Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’
gamerevolution.com
gamerevolution.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/mcisdf/an_up...
But it's such a weaselly post.
First, it admits they didn't vet her before hiring: "We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her." Apparently, a basic google search is too difficult for HR.
Second, it says this: "On March 9th, we added extra protections for this employee, including actioning content that mentioned the employee’s name or shared personal information on third-party sites, which we reserve for serious cases of harassment and doxxing."
OK, and they _still_ didn't check why people were opposed to this person? Still no Internet search or, oh, reading the comments people were posting?
Notice that this "protection" was two weeks ago, not recently.
Who really needs to be taken to task for this: Anyone who participated in the hiring and then covering for this creep. Hiring Aimee Challenor in a well-supervised manual labor position would be commendable. Hiring Aimee Challenor as an moderator of an online forum, based on her history of moderating an online forum aimed at children, knowing her political positions (and there's no argument to be made that they didn't, as the whole thing came about because they had instituted special protections based on those) should result in jail time.
They'll remember, but still keep coming back. You can't even blame short memory for it. They literally don't care more than the inconvenience they'd face in going elsewhere for forums.
And as long as that's true, the things they dislike will keep happening.
And if you don't have a killer feature, then you've just made a clone, and you suffer the fate of all social media clones from 8chan to Voat to Vidme to Gab and Parler. As observed by Dan Olson:
> when you compete with a monolith, the first people to jump on board will be the people that were thrown off the other ship, and most of them were thrown off for a reason... before you know whats happened, toxic users will have become your core userbase, and then you're never going to recover.
I abandoned political reddit years go, and now I find myself finding less and less use for technical reddit as well
the last vestige of reddit now seems to be for the lol's and meme's but even for the base level content that started redit it is becoming less funny, and more and more cringe
Can you please provide a few of the best alternatives?
I'm absolutely sure a lot of news is completely successfully censored, and calling out the effect on the ???5%??? of stories which break through does nothing except hide that fact from us.
However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name.
This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accomplishment is being forced out of politics due to her connections to multiple pedophiles? Why did they taking such extreme steps to hide the admin's name, when they don't offer the same protections to mods or other users of the site? Does reddit have any audit trail or safeguards when admins edit comments? It would be interesting if they did a postmortem on the situation, but so far they seem reluctant to say that anything went wrong on their end.
You mean, her own father? The article says her fiancee also had been accused of saying he feels attracted to children but they claim his account was hacked, which may be true as no one in their right mind would tweet something like that.
A five year setup followed by a Twitter hack seems incredibly unlikely.
Edit: The unique name used for her partners keybase account is associated with similar content posted in 2004. The evidence appears concrete that her partner is a self-confessed paedophile.
You must be blissfully unaware of the child-oriented fetishes that exist online. I know kink-shaming is a no-no, but I find it hard to believe that adults who participate in these activities don't have any desire to include real children. Just like I find it hard to believe that someone who uses an "islamic terrorist" target at a gun range doesn't have any desire to shoot a real one.
EDIT: replace "islamic terrorist" with "gangster thug" (I don't like altering comments in this way so just pretend I did)
it's kinda like people who are really into home defense. there's nothing wrong with people who train a lot to defend against a home invasion. but with some of them, you get the impression they actually hope it happens. not a great look.
To be clear, the connection is not just that he is her father. He raped and tortured a 10 year old girl in his own house while living there with Aimee. Then after he had been charged but not yet convicted, she hired him as her campaign manager.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190602191056/https://cphpost.d... > Cartoons and drawings depicting paedophilia do not encourage people to commit child sex offences in real life, a report by experts who treat sexual problems concludes.
The report, carried out by Sexologisk Klinik, which is a part of Rigshospitalet, was ordered by the former justice minister, Lars Barfod (Konservative), after the Socialdemokraterne, then in opposition, demanded a ban on drawings and animations of children being sexually abused.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h... > The findings support the theory that potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children. While the authors do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography, they say that artificially produced materials might serve a purpose.
Her father raped and tortured (a car battery was involved) a ten year old. This happened over multiple days whilst the child was tied to the rafters in the attic of the family home. This is the same house Aimee Chancellor was living in at the time. But she claims she didn't know and she was not on trial. Regardless, during the trial photos of Aimee with the victim were discovered on Amiee's phone.
After her father was arrested and charged with 22 counts of sexual violence, she forged documents in order to hire him as her election agent. This is a position where he would have had contact with children. She was kicked out the Green party when this came to light.
She then joined another political party, and was kicked out of that after her fiance was found to have tweeted:
"I fantasise about children having sex, sometimes with adults, sometimes with other children, sometimes kidnapped and forced into bad situations."
They were both contacted by the media about this, she claimed he had been hacked, he claimed that these were only fantasies, and would never act on these urges... She later married him.
Amiee Chancellor is a despicable human being who can only be viewed positively if she is compared to the people she chooses to surround herself with.
"Amiee Chancellor is a despicable human being" is pretty heavy, but the only thing related to her in your comment is that "she forged documents in order to hire him as her election agent." Not cool, but is there more here?
Regardless, during the trial photos of Aimee with the victim were discovered on Amiee's phone.
Thanks for pointing that out. Yes of course, that's completely different.
Does anyone know where to find more info about this? It's such a strange situation.
EDIT: There are some details here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/coventry-captive...
though nothing about Aimee being in the photos. I'm curious how she wasn't implicated in that case. How weird...
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/12/green-party...
Though I have no idea, I suppose her father couldn't get a job (I suppose he has paid his 22 years in jail now) so she might have felt like she had to step in to help?? I don't find that a huge problem, though if she did indeed forge documents , then of course she should be held accountable.
EDIT: I am sorry, I hadn't read the details of the case, so I assumed the crime had happened 22 years ago (as the father was free to work, I assumed he had paid his time)... but it seems he was on bail (!!!) from the crime, which happened in 2016!!! How does one get bail after such a crime?! I withdraw my comment above, this story is far too horrible and I don't want to be on the wrong side.
I think bail before conviction is fine if the person is not a flight-risk. (Innocence before being proven guilty, etc.) Far too many stories of people who are denied or unable to post bail (usually people without power or means) and get stuck in jail for months before ever seeing trial.
EDIT: I would link sources but the only sites which have properly covered this story are highly transphobic so I will refrain.
Yes I'm being cynical but why else hire someone with such a history for a social media company?
It's exactly as I thought. They thought they had a good employee and failed to vet with due diligence.
But, in their response, they absolutely failed to convince anybody: by banning a bunch of people for posting things that are in mainstream external media. Even if it doxxes your employee, once it's in the mainstream, you can't control it.
> he claimed that these were only fantasies
This are some pretty serious accusations, and the situation is much more fucked up if true (i.e. she shouldn't just be fired, more likely jailed).
