald was mentioned by mass shooters, it's bad.
Also, presumably not everything the KKK does is bad. Is it wrong that people in the KKK are all lumped together?
These are all questions of guilt by association, no?
I have in the past loaded Gab, 8chan, and Facebook in my browser. Am I “linked to” the users of those platforms that have committed mass murder?
Plus that's kind of two degrees removed from the original comment. If someone who does a horrible thing cites a community as a motivation/inspiration, yeah that group should absolutely at least think about what that says about them. It's not an immediate condemnation of guilt, but if there's strong evidence that that community's behaviour or ideology provided motivation, or if there's a repeated pattern, then it's a problem. The alternative is to say there's nothing wrong with white supremacists because all those people who commit racial violence citing white supremacy are just incidentally related, or that there's nothing wrong with gangs because we should avoid "linking" people who commit gang violence to their associates.
There was a lady who used YouTube in April 2018 who went to Google and shot three people. I recently engaged positively with YouTube. I also engaged positively with YouTube in April 2018.
Am I linked to a shooter simply because we used and enjoyed the same content on the same website?