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Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

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Re: Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

#71

Post by james-mcelwain »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #59
kilo_bravo_3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kicking someone off your platform for calling everyone a "leftist cuck" or some other bigoted "ironic" comment is not hypocrisy. It is basic human decency. Do you have an example of someone who was "censored" inappropriately?

The accusation is in the other direction, that some people aren't being censored despite saying equally obnoxious things. I've seen quite a few popular and non-censored Reddit comments talking about "Rethuglicans", or explaining that huge swaths of the population are irredeemably evil.

Do you have any evidence any sub was banned for the opposite equivalent of "Democraps" or whatever? This feels like a strawman without evidence that people were banned selectively.

Re: Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

#73

Post by thunkpad »

chromedev wrote: post #19

Anyone remember them saying in their ToS that hate speech is okay as long as it isn't against a group considered to be the minority?

Wouldn't the difference there be between venting resulting in hurt feelings rather than targeted violence?

Reports of genuine, targeted violence against reactionaries are almost non-existent while just a few days ago three trans women were nearly killed while waiting for a cab. If banning r/dropthet (a transphobic subreddit) reduces the amount of eyeballs absorbing phobic talking points that has to be a good thing, no?

I always find these sorts of discussions sorely lacking an understanding of The Tolerance Paradox. Hopefully more folks will begin to see the implicit violence present in minority targeted hate speech. It really does lead to loss of life all too often.

Re: Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

#74

Post by convery »

zalkota wrote: post #2

The other 82% is /r/politics

They'd never remove that though. Come to think of it, a lot of the banned subreddits were anti a lot of the politics that regularly get upvoted to the frontpage [0]. So looks more like a political purge. A selection of banned subreddits:

r/CampusConservative r/HateCrimeHoaxes r/rightwingcomics r/rightwinglgbt r/Nationalism r/DebateAltRight r/GenderCritical r/blackcrimestatistics r/againstdiversity r/Holodomor r/ExposeCulturalMarxism r/AltRightChristian r/The_Donald r/BanBigMouth

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/hi41t2/the_ba...

Re: Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

#75

Post by implements »

gruez wrote: post #8

>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.).

Religion is definitely not an immutable characteristic - there are many ex-theists, and people often change religion on marriage.

Gender is a can of worms - sex is immutable, gender seems to be (like religion or race) a socially conditioned performance of expected behaviour. Personally I don’t think it’s helpful - we should see ourselves as unique individuals with agency - much less immutable.

Re: Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

#76

Post by throw_m239339 »

ip26 wrote: post #54
niyazpk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is religion immutable when political affiliation is not?

Race & religion are sometimes deeply entwined, see Jewish. Imagine if Jewish ethnicity was a protected class but Jewish religion was not. How would that even work in practice? "I was not discriminating against the Jews on account of being ethnic Jews but rather on account of their Jewish faith, your Honor!"

Is there any other example of a "religion" that is both a religion and an ethnicity?

Re: Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

#77

Post by Someone1234 »

pietrovismara wrote: post #70
justchilly wrote: post #25

Said differently: "Reddit banned nearly 7,000 subreddits, but left alone the ones that contribute 82% of hate content." That seems like a dismal result, practically an admission that many of the bans were unjustified and/or subs that should have been banned were not.

The last bunch of bans was simply a leftist purge, banning several subreddits that at most advocated violence against landlords, not really a "minority".

Calls for violence have been against Reddit's policy forever, and is also often illegal. It has nothing to do with minority status.

Re: Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

#78

Post by ebg13 »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #43
mschuster91 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is something I can agree with as being more useful. Anything that can be done to reduce funding to hate groups is fantastic. But there is a real difference between using deplatforming as a means of defunding hate groups and what happened with Reddit. Reddit itself has no means of monetization. While you could certainly argue that Reddit leads to platforms that do monetize, that is a slippery slope.

> Reddit itself has no means of monetization.

This is a classic confusion about the nature of currency and networks. Direct monetization is one kind of success but not the only one.

For one thing, a hate prophet doesn't need money to be successful. A hate prophet needs _listeners_ to be successful. Reducing access to accidental listeners who then get sucked into a brainwashing machine is reducing access to success.

And then there's the fact that Reddit is a funnel, not just a destination. People go there just to go there, and then they accidentally stumble into hate cults. Some of those people get sucked into rabbit holes and find themselves in poisoned wonderlands. "follow me for more", "like and subscribe", "click here to find out", "read my blog", "watch my channel", "so and so says". Reddit isn't where the shit ends, but it is where the shit starts for many people.

> While you could certainly argue that Reddit leads to platforms that do monetize, that is a slippery slope.

FYI, the slippery slope argument is considered to be a logical fallacy so you probably shouldn't use it.

Re: Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

#79

Post by s9w »

cma wrote: post #6
chrisco255 wrote: post #4

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.

white shirts and torches - that's so much worse than the BLM riots!

Re: Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits

#80

Post by gruez »

OminousWeapons wrote: post #52
chrisco255 wrote: post #4

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.

Ignoring the fact that a private entity should be able to censor as they see fit on their own platform, Reddit is a business, it's not a charity. If a subset of users are hurting their business model, driving multiples of other users away from the site, or creating legal liability far in excess of the value the problematic subset generates, then Reddit absolutely should be patting themselves on the back for mitigatin…

>If a subset of users are hurting their business model, driving multiples of other users away from the site, or creating legal liability far in excess of the value the problematic subset generates,

is that's what's happening though? Are advertisers leaving reddit? AFAIK advertisers can already decide what subreddits their ads appear on. Are people leaving reddit to a "nicer" platform? What type of legal liabilities is reddit being subject to?

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