Do you have any sources to back them up?
Even assuming that Reddit learned nothing from the /u/spez-debacle and that admins can still edit comments, it would be a problem in its own right if she already had such far-reaching permissions when just getting started.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comment...
First, consider the context: the CEO (spez) was an easy punching bag on the_donald subreddit, in fact it was a bit of a meme there to attack reddit's admins (and those in the know do know that the attacks were often crossing a line, like accusing them of being pedophiles and things of the nature). The change that spez made was a bit of a joke itself, it was turning an attack on its head. If the edit had been made in the early early days of Reddit, especially in the jokey context it was made in, I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelash. But in the last few years, right around the time these things happened, it became clear that Reddit is a big deal.
I think what I'm trying to say is, whatever may be your feelings of Reddit and its stature, this particular act by spez was pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things. Indeed the subreddit that this happened in actually no longer even exists, the_donald and similar subreddits were banned to make Reddit a friendlier place such that it's now an easier decision for corporate America to put ads on there.
For comparison, I don't expect that a Google employee, or C-level executive, has an "Edit" button next to every single post on Google Groups.
Being able to silently change the content appearing under a user's name is a big deal. It's a more significant capability than being able to e.g. take down content.
That’s worse though, right? Why does he have this special functionality the other admins don’t have? Why would the CEO ever legitimately need to personally edit a reddit comment? Surely he has many better things to do.
And there are many very legitimate reasons to have the capability to modify entries in a database, but honestly even if there weren't, making a system where it's impossible for anyone other than the originating user to modify an entry is a challenging task.
He wrote the site's first version, and co-wrote the (modern) Python version. Lots of things stay in place in legacy systems.
That sounds exactly like what a Donald Trump meme subreddit would say.
https://bgr.com/2018/03/12/reddit-election-interference-stev...
The clear harm is that Reddit posts have been used in court cases. People have and will go to jail based on that content.
The unclear harm is they use “we’re being professional business” as an excuse to do unpopular and unfriendly things and also “it’s just a prank bro” when stealth editing posts... no dude. Can’t have it both ways. No one should trust this company at all, and they’re proving why.
I barely even use Reddit anymore because I simply dont trust it for an accumulation of reasons. Its ~50% astroturf for political and commercial reasons, you can somewhat easily game the votes, and I don't think they care because they make money.
It's a bit ironic that the group that likes saying how other groups are "snowflakes" get the most offended by what was essentially a joke.
“easily offended” is more often than not to be taken as “offended by something I do not find offensive”.
It was super significant in that it was evidence that Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance.
So while the individual edit was not important, the fact that it happened was. And there is an unknown number of other edits that were never disclosed and is unprovable. So Reddit broke the one thing it’s supposed to do- allow users to talk to each other.
Important for this article too because Knight claims her boyfriend’s Twitter account was hacked and someone else posted about fantasizing about kids. If it was Reddit we wouldn’t be able to know if it was Knight’s boyfriend, hackers, or some Reddit admin.
Yeah this is an issue, but let’s be real here, this matters to you me and a few other people here, and outside in the real world no-one cares. Even this expectation is new, any admin who was hosting phpbb forums or whatever else had this freedom to change a few entries in their Mysql Db, heck there was an engineer who was able to go inside people’s private gmail (https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/) — and Google is a company we expected to have better safeguards. Better security measures, sophisticated software architecture to prevent this, these things only happen after a startup reaches a high level of maturity in its timeline, Reddit hadn’t quite reached that point when this happened. I would be concerned if such a thing happened now though. Now these safeguards do exist on Reddit so there’s that.
I think it's less about the technical aspect and more about the expectation that people with the ability to change your comments won't do that. If you wrote an opinion letter to a magazine, and they published it, but only after changing a few words in your letter to make you seem dumb, everyone would understand why you were upset even though nobody would doubt that magazines have the technical capability to do this.
And I also set up audits and alarms so if someone does change things that shouldn’t be changed then alerts get pushed out to the right places for review. Even if it’s simple stuff like putting a trigger on a column that shouldn’t change so it’s logged and reviewed when someone changes it.
This is just a reasonable thing for an admin to set up. Decades ago, I got really pissed when sysadmins were just reading email and worked to set up controls so people could only do this with the right controls and reading a users’ content was a big deal that was super hard, hopefully impossible to do inappropriately.
There are situations where this has to happen right- HR investigating a complaint, laws, audits, etc- and that’s still possible. But casually browsing and changing without anyone knowing should not be allowed in any serious business. It’s not that hard to set up.
How did you come to this conclusion? It is entirely possible that there was an audit trail and governance, spez simply ignored the governance, and he would have been fired after an examination of the audit trail if he was anyone else but the co-founder/CEO.
That assumes theres an ethical corporate culture which many doubt.
If there’s not auditing to identify when someone bypasses governance, then that’s not effective auditing.
Assuming effective controls are in place without any description of them and evidence that they fail is foolish, I think.
Reddit could have shown off their governance and audit process, but didn’t. I’ve worked on similar systems where someone can just edit the db records and there have been places with no and decent governance. It’s more likely that anyone with admin rights can change stuff. This is bad for a company as big as Reddit with as many users.
Help me understand this. Reddit is a private company. Is there some sort of contract somewhere that says they won't edit messages and will maintain an audit trail? I mean, I might not like that they are doing it, but I'm also not paying a dime for Reddit (and I have all ads blocked, so they doubly aren't making any money off of me) so I don't see where I can be upset if Reddit does this. You get what you pay for.
If we want governance and audit trails, it either needs to be maintained as a public resource, paid for out of tax dollars, or needs to be a fully paid for product that involves entering into a 2 way contract. Otherwise, I think they are free and clear to do whatever they want to do with any subreddits, posts, or comments.
It was a pretty common occurrence on Twitter back when people posted their gang crap everywhere.
Surely you jest! Do you know how programs work? You don't think HN comments can't be edited by anyone with access to the DB and permission to make changes?
Frankly the idea that people on HN thought that people who run a website can't edit the content on it is one of the most bizarre, disingenuous things I've read on here.
You all know it can be done. Why is everyone pretending otherwise? Is it performative?
Still, agreed - The fact that they've now shown, multiple times, to have insufficient auditing and repercussions for the administrative abuse is sobering.
In a system as large as Reddit, there's rarely a good reason for a human to be running hand-written SQL commands in prod.
In practice, it was impossible to debug software if you didn't have knowledge of how it ran and it was impossible for teams to cooperate when designed as antagonistic. "Operations" people needed to know enough programming and SQL to be able to audit engineering access, or they became blind drones parroting the actions that the Engineering team took. A useless layer of signaling that added no substance. And it was easy to align bad actors in Ops and Eng, at least in places where it mattered - Usually with money.
