Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest
theverge.com
theverge.com
They have essentially trimmed all alternative thought or discussion from the website and turned places like /r/news, which used to be a moderate and balanced place of discussion, into a completely one-sided echo chamber of modern progressive politics.
The part I find most humorous is I only discovered /r/NoNewNormal this morning and found the posts there to be genuinely kind hearted, open to rational discussion, welcoming and positive. Yet they were obliterated hours later and are now being described by media outlets as evil anti-vaccine bullies. It must be nice to wield the power to delete your ideological enemies in one stroke and then get to describe them however you want across 10 media outlets without chance for rebuttal, debate, or explanation.
This has been going on for years. After the Orlando nightclub massacre in 2016, /r/news and /r/worldnews completely shut down postings about it because a Muslim was the killer. /r/askreddit and, yes, /r/the_donald opened up discussion threads because there was no alternative on Reddit.
(Also, like, stop blowing your dogwhistle so damn loud.)
First, I was never part of said "immense pressure" so don't speak on my behalf.
Second, please read the links I posted elsewhere. /r/news's moderators, and Reddit's own CEO, admitted that the subreddit had completely bungled coverage of the shooting. As the Washington Post article and the replies to the previous posts discuss, they did more than that; for hours it was impossible for /r/news visitors to learn that a mass murder of 50 people in a nightclub had happened at all. I am a witness of the censorship on that subreddit that day.
Third, I question whether there was ever "immense pressure" in the US to do such a thing. Even in New Zealand, where said immense pressure by the government and others caused the manifesto written by the mosque attacker to be universally censored, and overseas sites hosting footage of the shooting itself were blocked, at least the public knew such an attack had occurred in the first place.
>(Also, like, stop blowing your dogwhistle so damn loud.)
Ah yes, the fabled "dog whistle". AKA "I can't find something to attack in what ideological opponent said, so I'm going to pretend that what he said actually means something else, and attack that instead".
The dog whistle in your earlier post is that the mean old liberals wouldn't let you talk about violence committed by Muslims, but fortunately Donald's fans were there to give you a space; how generous of them.
There's an obvious ideological one-sidedness amongst mods on reddit and they do what anybody does after acquiring absolute power. They crack down on dissent. It was the other way around 20 years ago when the neocons were in power. Back then, the liberals were all for free speech and alternative news sources. It's just humans at work.
I'm sorry if you thought liberals were better human beings than the rest.
I know that liberals aren't great people. But y'all're cryptofascists, not liberals, and you're far worse.
One of the first things the Americans did in Iraq was to shoot at a hotel full of journalists. They killed a Spanish journalist called Jose Couso. His family tried to get justice for 10 years. Even Wikileaks tried to help. They couldn't do anything. He had been effectively silenced and they got away with it. Still, more journalists went and told us what was going on, so you should be thanking the news.
What reddit banned wasn't a smear campaign of fake news. It was an accurate account of something which had happened. They decided the public shouldn't know about it. The only thing that does is people learn about it from media linked to the other side. It just destroys trust. "What else don't they want us to know?" People are going to learn about it anyway. They're just going to read it from a media that's far less sympathetic. So that's a pretty bad own goal. There is no suppressing the news altogether. Can't be done. Have a think about this one.
Hiding stuff and lying is never good for the public. Transparency and truth are good things, even when they don't help your side, because better informed people make better decisions. The trick is to be on the side of transparency and truth, and to update your opinions accordingly, rather than falling in line under a partisan flag or banner and suppressing conflicting evidence.
There is no dogwhistle here. Reddit banned discussion because they're partisan and the news hurt their side. Sorry.
Finally, it's very funny the guy in favour of suppressing the news is calling the guy in favour of transparency and open media a cryptofascist.
Also, seriously, stop blowing the fucking dogwhistles. "Even Wikileaks tried to help," you say? Did Wikileaks send their peacekeeping forces, raise the issue in UN, wage a legal fight in USA courts to stop the killing? The Yes Men did more to stop the Iraq & Afghanistan wars than Wikileaks.
