I’m a sucker for conspiracy theories, like the Bermuda Triangle. Aliens abducting cows and lizards living inside the Queen. I don’t believe in any of it, but I’ve just loved that stuff since I was a kid. So I actually used to follow /r/conspiracy, but I stopped around the 2016 election when everything started being about American politics.
Not sure what happened, but it went from “the lone gunmen” to “angry American central” over night, and the place has royally sucked since.
>The company also says that half (48 percent) of all hateful content on the site was targeting a person’s ethnicity or nationality. That was followed by their class or political affiliation (16 percent), [...] "Hate speech" now includes your political affiliation? That's news to me. I thought it's usually restricted to immutable characteristics about a person (race, religion, gender, etc.).
I don’t see why the target of the hateful comment should matter when deciding that something should be removed. If I comment in more vulgar terms saying that “penguins are evil and people who like them should die”, that’s likely to be seen as hateful and Reddit may decide it doesn’t have its place on there platform, the fact that I’m talking about love for penguin doesn’t really matters.
We aren’t talking about a government definition of hateful, in which case you would expect limits to be set by immutable characteristics, instead it’s about Reddit deciding what is off limit for them.
Since there's no objective definition of "hate content", this is akin to them patting themselves on the back for outright censorship based on their own arbitrary definitions.
The_Donald promoted the Charlottesville hate rally, people with white shirts and torches.
I mean, I've been seeing out of my window in downtown Seattle hate groups marching on a nearly nightly basis, the difference with these hate groups being that they burn down vehicles, buildings, and other properties and violently clash with the police in order to forcefully enact their hateful/racist political policies, that hate me because of the color of my skin and the political polices I support. But sure, there was one time an entirely peaceful demonstration by people on the other side of the aisle, that was so hateful! They have to be banned, deplatformed, censored, removed, destroyed. But the people roaming my city, setting fire to the building opposite of mine a few weeks back because the owner is an "evil white capitalist"? They're good to go, no hate there.
More accurately would be to say Reddit reports 18% of hate content moved to a different platform. This would be akin to saying "salmon30salmon saw a reduction in hate content when he stopped attending hate group meetings". While I appreciate any attempt to reduce hate, it isn't really something to cheer in this case. The goal is to reduce hate, and pushing people further into the fringes doesn't do that. Now instead…
The idea behind deplatforming hate is to reduce the reach of hatespeech to those that explicitly desire it and the platforms that willingly provide it.
That, in turn, reduces the funding of the hate prophets - many German alt-righters found themselves in a serious financial crunch after Youtube and Facebook booted them off so they could only solicit for donations on their lousy-visited Telegram channels.
Side benefit: when the people that post hate speech on mass platforms like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter, members of marginalized groups get this shit into their feeds. Driving the hate speechers away increases the quality of usage of the marginalized persons.
More accurately would be to say Reddit reports 18% of hate content moved to a different platform. This would be akin to saying "salmon30salmon saw a reduction in hate content when he stopped attending hate group meetings". While I appreciate any attempt to reduce hate, it isn't really something to cheer in this case. The goal is to reduce hate, and pushing people further into the fringes doesn't do that. Now instead…
Everything I've seen suggests that removing platforms actually does reduce this stuff. It's analogous to the argument that there's no point trying to reduce suicides; people are just gong to do it some other way. But no, if you put a barrier on a bridge, suicides really do go down in total. If you make something even just a little bit more difficult, you reduce it.
I don't think “places to be hateful on the internet” are in short supply.
Since there's no objective definition of "hate content", this is akin to them patting themselves on the back for outright censorship based on their own arbitrary definitions.
Even if that's what they do, so what? It is their website. They can do what that want with it. If you don't like it, don't use it. You are free to say and believe what you want, but that doesn't mean you can do it on my website.