My career in DevOps has been breaking down these barriers, promoting a "shared ownership" model where it's devs are directly oncall and have production credentials to their services. Still, there are serious protections in place: The passwords to the production databases are stored securely, not typically visible to devs - They have to jump through hoops of using a auditable bastion box to run SQL commands directly on the production databases. Not that it's not possible, not that it's not done (Though good engineering practices make it an uncommon task, I think we've actually used the ability half a dozen times in the last year), but as the commands are being typed they send out logs to a third-party service that's instructed to archive them. It's not hard to get access, but it would be easy to see the trail.
That said: This is on a mature team. That doesn't come out of the box and we didn't get there easily. Many teams, even with all of that protection, don't actually audit the logs, and do generate a lot of logs because of poor system behavior.
Knowing the engineering talent at Reddit, I doubt that it's a concern. Whether by malice or naivete, it has likely never crossed their mind that anyone would break protocol and access databases directly for anything other than legitimate debugging purposes. I'm convinced that the SF bay has some of the narrowest focused minds... and also many of the most malicious.
I've worked on production DBs that have had these kinds of restrictions- like, an alert gets sent if an SVP accesses a system. There are a lot of good reasons for this but most of them come down to avoiding fraud.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2681390/Cooper-Harr...
Search for 'reddit' on both pages
Legal contract? No. Social contract? Yes.
> Otherwise, I think they are free and clear to do whatever they want to do with any subreddits, posts, or comments.
I'm surprised this is where you went with your rationale. The parent was clearly saying that the intent of the communities is the ability for people to freely speak each other. Any function, especially by authority, to undermine that will erode confidence and thus eventually cause people to use the site less.
You mean like the massive russian "troll farms" that have effectively coerced people into political beliefs, or places like /r/RedPill that have galvanized young males to be ant-feminine, or WSB where thousands of people have placed savings into Gamestop. Want me to go on?
So yes there is most definitely a social contract. Just because you don't believe the information, doesn't mean others don't as well.
> It's not social. There is no contract.
You should probably read up on what "social contract" means: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/social-contract-...
Sorry I don't see your point, I work in systems in very large e-commerce multinationals and I have been given the production database credentials many times allowing me to change anything of any user or any product using the mandatory company VPN and the admin account. What are you going to track? The VPN IP and and the general admin credential that can be 100 different people not including hackers that could have compromised any of our PCs?
The only important thing is that she doesn't stand behind the comments, she denies them. So that's it. She clearly doesn't support those statements, end of story.
Doxxing on the other hand is a federal crime in the US and thus is not considered "free speech" and must be censored according to https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2261A
Whoever with the intent to kill, injure, harass, intimidate, or place under surveillance with intent to kill, injure, harass, or intimidate another person, uses the mail, any interactive computer service or electronic communication service or electronic communication system of interstate commerce, or any other facility of interstate or foreign commerce to engage in a course of conduct that causes, attempts to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to a person described in clause ...
Uh, this was already known by then, though. What made it significant is that it happened to be spez.
In court there’s a concept called “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”[1]. If you’re shown to have lied to the court once, then anything else you’ve said can be considered to be a lie as well. You lose the assumption of good faith of the judge and jury.
It might not be a courtroom, but the same concept applies to a so called “bastion of free speech” platform like Reddit.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnib...
This is the problem of free stuff, you have no leverage and little to no value to the company as a single user, and if you are the kind of problematic user such as the ones in The Donal, you have negative value because you scare away the ads and ruin the companies reputation, so they actually have a very powerful incentive to push you away and make you leave the site.
If you are not paying don't complain, just move to another site or pay for the service so you are under a different contract and relation and you are no longer the product and are the customer instead.
You are not the customer of Facebook, Reddit or Google, the ads buyers are, and the customer is always right. If they don't like your post, it makes all the sense in the world to change it, censor it or kick you out because you are making them lose money and they are not a non-profit existing to serve you. They exist to make money for their share-holders like any other corporation.
Some search engines like Duckduckgo actually keeps a bang shortcut (!) awaiting the day when that subreddit gets unbanned.
Its hard to really make something disappear completely once it's on the internet.
Ponder this. Unconstrained. Doesn't see what the big deal is. Can do, will do. Frictionless, untrackable.
Like is that really the most important thing for any CEO to do? It's incredibly stupid and worse it kills user trust. I think Reddit should have banned TD early on but I still think this act was awful.
That we know of that he admitted.
I don't like reddit, and I don't like spez for other reasons (downgraded from Lisp to Python), but what he did was literally just a harmless joke. All reddit posts and comments are publicly archived by services like pushshift; we'd know if they had a habit of doing this.
I have no stake in this story, but how could you, or anyone, possibly know that?
But I also have no stakes here.
Are you sarcastic? This is logically a very useless statement due to the nature of trust. Once trust was broken it’s hard to obtain because does clearly lied about other things, why should he be trusted now that he’s been caught.
“I’ve been remarkably open about all the extra marital affairs where I’ve been caught, please trust there are no others.”
“I’ve been remarkably open about all the robberies where I was convicted, please trust that there are no others.”
Etc etc.
I would feel foolish even presenting any unsound logic and can’t even think of a situation where it would be relevant to trust. Officiated lie detector? Sodium pentathol administered by an adversarial government? Testimony under oath?
If you have extra marital sex right in front of your spouse, that is no indication that you are hiding secret affairs.
If you walk into a police station and tell them you robbed the bank across the street, there is no reason to believe you have secretly robbed many others.
I'm not justifying it; obviously it was dumb, given that people are still using it to denigrate him years later. But the implication that this means he is more likely to have edited other peoples' posts surreptitiously is (again IMHO) not true.
In what way can you support this claim? We’re you provided any indication or proof that this is the first this has happened? Or is the first time they were caught?
More subjectively, none of us can know for certain, but this line of reasoning just isn't supported by an honest reading of the thread in question. The Reddit leadership was in between a rock ("this sub is full of white supremacists and if you don't ban them you're racist!") and a hard place ("we're being persecuted for being conservative and white and if you ban us you're racist!"). Spez isn't perfect, but he seemed to be at least trying to engage honestly and field questions about what he had done and why. After many hours of arguing with people (and, it goes without saying, taking a fair amount of insults and abuse) he did this thing where he edited some posts in a way that seemed pretty clearly to be an attempt to blow off steam.
Now, was that wise? Clearly not, and I'm not defending it. But neither is it defensible to selectively pluck the fact that he edited some posts out of its context and use it to push the idea that Reddit leadership is in the habit of editing peoples' posts surreptitiously to push a viewpoint. AFAIK that's never happened, and I feel like Reddit is under enough of a microscope that we'd know if it had.