Good luck trying suppress the news further. You may find temporary success. But dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And as long as men die, liberty will never perish.
We're done.
The scientific method requires hypothesis tested by experimentation. Have we fully proven via experimentation any facts about long term side effects from the Covid vaccine? Of course not, we have not had the time! As such, any true scientist would invite debate, discourse and discussion as we as a society attempt to balance the risk of Covid with the unknown risk of vaccinations. We must also analyze and discuss the vital topics of freedom over one's body, freedom of speech, and the intricacies of quarantine restrictions on our civilization.
That conversation is important and should not be casually censored off the internet under the guise of "protecting innocents from misinformation".
The "debate" and "criticism" is always in the form of uncited or poorly cited conspiracies, along with links to extremely unreputable sites. It some cases, the only evidence is a highly shared Facebook meme. The credentials of the "research" authors are frequently lies, too. For example, there's a big one going around from the "inventor of RNA vaccines." However, if you look into it, it's just one of thousands of people who worked on RNA vaccines at some point in its lifecycle. It's like claiming some new grad software engineer who works for Facebook is "the inventor of Facebook."
Mercola, Natural News, Fox, Breitbart, *.win, Zerohedge, Infowars: These sources aren't dismissed because "there's a bias against conservative values" or whatever; they're dismissed because they regularly churn out completely debunked garbage. The times they're right about something is, at best, a fluke.
I've seen no evidence of /r/thenewnormal advancing scientific research in any way, and arguably they are having the effect of having amateurs direct research priorities due to phenomena like them promoting ivermectin leading to a surge in poisoning cases and thus scientific interest. The presence of "debate" does not nessecarily advance the scientific process, debate can be rhetorical sophistry that hardly achieves the same end as for instance peer review.
The best argument I can think of for allowing such communities is to put mainstream science in a position where they MUST respond to heterodox scientists or risk the public heeding their concerns and not getting vaccinated etc. etc. I don't think this is an incredibly convincing argument either, since it's a rather costly way to enforce sufficient scepticism, and it's disputable if it's nessecary.
If you wonder what kind of content is actually on subs like NoNewNormal, you could just go on and see for yourself. Well actually, now you can't anymore, because they're gone. Which leaves their enemies free to smear them as the worst thing anyone could come up with, when they have no chance to respond and nobody has any way to see for themselves what it's really about.
I used to check in on them every now and then. I didn't see much of the supposed extreme stuff about the vaccines being poison or being involved with 5G somehow. I do see things about how they aren't as effective as we would have liked, don't last as long as we would have liked, have more side effects than people are willing to admit, and there's decent evidence that natural immunity from having caught Covid is more effective. It is pretty arguable that blindly mandating everyone take it without accounting for people who have already had the disease or have genuine allergies or other negative reactions to things in the vaccines is not a very good idea.
To note my mother was also a doctor herself and worked on trauma cases (military) so she was well aware that homeopathy was just a way to provide hope in a fatal situation.
I wouldn't exactly call the claims I see in these communities as being irrefutably robust, or immune to criticism. Still there's enough of the "vaccine hesitant" out there they're going to collectively come up with more robust arguments than appeals to homeopathy.
I think though this points to an architectural problem with the multi community link aggregator/forum concept. Fact is, when you have a site that allows multiple communities to coexist and bleed into one another some won't get along, some will harass each other, it probably always results in things like this, then you get echo chambers. I think forums and single community sites (possibly even federated) make a lot more sense to prevent interaction from devolving into this. The model reddit based their business on has obviously failed the user at this point. It was a Utopian (and profitable!) dream to be the site for this sort of thing and it was short sighted in hindsight.
Recently it seems to have been a little easier on the political and social commentary stuff which i think is pretty nice and refreshing.
Though I understand why some aren’t as much of a fan. It does attract more drama and flame baiting.
And since people can't delete your post after 2 hours, you can see a lot of fluff nowadays even in a relatively old thread.
https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr
But it isn't about "a replacement for reddit." It is about finding communities online you want to engage in and engaging. Forums, non-federated aggregators (like HN), chatrooms all suffice. The trick is to avoid a one stop shop for communities.
