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

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691–700 of 970 posts

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

#691
post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

at least they were honest about it. And yet /r/politics remains

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

#692
post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sense of persecution and victim-hood I hear from the right seems rather at odds with how damn successful they seem to be at the moment. It's like when the silent majority was anything but.

I don't think they're especially successful right now. Their President is barely holding on to majority support in Texas and is losing every purple state. He seems powerless to appease his law&order base by stopping the riots and indicting their leaders as he wants to do. Their Supreme Court justices keep ruling against them (another bid to chip away at Roe v Wade knocked down just this morning). Their online presenc…

> Lots of people have lost their jobs for criticizing BLM

I think you'd need to cite cases where it was for objective criticism of BLM, and not associated/ tangential calls for violence, and/or hate speech.

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

#694
post #687
post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iron fist is a double edged sword in some senses. Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major specific communities. True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying th…

> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. Is that really a thing on the internet though? It seems like the unmoderated free speech havens on the internet are bubbles themselves and I'm not sure there's much real debate going on there....

>Some observers argue that the counterspeech principle makes a better ideal than a reality, primarily because some people or groups in society possess far more power than do others. For example, proponents of critical race theory contend that minorities often are denied access to the marketplace of ideas to counter harmful speech.

>Others argue that some types of speech — for example, pornography and hate speech — are so harmful that counterspeech alone is not an adequate response.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspee...

I agree with your point, without some way to structure, weigh, and amplify the signal; noise and polarization are more likely to win out.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a...

The final result still leaves me conflicted, in a baby with the bathwater sense. Plenty of the speech in the sub was merely speech I disagreed with, and censoring it all is nowhere close to a least restrictive means way to erase hate. Moments like spez editing a users comment are now erased from the record, for the moment at least archived elsewhere.

If a politician ever wanted to go back, look at the pain of others, and use what they learned to bridge divides, to be able to speak to the others, they are now denied this resource for research. That probably bothers me more than the structure of reddit being quasi-free-speech-incompatible. ChapoTrapHouse isnt somewhere I ever went, but from a communication sense, I now feel a missed opportunity to learn how to read their language, and understand or recognize it if I heard it.

Between Reddit, Youtube, Twitch, and India; today itself might eventually be regarded as a historical day, where both public servants and private enterprise stood up and said enough, albeit for different reasons.

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

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think reddit 'leans a bit right' This has to be a joke. Either you are so 'left-wing' that you consider Obama, Biden, etc, as 'right-wing', or you are ignoring the vast majority of the site. 'left-wing' views are not 'tolerated', they are celebrated. There are consistent 60k+ upvoted 'trump bad', 'obama good', 'republicans bad' posts from default subs. When's the last time you've seen anything 'right-leaning' on…

I am not joking, and yes Obama and Biden are very clearly right-wing politicians. I have not seen a single actually left-wing policy out of either of them. Also, please don't assume the people you're talking to online are 'joking' when they express their serious views. It's against HN guidelines to assume such bad faith in my answers. > 'left-wing' views are not 'tolerated', they are celebrated. I don't see that at a…

I guess it depends on how you both define left wing. From the economic perspective, maybe not (except medical care for all, maybe); from the human-rights perspective (e.g. gender rights, race-related policies), the more popular subs are surely leaning to the left.

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

#696
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "everyone I don't like is a racist" debate strategy isn't a good look, but "every conservative is racist" is just pathetic. There was literally zero racist activity on The_Donald. The mods were very transparent and showed EVERY ACTION once they hit quarantine (to show they didn't deserve to be quarantined). The only racist posts came from new accounts / people who had never posted in The_Donald that were immediat…

To anyone reading, this is not true.

Great contribution, care to present your case next time?

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

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it hateful to be skeptical of gender?

"Skeptical of gender" is a cover phrase for "denying the existence of trans people". So, yes.

Are you skeptical of the shahada? If you are skeptical of the shahada, does this mean you deny the existence of Muslim people?

Are you skeptical of the Nicene creed? If you are skeptical of the Nicene creed, does this mean you deny the existence of Christian people?

Are you skeptical of body thetans? If you are skeptical of body thetans, does this mean you deny the existence of Scientologists?

Are you skeptical of climate change? If you are skeptical of climate change, does this mean you deny the existence of climatologists?

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

#698

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…

This really is the key point. Posts which on Twitter or Facebook would be deemed as hate are allowed now on Reddit. They were not before. Indeed in most EU countries, Reddit steps over the line into hate speech by allowing it against certain groups. There is an important caveat as it still would not allow violence, harassment or bullying.

I am actually shocked at how little thought went into this policy. For example in UK, women are majority. This policy now allows someone to say "I hate women". Everyone except Americas and Europe can now say "we hate people of color". This is such a short sighted policy that I can't believe it's not a joke.

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

#699
post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddest thing is that many groups deemed a majority are not if one looks at a global scale. It really seems the terms majority/minority are selectively defined as needed to target certain groups.

It's not even true on a per country level, for instance in Bahrain and UAE the majority of the population are south Asian people. It does not protect them from racism. It's not uncommon around the world for racism and discrimination to be perpetuated by a small but powerful aristocracy.

All the more reason to drop any 'majority group' based logic and just ban targeted harassment and discrimination based on immutable characteristics in general.

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

#700

The title should be updated, as T_D was just one of a large number of subs banned today; even then, it has been largely irrelevant since the admins' earlier decision to quarantine it and impose other restrictions. Other larger banned subs include /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans) and /r/ConsumeProduct which was ostensibly for criticism of consumerism and product promotion, but hid a large strain of antisemitism below th…

a number of subreddits like r/ConsumeProduct were taken over by the hate mongers from the_donald. You would have post brigaded to the front page that had absolutely nothing to do with consumerism or product promotion

I should be the prime target for a community sarcastically titled “consume product” as I hate spending money wastefully and enjoy getting good mileage out of anything I buy. Instead I learned how to block subreddits on my Reddit app of choice because the content had absolutely nothing to do with criticizing wastefulness. I could never quite put my finger on what the subreddit was designed for (I never subscribed, I only interacted with it when it hit /r/all) but I knew it wasn’t a criticism of wasteful consumerism.

Social media has a trolling/brigading/hive mind problem in general across all platforms and I would add solving this problem to Paul Graham’s list of “frighteningly ambitious” ideas.

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