It's been interesting to watch the community actually grow (it was thedonald.win, but there was a difference between moderators - aka the domain owner wanted to make money).
Then again so are all its subreddits, and the volunteer mods are about as opaque and strange as the admins, with the added excuse that they're doing it for free.
The fact that the ecosystem has survived seems more like happenstance.
Volunteer moderation is one of those things that must baffle economists. Here you have people putting in a lot of work for free for a profit seeking enterprise.
They do the same thing for the same reasons when it comes to peer review...
I'd wager it's either a perceived, or in some instances, actual, power that motivates a few few of these folks. I don't doubt there are do-gooders out there who want to see their artisan needlepoint subreddit do well, so they volunteer their time to the community... but I also believe that once a community reaches a certain size, the folks motivated by power start to seep in.
More often than not, the man who seeks power is ill-suited to have it.
Not that I think there's a way to force that, but the disconnect is still there.
Agreed about the folks who want power. When I moderated a large forum and we picked new moderators we had a rule where anyone who lobbied 'too hard' to be a moderator was automatically out. What is funny is that if you followed those users they often ended up banned later on ...
Don't they have to mingle with whoever decides who's going to be promoted to admin or moderator? For indirect votes via party lists, I think it's quite similar, isn't it? You don't have to convince the public, you just have to convince the tiny amount of people that decides who's placed on the list.
Granted its a trust thing, I get it, but it's also a disconnect.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/mbqgx2/a_clarif...
It's astonishing to me that a person like this can become an admin on a website used by millions of teenagers. We already know that admins can access private messages and other personal information.
- positions of power (we have had a few in france who were judges / party representatives etC...)
- any job close to children, which includes in particular schools, but also..
- church
Why ? Because if you woke up tommorow as a pedophile, without any morals, and wanted to maximise the "chances" to satisfy your sexual attraction, where would you go ? Exactly.
At sone point "if you are not a groups of pedohpiles covering each other, dont act like a group of pedophiles covering each others".
If i was pedophile i would absolutely go to the church, also because so many people have their faith blind the truth. The "cant even imagine" its possible this "respectable priest" can do that.
And yes you are right, i also forgot sport trainers.
It has nothing to do with child sexual abuse per sē, but simply that it's modus operandī, and that of many other organizations seems to be silence money to protect it's brand.
Surprisingly that's all I hear about in the media. I've been looking for hard data and haven't been able to find any, especially for things like priests vs teachers vs other people. Do you have any data on that?
What I am convinced of is that the ratio of those that break the law in crimes that typically involve abuse of power, are more commonly found in positions of power.
The average pædophile will live his life without ever breaking any such laws, by either lack of willingness, or lack of opportunities awarded by such power.
Schools! Oh...you went a different route. Right, we don't acknowledge the widespread sexual misconduct and cover-ups in the schools for another 5 years in this timeline because the church story was just so juicy.
that said reports in general are between like 1% and 10% of the total abuse so i'm not sure how significant it is
The Greens control Brighton unequivocally. There are Greens and LibDems in the House of Lords. The LibDems forced through a referendum on PR. They may seem like a harmless joke but they do wield power in their own way.
And therefore, they will try to get those positions where they are in power. I don't know if this was ever investivated, but it makes sense to me.
Edit: when you look at the dad in this story, raping and torturing a child seems more like the power aspect than the sexual one.
and in that case the father was dressing as a child when he was torturing the girl according to an article so i'm not sure he was looking specifically for power more than being downright crazy.. but why not
We likely hear a lot of places like Churches, hospitals, and schools, because historically people were pretty quiet about what went on there, and now all these horrible historic revelations are coming out one after another.
I can imagine access to children being a factor too, although actual pedophiles have an instinctual emotional closeness with children which might influence them towards those positions. If any are in those positions and see this, I really hope you don't do anything to anyone there.
The highest frequency of abuse actually happens in none of those places but at home. It is usually a family member who does it. Sometimes, it may even involve drugs, rather than a sexual interest. I'm not very fond of the War on Drugs, as it destroys lives, but I really hope people use drugs responsibly, when / if they do. And we may need better mental health services to reduce the perceived need to rely on alcohol / drugs.
From what I know, pedophilia is a spectrum, which goes from very weak (insignificant and easy to ignore for most intents and purposes) to the exclusive type. There are some sub-types, like ones who are only interested in infants, rather than older children. Pedophiles aren't synonymous with abusers. Many don't abuse.
On the one hand, you've got the (reasonable) rule "always condemn and distance yourself from pedophilia". On the other hand, you've got the also reasonable rule "never discriminate against someone because of their gender". If the Greens, Lib Dems, Reddit, or anyone else involved had chosen not to hire her, she could stir up outrage against them for gender discrimination. If they did hire her, the public could stir up outrage against them for their connection to pedophiles.
It's easy to agree that both pedophilia and gender discrimination are bad. It's harder to take action, especially when people have prior agendas.
We don't even need to hypothesize this specific "if", because that's exactly what she did[0] after being ousted from Green Party due to all the pedophilia-related concerns.
Preying on children, or advocating for those who want to, is a significantly bigger problem than the _accusation_ of bias based on preference.
I find that every time I read about such matters, it is from some Anglo-Saxon place where emotions about such matters seem to run high.
I cannot think of any Dutch occurrence of someone being dismissed from a party alleging any gender discrimination, and I would to what extent such arguments are truly something that sways the Anglo-Saxon, because every time I see them made, publicly or privately, they seem to be coming from an Anglo-Saxon source, in particular the U.S.A., but the U.K. is not very far behind.
But perhaps, it is simply a function of district-based politics where one votes for the man, rather than the party, so the personal life and identity of politicians takes a far grander scale than in other systems.
The most similar situation that comes to mind was the situation of Philomena Bijlhout in 2002, who was terminated after having lied about being a member of the Bouterse Militia when the December Murders occurred.
That was that; — he was terminated without any further drama or allegations that it was political gamesmanship, sexism, racism, xenophobia, manipulated evidence or anything else when the pictures that proved his word false surfaced.
I find that U.S.A. and U.K. politicians often have what I would consider petulant blame shifting when such matters occur that I feel are not strategic and only serve to bury them deeper, so I wonder if they actually are strategic in such a political climate of districts which creates far more extensive tribalism and voter loyalty, whereof I wonder if it contributes to actually making such claims worthwhile.
I have noticed that the U.S. and U.K. population seems to be very loyal in general and often unreasonably defend a cause, product, and man to the death, even when flaws are apparent.
The fact that someone could pretend you aren't hiring them because of their gender is moot when you can simply point to the real reason you're not hiring them.
If I'm faced with the question of whether to hire an unrepentant serial killer, I'm not going to let their gender inform my decision. That's not "balance" in any way.