Your probably write about avoiding the on stop shop.
I'd rather say the difference comes from keeping the same identity across communities, which allows you to easily gain fame/disgrace in one community and use it to influence another one, and an administration/moderation team with a bias and a willingness to cave to pressure.
It started earlier than that with the ban of r/jailbait. It always comes back to "protect the children"
Alternately, why would I want a public discussion tool that lets low effort garbage memes fill the public channels with effluent?
92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
Also theverge.com disabled comments on this article in particular. Wonder why...
So much for open debate, reddit by now is conversation conditioning machine for any topic that gets attention, banning anything that disagrees, and leaving bots and banal discussion
Let's just hope they have alienated enough people to get more traction on other platforms
Should be a lesson to everyone to check the claims of the poster from multiple sources so you can call it out before it goes viral.
NNN needed more posts about the science supporting their views against vaccine mandates, and less BS about left-wing globalist conspiracies.
For example prior infection offers way better immunity than the vaccine… https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
Actually the difference is so large that if we were to restrict people it should be based on who had the virus. Those who caught it or not are a bigger difference in having a chance to spread it than those who are vaccinated or not. So maybe we should have an antibody mandate - not a vaccine mandate?
Hacker News itself does this all the time; there's plenty of topics and conversations that aren't allowed to be posted here. And people get banned/silenced all the time. And that's good! That's what healthy moderation looks like.
The platforms are public and used by millions.
Your focus on legality to me is completely irrelevant at this stage. People want to discuss if this decision was a good idea or bad idea.
Often, ethics become law. If you care about this at all, figure out what laws you want and organize to pass them.
It actually doesnt matter if its legal or not for them to be doing this. Whats important is for customers be fully aware of whats going on and to make a choice (purchase or not). The opinion of customers will undoubtably shape that companies future decisions.
So companies do much more than obey laws and follow contract or EULA. The respond to their customers and users based on their perceptions and feedback.
https://fullfact.org/blog/2020/nov/framework-combat-misinfor...
Restrictions on free speech and dissent ... or the overwhelming of channels, forums, and archives with propaganda and disinformation ... are both characteristics of abusive, power, regardless of its foundation. The origins of free speech princples emerged in response to religious and monarchical governmental abuses, for the most part (with some role played by lesser nobles and interests).
With numerous commercial firms existing at scales which rival entire countries, the "private property" defence against any and all limitations on censorship simply isn't supportable. That said, a reasonable and principled policy with review, oversight, and appeals processes would be useful. Ultimately I see government regulation as a very likely necessity for communications platforms operating at significant scale.
Eventually you may find yourself on the receiving end, will you think censorship is good then?
Hating the site is fair, but honestly what you're doing is really shitty. Thank god Pushshift exists.
I feel bad about it. I hope people are able to find my posts in archived formats somewhere. But I just didn't feel comfortable on there any more. Reading around there is just gross now. I think I will concentrate on posting on my own website now.
Reddit called itself a bastion for free speech then walked it back for Chinese investors, and were surprised at the backlash.
The original ban wave was the exact reason the delete scripts were conceived.
I know this conversation has happened numerous times on HN by now, but at times like this I can't help but speak up. Although I have matured over the past decade, no longer the "Ron Paul" libertarian of my college days, and I understand the nuances w.r.t large public platforms facilitating misinformation; there still exists a part in me that pines for the "old Reddit," and laments that all attempts to remake platforms with liberal free-speech policies have come from far-right extremists.
I’m not criticising the action. I support it. (The reasons are complex and difficult to articulate, though what I had to say ... on Reddit ... about limitations on speech some six years ago seems strongly appropriate. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2g8e8c/shoutin...)
It's the rationalisation which seems thin.
The more so as what I’d based that argument on at the time --- falsely claiming no harm where a harm clearly existed is precisely at the centre of current discussions of the topic. This also seems to be a major, though under-discussed mode, of deceptive speech, and more pointedly a mode in which the downplaying of risk accrues benefits and gains to the parties promoting that message.
