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Comment by ryankemper | Hacker News Reader

> Reddit is still very much anti censorship.

This is just not true. They are very transparently trying to kick off users/communities that they don't "like".

For example basically any subreddit associated with the "alt right", except I believe /r/DebateTheAltRight or whatever it's called.

It's very simple:

(1) Identify community that you don't like, generally due to association with anti-leftist political views

(2) Find an instance of a threat of violence, regardless of context (i.e. the threat coming from someone who isn't a "real" community member)

(3) Use (2) to have a justified reason for "quarantining" the community, which is just the first step in a long, slow death-squeeze. From my understanding, those at /r/The_Donald saw the obvious writing on the wall and thus migrated to the donald.win quite some time ago.

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The sense of persecution and victim-hood I hear from the right seems rather at odds with how damn successful they seem to be at the moment.

It's like when the silent majority was anything but.

This is difficult because there are different definitions of 'right' as well as different environments.

They can be successful at the ballot box nationally but still be persecuted.

Remember that Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla for his views.

To be a professor in University of California one has to pass a political litmus test.

So yea I do think there is persecution.

> Remember that Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla for his views.

He was forced out due to a 1000$ personal donation to a political group that was Christian/right leaning. Political speak: "Incompatible/Hostile views"

I seem to recall there was slightly more to it than that. I don't have the time or inclination to get drawn into this now but I didn't want an incomplete summary to stand unchallenged.

That is about it. That, and that given the opportunity to apologise for it, he didn't.

He immediately lost the respect and trust of most mozillians and a lot of the public, which itself made him unfit for the role. I don't know if you can really say he was forced out; you don't keep a CEO around when nobody in a company of hundreds of employees trusts them.

> That is about it. That, and that given the opportunity to apologise for it, he didn't.

It was personal funds right? Why should he apologize? Should you apologize for buying something from a competitor? Who do you apologize to for making a private transaction with your own money?

> He immediately lost the respect and trust of most mozillians and a lot of the public, which itself made him unfit for the role.

He did? Was he unable to perform his job? They uncovered this after the deed was done. Was that faith lost while they didn't know about it? If you asked Firefox users right now: how many people would even be able to tell you about this situation?

> I don't know if you can really say he was forced out; you don't keep a CEO around when nobody in a company of hundreds of employees trusts them.

Did the employees get polled on this? (My bet is no)

Dude/dudette, you're barking up the wrong tree, I didn't care about Eich then and I don't care about him now. I'm just confirming the post YOU wrote above, so quit it with this weird tone.

Also, your expectations of a CEO of a corporation as large as Mozilla are out of whack. If Pinchai, Bezos, Satella, Musk etc were publicly put on the spot for personal views that were antithetical to their respective corporations and lost the trust of their employees and the public, they'd either apologize or lose their job. Weird hill to die on.

But that's exactly what I mean when I say political persecution.

If his political views cause him to lose the respect of his employees, and losing the respect of his employees causes him to be unfit, then his political views caused him to be unfit.

he donated in support of prop 8 in california (banning same sex marriage)

I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me. But the fact that that's considered a hostile view is precisely the kind of persecution that I mean.

I don't think they're especially successful right now.

Their President is barely holding on to majority support in Texas and is losing every purple state. He seems powerless to appease his law&order base by stopping the riots and indicting their leaders as he wants to do. Their Supreme Court justices keep ruling against them (another bid to chip away at Roe v Wade knocked down just this morning). Their online presences keep getting canceled (Twitch ban against Trump just this morning). The New York Times has decided that publishing a right-wing essay by a Senator, with which the majority of the party agrees, is a fireable offense.

Their right-wing legislature failed to repeal ObamaCare. The right-leaning Supreme Court prevented Trump from canceling DACA. Although the courts didn't explicitly prevent Trump Wall construction, they did the next best thing: allow it to get tangled up in litigation, injunctions, and counter-injunctions for 4 years, thereby preventing substantial progress.

Lots of people have lost their jobs for criticizing BLM, whereas criticizing the right is practically obligatory. I see a lot of rhetoric, and very little success.

> Lots of people have lost their jobs for criticizing BLM

I think you'd need to cite cases where it was for objective criticism of BLM, and not associated/ tangential calls for violence, and/or hate speech.

Here are a few dozen examples: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1269314030663012352.html

Quoting some of the extreme examples:

> 3/ Gordon Klein, a professor at UCLA, has been placed on leave after he refused to cancel a final exam following George Floyd's death

> 23/ David Shore, a 28-year-old data scientist, has been fired for tweeting an article by a biracial Princeton African-American studies scholar suggesting that rioting is politically counterproductive.

> 32/ Tiffany Riley, the headmistress of a high school in Windsor, Vermont, has been forced to take "administrative leave" after writing a Facebook post in which she said, “Just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I am a racist.”

> 37/ Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic truck driver, has been fired after a fellow driver put a picture of his arm hanging out of his truck window on Twitter and claimed it was the white power symbol. A BLM protest was taking place nearby.

> Find an instance of a threat of violence, regardless of context

Doesn't the fact that finding instances of violent rhetoric among alt-right posters, regardless of context, sorta make the case that maybe this is an endemic problem and not a purely political suppression?

There are a lot of really hateful people among that group, in ways that just aren't true for other politically aligned communities.

I mean, the Dirtbag Left folks have their assholes too (note that the Chapo sub was banned too), but they're comparatively rare, notable in isolation, generally have names associated with them, and (really importantly) tend to be shamed and controlled from within their own communities.

The alt right is a bunch of assholes, plus a bunch of people who make a habit of tolerating assholes. That's a toxic combination if you're Reddit.

> Doesn't the fact that finding instances of violent rhetoric among alt-right posters, regardless of context, sorta make the case that maybe this is an endemic problem and not a purely political suppression?

No? Because in an anonymous online forum anyone can just hop in and drop a “... kill em all!” message and whoops, there goes your forum. It’s impossible to prevent, at best you can only react to it. You are completely at the mercy of admins as to whether or not they believe such content is “inherent” to your community, and surprise surprise, they do.

Except, again, this doesn't happen on other large left-leaning forums at Reddit. When was the last time /r/twoxchromosomes brigaded the voting at /r/news to attack an inconvenient story? When was the last time a mod on /r/relationships was banned for hate speech?

If someone dropped a message like that they'd get banned.

What happens when a large chunk of the community is like that and moderators are not keeping harassment down?

> They are very transparently trying to kick off users/communities that they don't "like".

They are now. But what we are saying is that reddit didn't used to be like this.

Reddit used to be much less moderated, and much more in favor of free speech, almost to a ridiculous degree.

They used to allow a subreddit called jailbait, for gods sake.

Things are very different now, obviously.

Reddit has banned left leaning subs too, so there is probably something more there than first meets the eyes.

I think it'll be a good thing, Reddit and most Silicon Valley companies hostile to free speech are going to decline as competition as alternatives that truly appreciate the constitution of the country they operate in are born.

I actually like how Reddit moderates for the most part, they do keep things relatively "clean", but they are also thoroughly corrupt politically, horrendously biased in favor of anything left wing and beyond reform. Outside of a few minor subs, I don't "browse" reddit anymore at all. Everyone fair and honest who visits /r/politics or /r/worldnews knows by now they're being lied to, constantly and without relent, so only one type of reader still goes there willingly.

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