Sex trafficing is just something police like to bring up at press conferences when they arrest women for prostitution. Often they don't actually charge anyone with it though, it just sounds cool to say so they do it.
Human trafficking (for non-sexual exploitation), sex trafficking, and non-coerced criminalized sex work have differences; but they all are very real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_protocols
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Trafficking_and_Vio...
I understand you have anecdotes from 2 women which describe non-coerced criminalized sex work, which is not sex trafficking.
My information comes from decades of global, publicly available and verified data. Sex trafficking is a real thing, and you delegitimize its victims when you say otherwise.
https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/136020.pd...
Unfortunately not so astonishing, people like that are drawn to and commonly inhabit exactly the kinds of places you wouldn’t want them. There are some fairly recent public examples you could easily find.
unfortunately all of these platforms focus almost exclusively on subjective "We know bad things when we see them" type of rules
The only part that astonishes me is that Reddit hired the person. It suggests they are either not performing proper background checking (terrible), or they are and decided to overlook what they found (even worse).
Allowing a person who willfully ignored pedophilia and torture be in a position of power near/directly engaging with minors, and then hiring that person, is despicable.
Key quote from this article: https://freebeacon.com/culture/reddit-faces-massive-user-pro...
I deactivated my reddit account and blocked reddit domains on my devices this morning as a result of the censorship. So now I'm cut off from any more reddit interaction and can't provide anything further. Also, Challenor and other admins deleting evidence and permabanning people is like, the whole issue.
I meant the one about moderating a number of subreddits pertaining to minors. I'm aware of the other claims.
Are you talking about replacing contents / titles with "[Removed by Reddit]"? That's the "Content Removed by Reddit Admins" category in https://www.redditinc.com/policies/transparency-report-2020-...
From context I've seen elsewhere, my guess is that the mod posted the text of the Spectator article in its entirely as a comment on their submission. Then, someone edited out the sentence which contained a passing mention of Aimee, but in a nongrammatical way. Then someone went back to fix the edit, and a little while later the comment was full-on deleted (so now it shows up as [ Removed By Reddit ]) [2]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/mbytxw/_/gs0wor...
[2]: Visible from the mod's user page but not on the submission itself
It seems to me that the biggest problem with that specific situation, assuming the description is indeed correct, isn't that the admins of a forum have the power to edit content on their own site, but rather that if the content has been edited by the admins then this isn't necessarily being disclosed transparently to others, and by extension the original author might still be held responsible for something they did not in fact write.
You might expect that, for legal CYA reasons if nothing else, a forum of Reddit's prominence where controversial subjects are sometimes discussed would at least keep some sort of irrefutable log of any changes made by its admins and clearly mark any content that has been edited by admins to avoid misrepresenting the original author. However, going by various other comments made over the past couple of days, it looks like this might not be the case, which seems dangerous for both Reddit and the people writing the content that gets changed.
> "I messed with the “f*** u/spez” comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour," Huffman said, indicating that the only thing he secretly altered was the target of the insults.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
Does anyone have screenshots showing these various states?
Is there even a shred of evidence this person did anything illegal, immoral or unethical themselves?
they hired their dad, BEFORE he was even convicted of crimes she had nothing at all to do with. That's the worst thing this person ever did?
Usually I'm not a "cancel culture" critic but this is just insane.
No, and despite being told multiple times over the years they have not made any attempt to develop anything like this, despite it being an obvious step to prevent admins from controlling group think on the site.
My theory is that the company is worried that if they start letting people see under the covers that all the users will realize how much the site is used to manipulate them... deletions of "wrong think", bot posts, etc.
Hiring trans people gets you a lot of Virtue Credits. The incentives are clearly there.
It’s ridiculous, of course. And I say this as a trans person.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348255/reddit-moderator...
Also, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence alleging Ghislaine Maxwell was a powerful mod on reddit, with a very disgusting collection of "evidence"[2]
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/ghislaine-maxwell-attended-k...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/hnckn0/umaxwellhil...
How can you advocate for women's rights and inclusion while fraternizing with Epstein and not seeing anything wrong with that... man, it bummed me out.
We've just witnessed two celebrities on the same show, make tweets comparing a political situation to Nazism. Only one was fired for it.
One was conservative, the other liberal. If you immediately knew that one kept their job based purely on that description, the question of why Reddit would hire such a disastrous individual becomes much less mysterious.
https://metro.co.uk/2021/03/24/chaos-at-reddit-as-dozens-of-...
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-reddit-censoring-the-...
they couldn't have handled this worse
It's still somewhat difficult to find a clear explanation because the admins were banning people who mentioned her by name (despite the fact that she is a public/political figure in the UK). That had an extremely chilling effect on the discussions, but now the Streisand Effect is kicking in.
At what point do you acknowledge that her partner has been doxxed as a self-confessed paedophile? The alternative would involve an incredibly elaborate plot targetting a random US citizen years before he happened to meet the person involved.
Someone also mentioned that she lived in the same house at the time her father locked up and tortured the ten year old. If you’re oblivious to someone being tortured under you’re roof, you’re either really naive or part of the problem.
this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that you often have to follow a link to expand the tree, that you then have to back out of to get back to the main thread. I have 16GB of RAM and a 27" screen. I can handle expanding a tree of text inline.
I don't follow. I just opened a random comment thread, and counted comments being shown up to seven levels deep (which was the deepest comment.) Is the behavior you describe only if you're logged out or something?
Try opening your link in an incognito browser.
If I go to the link posted above [1], I first see a much narrower window (careful, don't click on the black area to the sides, or you'll go back to the subreddit, the whole thing is basically a modal dialog now). Then I see one single comment, and it itself is half cut off. Below it I see a bunch of "related" content: https://imgur.com/a/tyaheDC
If I click the button to expand, I see no comments deeper than two deep: https://imgur.com/a/HDlNYFK
To see deeper any any thread, I have to click a link which doesn't expand the comments but takes me to its own link thread. To get back I need to use the browser back button and my context is lost.
They do not want users to engage with existing comments at all. The first comment is half cut off. The rest are hard to get to. They appear to want you to consume the posted content, and maybe post your own comment if you like.
I don't think this is right, unless there's an "old new" reddit and a "new new" reddit. Old reddit doesn't have the alien avatars, or the lines indicating the thread. Also, the usernames are blue, and it looks entirely different in numerous other ways.
What I suspect you are comparing is the logged out experience and the logged in experience.
The difference is that I open the threads in a new tab, instead of just clicking on them. Also I am logged-in (so no related content below) and I have an ad blocker.
This typically happens if you google something and the answer is on reddit.
Edit: lol, I participate in a lot of contentious threads here, but this simple question where I am genuinely trying to understand something has generated the most downvotes.
Reddit is precariously close to doing a 'Digg'.