That said, Reddit’s lack of principled leadership and very-late-to-the-party redress continues to erode trust in the platform among those who live in a reality-based world and support strong epistemic systems. Which is one of the key challenges the firm faces: neither of the two principle sides in this matter are or will be happy with how it aquits itself.
I’ll note as well that the principles of “free speech” are not synonymous with the US first amendment (which concerns only government limitations), that speech on a privately-operate platform is both not the same as government censorship, but also not dissimilar in many regards, and that in any regard, free speech itself is not an absolute principle but one existing in balance with other considerations. I’ve been thinking in terms of a set of related, though often conflicting principles as Autonomous Communication (or variously: "informational autonomy" or "communications autonomy" --- naming things is hard --- discussed in “Which has primacy?”). The rights to privacy, free-assocation (both positive and negative), against self-incrimination, of obligated disclosure, and to accurate information, all collide, though there are some common principles which might help in adjudicating amongst them. I’m not aware of others offering any similar construction.
See: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/622677903778013902fd002590d8e...
I think this is the nub of the problem. There are common carriers like the phone company, and there are publishers. A publisher will be responsible for what they publish, whereas a carrier really just gives access to their infrastructure.
We have a situation now that seems like social media companies want it both ways (none of obligations and all of the prerogatives), so we get something like a phone service that censors your calls when convenient to the phone company.
I really think this requires a political solution, though one often sees technological solutions suggested (peer-to-peer, federation).
> ...free speech itself is not an absolute principle but one existing in balance with other considerations...
Yes, political speech is the most protected variety. Curiously, money can be considered political speech. So while I think the only kind of real solution here is a political one, I don't expect that to ever happen.
The problem has numerous nubs.
But to the extent that socially harmful discriminatory practices of common carriers have profound influences, then yes, I agree with you. And yes, the problem is inherently political, as what it concerns is social power.
Money-as-political-speech is profoundly problematic. The US has much very bad case law here.
I don't think basing your argument on Schneck does it any good. It doesn't seem to be considered good decision nowadays. That case would fall well within First Amendment protections by standards established in later cases.
Schenck was a bad ruling, it's been overturned, and Holmes's argument appeared in a dissent. [Update: Nope, majority, see reply below.] It's memorable language (which is why it is invoked all the time, usually in a mistaken or misleading way). But it has never been guiding language.
It's still a useful notion: one of considering private right to speech vs. the court's interest in public harm. Holmes's hypothetical was in falsely claiming a threat where none existed. That occurs occasionally, but is actually somewhat less an issue than denying a threat. The second is a behaviour we've seen again and again and again, mostly in a private-enterprise, "free market", private-property (and profit) context, where by downplaying some harm, profits or business can be transacted for a longer time with a larger market (or frauds perpetrated). This is what Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway document repeatedly in Merchants of Doubt.
The benefit in Covid disinformation may be harder to pin down, though there are several pretty plausible cons that might be played, including poltical power, sale of hoax or ineffective cures (as has been suggested regarding Florida's governor and a key political funder), and general huckstering and grift.
I'm not sure I follow. Holmes authored opinions for unanimous decisions for upholding convictions of peaceful criticism of draft in Schenck, Debs and Frohwerk.
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
I was thinking of the subsequent Abrams case (only a few months later in 1919) where Holmes departed from the Majority. That disagreement became the Great Dissent (and recent-ish book of the same title).
If I can somewhat cover for myself: Holmes in Schenck, and yes, writing for the majority, offered the "fire in a crowded theatre" hypothetical as not deserving protection.
Again: partiall overturned later in Brandenburg (1969).
My point remains that I'm not actually using Holme's hypo but one derived from it, and again, with a direct-gain motive added to that.
https://patriots.win/p/12kFPq7oFY/recap-on-how-rnonewnormal-...
Don't get me wrong, I think it's reprehensible. I just don't take these people seriously. They exist, they have a right to exist, and they are going to spew their bullshit everywhere.
What I'm really not willing to accept is a game of cat and mouse where normal everyday activists pose as these kinds of people and say the worst things they can in order to shut down discussion.
