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Comment by sinecure | Hacker News Reader

Reddit's procedure for communities that go against any mainstream progressive narrative is to quarantine them and then ban them under the accusation of "brigading".

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.

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>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.

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.

Absolutely. It's been incredible watching it happen in slow motion over the last decade. What was once a bastion of free thought and discussion online (after the fall of Digg) has turned into another trimmed and controlled mainstream playground for only the "right" opinions.

For those who don't believe me:

https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4ny59k/lets_t...

https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4nsiw1/state_of_the_su...

https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4nw8nc/washington_post...

Weird hill to die on, IMO. Remember when we were younger and there was immense pressure on cable news to stop sharing the details of mass-shooting incidents because it was glorifying the shooters and their violent means? What Reddit is doing is what we asked cable news to do.

(Also, like, stop blowing your dogwhistle so damn loud.)

>Remember when we were younger and there was immense pressure on cable news to stop sharing the details of mass-shooting incidents because it was glorifying the shooters and their violent means? What Reddit is doing is what we asked cable news to do.

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".

Oh, you're not from the USA? So, uh, we have a lot of mass shootings. A common point of discussion is whether we should publically discuss the details of mass shootings, because discussion can easily excuse and glorify the shooters.

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.

It's true. The liberal mods of /news banned discussion of a mass murder exactly because of that. Only the other guys gave space for discussion. What's a dog whistle about that? I understand it makes those mods look bad. That's not anyone's fault but their own, is it? Would you rather people just not mention it?

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.

Atrocities of dehumanization are always started by these sorts of discussions. The USA has perpetuated decades of organized state-level violence against Muslim-majority countries halfway around the world, and the main fuel is stories about the crimes committed by Muslims.

I know that liberals aren't great people. But y'all're cryptofascists, not liberals, and you're far worse.

The news are the fuel? Right, had reddit banned links to news about 9/11, maybe the US wouldn't have gone to war. It was not the fake WMD's or the lucrative war industry contracts. It was the news reports.

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.

Hi, again, we're talking about the USA. A serious number of people believe that Fox News is not only reputable, but the only reputable news organization operating in the USA. CNN is considered trusted and mainstream. Who do you think was pushing fake WMDs? I grew up in the USA during this time, and I recall how the media embraced the neoconservative narrative.

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.

You're still hearing whistles? Are you sure is not tinnitus?

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.

There's no rational discussion to be had between homeopathy doctor and an oncologist, for example. It's just a waste of bandwidth and source of misinformation which is killing innocents.

Assuming your position on any subject, especially novel viruses and novel vaccines, is 100% correct and immune to debate or criticism is irrational. When your position is "I'm right, they're wrong, they shouldn't be allowed to talk about it" you are the censor. If the facts support your position, why silence debate or criticism?

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".

> Assuming your position on any subject, especially novel viruses and novel vaccines, is 100% correct and immune to debate or criticism is irrational.

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.

It is disingenuous to conflate antivax cultural meme production with the scientific method.

If vaccine safety can't be established by anything but time, than debate definitionally cannot inform us about the safety of vaccines. Vaccines can not only be unexpectedly dangerous in the long term, they can also theoretically be unexpectedly protective, and we can't know without waiting.

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.

One could just as easily say that there's no point in trying to have a rational discussion with people who want to compare anyone who disagrees with the worst thing they can come up with.

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.

Can't people just look at the sub via archive.org?

So my mother oncologist also offered alternative medical treatments that were basically homeopathy. I think the truth is that it every cancer is curable. And if you are in a fatalistic situation like that it’s important to have something that modifies your outlook in addition to practical treatment. Otherwise you as a patient might simply give up.

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.

The people doing and calling for the banning are hardly trained medical doctors by and large, and I've certainly seen COVID contarians cite heterodox doctors who actually had relevant expertise. They love to cite Robert Malone who while a very controversial figure is certainly more qualified than your average boycotter or moderator or admin to opine on vaccination.

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.

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