It wastes too much screen estates for no reason. On my screen about half the width is wasted on the left and right blank spaces.
It breaks a lot of subs' custom theming.
The comment section navigation is horrible. It only shows comment maybe 5-6 level deep and if you expand then you will have to "go back" later. When you first go into a thread, it also doesn't show all comments, and instead requires an additional click to "View entire discussion".
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
Sure, you yourself can still write a couple of solid paragraphs about a topic (the norm on Reddit until just a few years ago), but you will very look out of place among the one-line comments. With time, you feel pushed out of what used to be your own community.
I can't tell if this is organic or not. If so it might be people leaving Facebook who aren't capable of irony enough to be interesting, but I think it's mobile-optimizing karma farmers.
I've learnt through the years that "about us", "company policies" and "our values" pages are mostly marketing bullshit.
Who we hire, fire and promote show the actual values of a company.
What does this mean regarding reddit, considering this situation?
Everybody should draw their own conclusion.
eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26567842
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557175
In other words, HN's submission filter is fairly aggressive, I doubt anything nefarious is taking place.
I doubt there's a conspiracy of users flagging them, either, so you're most likely correct.
In other words, is Reddit telling the truth when they stated it was autoban mistake?
For every mod that "leaves", dozens more will gladly step up to take over.
Reddit Admins will also not think twice to remove mods that do things like this to "hurt reddit"
Booting people off core infrastructure (IaaS, colo, DNS) for reasons outside violation of law is a very slippery slope.
Probably it would be bad if the only speech allowed on popular web sites were speech that wasn't illegal anywhere, or illegal in only a few places.
If a specific country outside of where Reddit's servers are hosted has a problem with it, then they're welcome to ban it.
Gab/etc were accused of inciting violence, threats of physical harm, treason, etc. Reddit hasn't been accused of anything like that recently. Regardless of reality, infrastructure companies can make their own decisions on who is guilty and innocent.
You're right about accusations though. It seems that accusation alone is the key factor in whether you remain on AWS. Doesn't aspire confidence in AWS, does it.
https://wannabewonk.com/gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet/
There's a technical term for something that's borderline legal: legal.
Looks like all this drama is to give an illusion of control and free speech. Am I missing some other dynamic at play?
Nobody should be under any illusion that they "own" their subreddits.
However, the philosophical positioning Reddit has taken historically is that the Moderators own the subreddits, so yanking one away wholly from the moderation group would mark a substantial shift away from that positioning.
Maybe that's a good thing for Reddit, though.
Not much of a departure -- they've done it.
Reddit absolutely loves to yank smaller subreddits from mods.
Seems anthropomorphic to me...
I don't doubt admins and "powermods" are often the same people, and I'm not defending the morality of reddit as an org. However, the etiquette is that mods have total control over their subs as long as site-wide rules and real laws are not violated.
The issue for me is I don't know of other good places for long-form discussion and good link aggregation in general. Most of the time in smaller subreddits there aren't really any issues.
What alternative is there to /r/AskHistorians? Etc.
The absolute rank doesn't really tell you where the next closest competitor is.
Digg was pretty big for the time. The competitor I used the most back then was slashdot and I'd say digg was considerably bigger.
I have an idea that the future will not be in content silos and volunteer moderation by power hungry people... but I certainly don’t know how to get there so I’ll wait. I suspect the future will be “subscription lists” you join that block things people you generally agree with flagged, but this may bubble issue like we have now.
I mean, their tagline "the front page of the Internet" screams arrogance to me, in the face of what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the Internet to be, and yet it's probably not wrong at this point.
There is no popular alternative now, but something could appear eventually.
Yet, there's no proportional response in this case.
How things were sorted on the main page, obstensively to stop from getting botted, was a secondary concern as most people just read and don't comment.
haven't been around reddit for long then, have you
The Donald wasn't a white supremacist subreddit.
In fact even moderate liberals on reddit often complain of being attacked and banned for expressing even a slightly different opinion on supposedly politically neutral subs.
it would be fine if it only came from users, one can just ignore nasty DMs and such, the problem is admins and mods are heavily censoring opinions and ban all dissent, so echo-chamber effects are extremely strong.
And it's not only political sub-reddits, the entire site is promoting a particular political ideology in a most "soviet" way possible.
No, that is not an overstatement.
The refrain of "just create your own subreddit" is not practical to combat the indoctrination being manipulated to the top by these orgs. IIRC commondreams.org is behind the /r/AOC and /r/MurderedByAOC subreddits entirely.
Do you have evidence of that?
The mod of those subs is /u/IrlOurPresident, and the submissions are restricted to pretty much only that account. That is where to start to trace down the claim.
Not much.
| That is where to start to trace down the claim.
I can't find any link between that user and commondreams.
And look at the submissions, and the vote count of submissions. I do not have the comments I read several weeks ago available, but in my many years on reddit, I have no doubt there is clear vote manipulation occurring.
inb4 "those are different things", I know.
That's what I looked for. You should have better evidence than a highly active user in a restricted access subreddit before making an assertion like that. Especially considering how wildly popular AOC is, I don't see any evidence of manipulation.
The notion that individual subreddits mean Reddit Is What You Make of It is useful only to distract just like you’re (unintentionally) doing here. It helps deflect some of these situations by having folks who unsub all defaults saying “looks great here!”
The subreddit was banned, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, a very popular conservative social media platform was kicked off of its hosting providers, etc. Regardless of your political views, it is abundantly clear that certain viewpoints and opinions are being suppressed, which is fundamentally contradictory to free speech and American values.
Donald Trump is a billionaire and a former president. He can and does call into Fox News, et. al and immediately has an audience of millions. The idea that his speech is being suppressed is absolutely ridiculous .
Why exactly should private entities be forced to host content that they choose not to host?
Where did you get that idea? No one is forcing a provider to host content they do not wish to host, and my comment made no mention of such a thing.
Regardless, that's completely orthogonal to the fact that certain view points are being suppressed. How do you consider such an assertion to be ridiculous? Do you consider something suppressed only when all mentions, everywhere, of a particular topic, are erased? I don't think you do. Just because those opinions have not been _fully_ suppressed does not mean they _are_ being suppressed, as indicated by examples such as the bans and erasures previously mentioned.
You previously said:
> a very popular conservative social media platform was kicked off of its hosting providers, etc
The hosting provider kicked off the social media platform. They didn't want to host that platform. Nor should they be forced to host it. What's more, your whole point seems to be that because Donald Trump has been banned from some platforms, that his speech is being suppressed. But those platforms, which are private entities, are choosing not to allow him to post on their platforms. So you seem to be complaining about private entities choosing what and what not to host on their platforms.