I'm not for giving a small handful of people the power to shut down discussions they don't like by pretending to be alt right anti-Semites.
I'm surprised that works, and that the Reddit admins let it work.
If I were Reddit, I'd probably cave, but then make a code change so that "very large and influential subreddits" cannot implement those settings changes without admin approval. I wouldn't want to cede so much power to a few users. If done at the right time (e.g. when there's no big meta controversy), it might not even cause that much weeping and gnashing of teeth. I doubt most Reddit users care that much about mod powers.
Big yikes. That is not a good place.
Also, don't these folks realize that Jesus was Jewish... like, what kind of brain worms crawling in their heads that they can in one breath proclaim faith to an Abrahamic religion, hate for people from that part of the world, and how morality comes from a society following their preferred religion.
Feels pretty hopeless.
I've been collecting some alternatives to NNN https://unvaxxxed.com/alternatives-to-reddits-nonewnormal/
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/949048
Fascinating read.
Oh, and wouldn't you know: those more permissive platforms are also where actual white nationalists, racists, and violent extremists hang out.
Just an absolutely pathetic, counterproductive, downright stupid decision on behalf of reddit.
The boycotts by several popular subreddits were hurting them, and that is all. — r/legaladvice is a known hotbed of misinformation of potentially drastic consequences that is allowed to stay, as that misinformation does not run enough across political tribalist lines to make people care.
you mean boycotts by a bunch of petulant power mods. I sincerely doubt that rank and file reddit users really cared that much.
Whether you agree with the outcome or not this is not the situation reddit admins should want to be in. They've just shown those mods that if they're loud enough that reddit will roll right over.
Seems like a bold move to put yourself in that position on the eve of their IPO (if rumors are to be believed).
And yes, I mean that the boycots were organized by those in control of those subreddits.
I think you're right. It's important to realize that the normy web is cable news, not the agora. There is nothing organic about the apparent consensus expressed there. The top 500 communities being moderated by the same few people is a well-known statistic. The Elgin Air Force Base connection is another fun thing to look into.
Every couple of weeks there's another story about some fringe community getting burned by big platforms, Glen Greenwald fills in some template to write an article about it, somebody links to the XKCD comic about censorship, and the dance continues. However sympathetic I am to free expression, I'm a bit tired of the discourse at this point. Nobody expects major broadcasters or newspapers to present unorthodox viewpoints, given how thoroughly compromised they are by intelligence agencies and corporate interests. I don't see why major web publishers should be viewed differently. Engaging with these platforms is not a winning battle.
The only solution is to set up alternative institutions, but I haven't been impressed by what's popped up so far. Most decentralized Mastodon etc stuff is in practice even more ideologically rigid, and full of truly psychotic nerds.
I like to imagine that there's still some active PHPbb board out there full of dudes just chilling. I'd like to find it one day.
I'm actually more concerned about Facebook.
GAB is a sleeper community, only missing an App.
You may be right, but your choice of words make me wonder why some people feel so sure of being right as to claim somebody else incapable of getting something right when it's so obvious what to do. But is it?
Perhaps the decision is sad as it would be better for the world that they stand their ground. But perhaps it was the only rational choice that reddit could do (game theory and all that). Or perhaps they did intentionally choose what they thought was the better option for everybody, and letting people radicalize in their ghettos (and stand out as radicalized groups) instead of normalizing the radical positions.
In any case, I wouldn't be so sure we're dealing with downright stupidity.
Rarely do people care about improving the world, but feeling part of a team has always galvanized men into iron warriors. — Achieving victory is of course not the concern of these warriors, but the joy of fighting shoulder to shoulder with another is it's own reward.
Of course, that it runs across tribalist political lines is the only reason the misinformation again exists in this particular case, but that also makes it less useful to shut the subreddit down.
The misinformation that is commonly spread, by, say, r/legaladvice, is easier to remedy by simple conversation or alternatively shutting it down and for Reddit to ban lay legal advice, as people believe that simply because they are misinformed, not because they enjoy feeling part of a team believing whatever the rest of the team does.