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Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

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Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#571

Post by dmoy »

duxup wrote: post #86
ve55 wrote: post #7

Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is. You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matt…

Would something decentralized help? I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height…

> The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc.

Yea, I gotta say, having to previously deal with r/The_Donald brigades on another large subreddit was incredibly annoying and depressing.

Can't speak to spreading fake news, but massive influxes of r/The_Donald users spamming truly vile stuff in an ostensibly non-political sub really sucked (as a moderator, to clean up).

The only thing that works imo is fairly strict moderation, or extremely niche/small communities. Everything else just gets swamped by toxicity. Decentralized vs centralized isn't really the right dimension to look at I think.

And as soon as your small community grows... the trolls come a-knocking.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#572

Post by freen »

iateanapple wrote: post #522
freen wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overwhelming majority of terrorism in the United States is committed by right wing extremists. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-... The anti-gun, peace-loving left may not be the most polite online, but they emphatically are not as violent. Not by a long shot. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either uninformed or lying through their teeth to push an agenda.

[flagged]

I see someone isn’t a fan of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

What’s your evidence that left wing violence exceeds right wing?

By the by, a lot of the “left wing” violence recently was caused by right wing militia “boogaloo” people.

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/17/far-right-boogaloo-boy-kill...

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#573

Post by zozbot234 »

docbrown wrote: post #509
zozbot234 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They migrated a long time ago, and the sub itself was all but abandoned. Reddit's ban today is the equivalent of them saying "You can't quit, you're fired!". It would be hilarious if it wasn't so damn predictable and depressing.

> Reddit's ban today is the equivalent of them saying "You can't quit, you're fired!". This implies the Reddit ban is directed toward TD specifically, which it’s not. This is Reddit taking a long-term stance on what type of content they want on their platform. To sit here and downplay its importance is a predictable talking point and just as depressing.

> This is Reddit taking a long-term stance on what type of content they want on their platform.

It's hard to take that "long-term stance" seriously when they basically make policies up as they go along. Now they're telling us that they want to make the site free of hate against identifiable groups - except if that group is in the majority, then the policy doesn't apply and it's 100% okay to whip up hate against them! Yay nihilists and misanthropes, I guess? Isn't that a bit ludicrous?

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#574

Post by haunter »

blisseyGo wrote: post #525

From Reddit: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc... > Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families. > While the rule on ha…

It means /r/sino won't be banned which is a CPC propaganda sub

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#575

Post by xienze »

hhhhhhhjjjjjjju wrote: post #487
ve55 wrote: post #7

Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is. You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matt…

I run a video game clan with a fairly active discord channel -- the stance I've taken is: there are no rules beyond: 1. nothing illegal (includes cheating at games) 2. no racism / homophobia / transphobia 3. no harassing other members 4. everyone has different beliefs and come from different parts of the world -- if you are offended, ask the offender to stop, otherwise see a mod so far there are around 50 people in t…

> I don't know how but thus far we've had no real issues.

Because you only have 50 users, which is nothing. It’s the same reason communism is such an appealing idea, in very small communities it works but doesn’t scale up to nation-sized ones.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#576

Post by maceurt »

Giorgi wrote: post #547

Day before someone reported that on Monday Reddit was planning wave of censorship. Follow reddit self-destruction here: https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/

And the news traveled pretty quickly to so many different subreddits before the ban wave. All the subs that had a chance of getting banned were making posts warning about an upcoming ban, and I even saw a post in r/againsthatesubreddits like 6 hours before the banwave that was talking about the post on watchredditdie in a way that sounded like they knew it was true.

I highly doubt that all these mods just saw one post from a medium sized subreddit and started preparing for a ban. Seems to me like all the mods within certain subreddits knew and it got leaked to other mods.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#577

Post by deanCommie »

throwaway829 wrote: post #539
caconym_ wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

T_D was chock full of calls for violence since its early days. In particular, I remember looking one day and seeing its whole front page covered in posts glorifying Pinochet for the way he treated his domestic enemies. The mods quite clearly had no good faith interest in keeping this kind of content out, only stepping in (except to ban users going against the narrative) when they were threatened from above. I am myst…

Similar to how leftists promoted the "punch a nazi in the face" meme'. They will of course be the ones defining who is a "nazi".

Your slippery slope arguments won't go very far when there are Literal Actual Nazis out there making comments about Jews, flying swastikas, and heiling Donald.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#578

Post by duxup »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #455
duxup wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>lots of other communities are allowed to exist despite having much more and more overt bigotry including celebrations of political violence I would argue that was what TD was until very recently.

That's the point. Other communities are worse than TD and go reprimanded. And it's not just communities like TD; people are canceled, terminated, etc for completely not racist offenses such as "making an OK symbol by accident" or "standing next to a woman who wrongly suggested a minority person was vandalizing a store" or "citing a prominent Black academic's research on nonviolent-vs-violent protests" or "publishing…

Honestly it's hard to figure out what even you're saying.

That reads more like a general ideology of persicution you're describing that you think is true ... rather than anything about what I said.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#579

Post by kerkeslager »

ardy42 wrote: post #519
kerkeslager wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the current rules Reddit are still an invitation to "I'm not touching you Fascism". Fascists haven't gone away. They still are around and they still think fascist things, they've just metastasized into a subtler form of cancer. The only difference now is that we can't confront fascism with the truth any more. Ironically, by using the tools of the fascist against them we've implicitly admitted that the fascist is…

> The only difference now is that we can't confront fascism with the truth any more. How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been? Especially on the web? My impression is that fascist/racist ideas aren't spread in open debates where the truth matters, but indirectly: through deniable memes and dog whistles initially, then slowly, as people's innate defenses are lowered, through many stages of more…

> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been?

When white people were afraid of black violence, Martin Luther King showed them black people peacefully hand in hand with ministers in their Sunday best, walking toward Selma and remaining nonviolent even as they were met with violence.

When straight people saw gay people as dangerous deviants, Harvey Milk showed them gay people in their families, jobs, and neighborhoods, behaving like the normal people they are. I personally grew up in a church that taught homophobia--my own opinions were fundamentally changed by one of my friends coming out in high school.

Ask yourself your own question: when has censorship ever been effective?[1] I'd argue that, among other things the election of Trump is partly a backlash against attempts to control speech by the left. It's no mistake that a big part of the pro-Trump narrative was just that he "spoke his mind".

[1] Whenever I ask this question, people always respond by pointing to one study which showed banning a few hate subreddits decreased hate speech on Reddit, so I'll preemptively respond to that by saying that there's absolutely no evidence that bigots on Reddit didn't simply move to Voat at that time.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#580

Post by VRay »

BoorishBears wrote: post #73
parliament32 wrote: post #9

Whether you agree with the move or not, it's funny how Reddit's stance has changed over time. Under the old ownership, 2012: "At reddit we care deeply about not imposing ours or anyone elses’ opinions on how people use the reddit platform. We are adamant about not limiting the ability to use the reddit platform even when we do not ourselves agree with or condone a specific use. We have very few rules here on reddit;…

The Donald would have been deleted under the old leadership too... They got in hot water not for supporting Trump (there are plenty of pro-Trump subreddits) but actively breaking the most basic rules of Reddit, maybe you should actually look at their history. Spamming the same images to the subreddit, interfering with other subreddits, trying to out whistleblowers in federal cases, gaming the content discovery system…

Another fun factoid about The_Donald's love of free speech is that they immediately and permanently banned anyone who disagreed with anything said on that sub. Good riddance
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