And the bigger point, Donald Trump is free to go out into the public square and voice whatever viewpoint he has. Some networks, social media companies, etc. will cover it (in fact, a lot of them will). No one is stopping him from doing this. Just because he can't tweet it doesn't mean his speech is being suppressed.
Freedom of association is a deeply American concept. Within certain parameters, I can ban anyone I want from my business.
The problem here is that certain entitled people feel entitled to use other peoples' property as their own.
Also... just noting that many of those same users went on to do arguably the most unAmerican thing in American history - they attempted to end it.
You can spit and puff all you like, but I won't be listening to a word you have to say about who is and isn't acting in the American tradition.
Try it. You'll be censored, down voted (real votes or not), shadow banned and actually banned.
> To my knowledge that is not at all the case. There's even one subreddit dedicated to asking Trump supporters questions, although posts have to be approved by the moderators.
I doubt there are any left given that they can't post anywhere.
"It is well known the admins wanted TD banned" is a direct lie. I doubt you have better insight than anyone else about what was going on inside Reddit.
But regardless, as concerning as these policing decisions are, it's not clear how any of this stuff affects a reader of only apolitical, non-default subreddits.
I appreciate the attempted correction despite it being wrong.
Edit: Sigh, HN being HN. I’m rate limited and can’t respond to persistent, sustained miscorrection over a single word choice in a much broader point, because I spent all my thought tokens defending the word choice, which matters approximately zero, instead of the point.
Being unaware of something is orthogonal to being affected by it.
Edit: The parent has edited their comment since my reply to be more specific. I'm not sure I agree, but it's now not as obviously wrong as I outlined here.
I can only speak to what I experience and I can't pretend my experience is something it's not. If that is unintentionally distracting from some greater purpose, too bad I guess. I'm not about to get on board with a perspective I have not experienced and do not understand.
I used to say the same thing you have here to say pretty much the same thing about Reddit. That’s why I cited my experience in response, as you say you’re sharing yours, to point out that beyond what you’ve experienced there’s some nuance you may not have considered (and learning it was valuable to me).
That's one of the foundational causes to all the violence and ignorance in the world if we say "get on board" means "can tolerant and respect"
Maybe there are some more niche more secluded "better" subreddits. But as far as unpopular goes DermatogoyQuestions is pretty niche, and is oriented towards doctors and patients. And yet the worst parts of reddit still get here, and are upvoted straight to the top.
These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons.
IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wittiest comments are likely spontaneous. And lurkers are not likely to engage in a discussion if they feel it may be off topic.
So we miss out on spontaneous humor and the random insights of brilliant people.
All of this makes reddit a sadder experience.
Reddit is where you go if you begrudgingly vote Democrat but think that liberals and progressives have gone too far.
I do wonder what the political landscape is going to look like in the next decade if/when Republicans realize that there's huge huge swaths of young and young-ish people they could easily convert if they just dropped all the gods & guns & murica branding and gave up on social issues.
This is just a passing trend though, 10 years ago everyone on the internet was libertarian. Which is how you knew the internet wasn't real. Nobody's actually a libertarian in real life.
I'm going to assume what you mean is that nobody lives entirely by Libertarian ideals. While that may be true, it's true of every other political category as well, so I guess nobody is anything under that logic.
On the internet there's that political compass site that tells people they're libertarians, but it was made by libertarians so I think it's a recruiting tool.
But it's also true that people don't practice it in real life. Drug legalization, yes, that's going somewhere if slowly, but the right wing libertarians still tend to be NIMBY in local politics.
They haven't, like, done anything though. Not many politicians elected, no drugs legalized, noone freed from prison, state control over people generally not reduced. I have heard of a few attempts to start libertarian cities that failed because you can't get a Walmart when your taxes are too low to construct a sewer line.
Practically nothing makes it to the front page organically these days. It's all orchestrated.
Admittedly, I think I see those more on obviously humor subreddits (r/jokes) or smaller subreddits. I'm actually happy that places like r/science delete comments that are simply effortless jokes.
Reddit might have cleaned their act up a bit but it still a gross wild west.
On an unrelated note, isn't spivak a gender?
Then they changed the subreddit rules and only accept "Notable" people for IAMAs and r/casualiama was born. In the 10 years I've been at Reddit it has changed a lot, including some "niche" communities that I was at, as Reddit becomes more popular all it's subreddits degrade into Meme collections.
If you want to find older posts you have to use a search engine.
Unfortunately, it seems like the only options out there are either:
1) Reddit clones, that attract people who are angry about the worst subreddits getting banned at one point or another. Pretty much nothing but non-witty hate speech, and meta discussion about how much Reddit sucks.
2) Random phpBB bulletin boards, that are too small to have the critical mass of early Reddit. Of course, today's Reddit is WAY too big, and suffers from the "Eternal September" problem. A smaller, lesser-known alternative would be great. But it has to be large ENOUGH, or else it's not much different from a private Slack or Discord.
Today I'm out looking for alternatives again, which brings me to HN. There's something magical about early reddit, but I don't think it's unique, I think it existed on usenet and bulleting boards and other stuff before my time, I think it will exist again, but if it exists right now, it's a carefully guarded secret that I haven't stumbled upon yet.
I hope a new one emerges.
I also miss when the youth of the time weren't so in favor of heavy-handed censorship. The current zeitgeist puts the CCP to shame.
It is only useful to me for very, very small subs that act like enthusiast forums of old.
I was a part of a few subs where sub moderators chose to participate in some reddit protest and go private.
The response to closing the sub temporarily, by the users you see in the sub was nearly 100% negative and a series of moderators who nobody ever sees came out to defend their choice simply demonstrated how disconnected from the sub they were (some didn't even seem to know the sub rules...).
There's a weird multi level stratification on reddit with admins, mods and users and I'm not convinced any of the 3 see eye to eye / understand each other.
https://twitter.com/mcopelov/status/1374544227300999169
(At one point a Nordic politician asked Bernie to stop calling them socialist.)
Which does have a more classic feel.
Is there any popular link aggregator on the internet that this doesn't apply to?
This is probably because I'm focusing my participation on subs where the users are unified by a similar interest in an area of creative expression and participation.
Follow controversy, anger or FUD and you'll just get sucked into it in a sort of meta way. Anger because of the anger, controversy because of the controversy, FUD because of the FUD.
I agree that reddit shouldn't be censoring anyone or certain topics since it feel like a public utility. But if I were to have a blog, I think I should be allowed to block someone or delete certain comments based on how I think my blog should be, but my blog isn't a public utility. Or is it?
daringfireball.net is a blog with no comments and at some point someone wrote a browser extension that just adds a comment section the owner of the site has no control over. Bit mean but that could always happen to you.
I get the impression that U.S. social media companies have a very sympathetic mindset and relationship with the CCP driven by social media company's desire to use their technology to surveil and drive the economic, social, and political direction of humans on a mass scale.
