We do know that there's nothing 'private' about any social media platforms, but some people still believe that to be the case.
Now they are blatantly publicizing that private chats are being read.
Anyone remembers the outrage when gmail was analyzing emails to provide ads? What happened to that?
Google's PR seem to stay on top of that one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484883
Who is publicizing it? This is purely speculation by moderators who are not reddit employess.
Maybe ordinary mods but Reddit employees?
> Thanks for submitting this request! It’s been flagged for manual review (not a bad thing!). This might delay a decision by a couple weeks. In the meantime, please politely message the moderators of r/whatever and reply to this comment with a link to that message. Only you, the mods of r/whatever, and some admins will be able to view the message content. Including a link to this message will help speed the process along.
no, they aren't: banning the item from private messages doesn't mean that they are enforcing it by reading private messages. It could mean, for instance, that if somebody complains about you including the item in a private message, you would be in contravention of the rules.
also, a robot daemon scanning private messages for the text string would not mean that your private messages were being read in any meaningful way.
It's one thing to prevent people from saying something on a part of your platform anyone can see it but if they want to talk about it one on one with someone else (someone who presumably has a block button at their disposal) then that shouldn't be censored.
It's the difference between a billboard and a letter. Of course a 3rd party can snoop on a letter. But a billboard is content that is intentionally put in public view.