That only governments and their agents are qualified to perform act of censorship.
What Reddit is doing unambiguously qualifies as censorship. It is also perfectly legal, but that's not the point.
You're mistaking the argument here. The argument is that a private company exercising censorship isn't violating a US person's constitutional right to free speech because the two things are different. It doesn't mean its not censorship and it doesn't mean it can't be unethical. It just means that the company has the legal right to censor whatever they want.
However, I really feel to clarify that I feel that reddit is in the wrong in endorsing the action of an admin that was clearly censoring mention of their name from the news.
The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following!
People like to scream "censorship" and social media companies rally behind that and their protection from liability. Arguments are made that making editorial decisions about what gets purchased is a moral or legal risk. That's a bunk argument, because social platforms have no problem at all promoting dangerous, wrong or even illegal content to maximize engagement. Let's be real here -- for all of the weighty principles brought up here, a significant chunk of reddit engagement is porn.
Those people have always existed. When I was a kid in the 80's, supermarkets carried tabloid newspapers with headlines like "Boy born with head of a bat" or "leading telekinetics agree that world will end in six days". The difference now is that while most of us just shook our heads and dismissed those tabloid newspapers, nobody was pressuring the supermarkets themselves to ban their sale.
So when deluded people read something outlandish online, they're now left free to assume that some halfway-trustworthy real-world entity must be endorsing those claims. There's no expectation of critical thinking or skeptical debate about what we see online because real-world norms are very different, and it all gets conflated as "what's mainstream".
Editorial standards in the normal media didn’t allow for the type of propaganda that is mainstream today. The NY Times didn’t write about Bigfoot, because it’s silly and would detract from their reputation. Who would take a publication talking about batboy seriously?
Reddit/Twitter/Facebook specifically denies accountability for anything - they hijack the credibility of organizations AND you to drive engagement, period. If the content is gross, it’s not “their fault”.
Why exactly is this a problem?
These people would deliberately enable corporations to restrict your freedoms, and are simply seeking justification after the fact for it by hiding in the letter of the law, and ignoring its spirit. This goes against the fundamental values of the West and goes against what anyone who ever wrote a free speech law would have intended.
Reddit is one of the public squares of the internet. The only content that should be banned sitewide should be content that is expressly illegal in the countries that host their servers. That's it. Subreddit moderators should have a much firmer hand, because if you don't like a sub, you can create another one. The site as a platform, which was created expressly to be a bastion of free speech originally, should not be in the business of banning people for their ideas.
Reddit instead picks and chooses what people can say and think, and can't even hide behind 'obscenity' as they allow plenty of porn but don't allow anyone who doesn't abide by their strange new set of ill-defined postmodern values. Can we get a list of the concepts that fall into their new wrongthink? Hardly.
I'd prefer they just state their policy aloud, in clear terms, rather than couching it. Just say you can't advocate for or even argue in favour of white people, for men, for heterosexual cisgendered people on the platform. Just be honest and say it like it is. It would be much less insulting and much easier to deal with conceptually if there was even a shred of honour in their approach.
"You know, a free press is not freedom for the thought you love, but rather for the thought you hate the most. People need to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world so they can be free." -Larry Flynt
Reddit has always had the ability to censor.
> We will try to moderate our platform fairly, but we reserve the absolute right to do so arbitrarily and capriciously. Users are not entitled to any explanation or recourse.
That should be the extent of any social media platform's content policy. I think we'd all be better off setting expectations properly and honestly.
[0]: https://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-th...
>Cries to censor it would sound out, to be almost inevitably beaten back by cries of "free speech!" The idea of free speech is sacred to many Reddit users, a product of the free-wheeling online message board culture from which Reddit springs.
> [...] admin u/landoflobsters explains that it was not the company’s intention to remove any mention of Knight’s name, but that there had been “overzealous automaton” when it came to preventing doxxing and harassment. The admin explained that an internal error had led to the suspension of a moderator who had posted Knight’s name, and that the company had “communicated clearly” with the affected party as they resolved the situation.
A now fixed error would not count as censorship. He might be lying, but there's enough reasonable doubt to allow for quotes IMO.
On a side note, though, it's funny that the article choose to put quotes around “communicated clearly” as well.
That's mismanagement that doesn't even see it's mismanagement.
A policy problem that affects a person in leadership affects everyone in the group. They should have communicated with the affected parties and it sounds like they left it to the moderator to sort everybody else out.
They chose... poorly.
A handful of people who mostly delegate work to slave labor (volunteer moderators) and only take action themselves to monitor and maintain the slaves.
Reddit employees have no purpose other than to crack the whip at moderators.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/mbbm2c/welcome_...
It sounds like things are still very much opaque.
I've seen that repeated a lot, but every time followed by a correction that said part of the article was quoted in the comment.
The best possible outcome is for Knight to take all of these highly selective champions of free speech to the cleaners in court for 'harassment.'
Keep this in mind as you see other people claiming falsely that anything is still being censored.
totally understandable, right?
/s
The allegation is that the name was only mentioned in the body of a linked (paywalled) article though...
The "publicly known" part is the key here. She is a public figure who held prominent political positions. She has her own wikipedia page. There were plenty of news articles featuring her name since forever ago.
>The allegation is that the name was only mentioned in the body of a linked (paywalled) article though
This is imo just a cherry on top.
> Automation tends not to take five minutes, edit people's comments to remove publicly available information on public figures(in this case a passing one sentence mention that did not even mention reddit or admins), make typos on that edit, re-edit them again later to fix the typos and then permanently suspend posters with still no reply on their appeal after almost a day.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/mbytxw/daily_me...
Of course in this instance it appears the opposite happened and nobody knew Challenor (a pretty obscure figure whose political career probably deserves the past tense) was involved with Reddit at all until the modding Streisanded it.
What? Alexis Ohanian doesn't post under his real name, he posts under u/kn0thing. And it isn't a recent thing, that has been his username from the very beginning.
(All of which is moot anyway if the interventions were manual. Their PR would have been probably been a lot better blaming an anonymous human admin and reinstating the post too...)
This is "cancel culture" in a very dangerous form, one that if taken to its conclusion, could prevent someone from ever being employed again. That is a very harsh punishment, handed out without a trial or defense, it is NOT justice.
Furthermore, it puts a potentially chilling effect on employers, and harm employees. The first reaction of employers will be to keep their employee identities entirely secret, and to enforce that secrecy in the work contract. This will harm workers who want to move to a different job, and talk about the work they did.
My firm hope is that this protest is more an emphatic bug report than a mob looking to murder someone's career after spending about 30 seconds thinking about it from all sides.
Don't you mean at best?
Unless you have proof that the allegations are false then you cannot say the absolute worst case is she has a questionable history.