Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

Post by notahacker » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

maxk42 wrote: post #30

unethical_ban wrote: post #16

reddit admins responded and specifically said their automod got aggressive, remediated it, and that talking about the admin is alright as long as it isn't a dox attempt or threatening behavior. Keep this in mind as you see other people claiming falsely that anything is still being censored.

Reddit's automoderator is not a wild animal that gets "aggressive." It's a simple regex: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/automoderator/full-documentation Someone edited the rules to deliberately block any mention of the name in question site-wide.

Post by adamrezich » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #85

dvhh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform. That only governments and their agents are qualified to perform act of censorship.

Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom. The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following! People lik…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

formerly_proven wrote: post #193

caslon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the harm in such a pointless joke? It was silly, but it's not like the meme subreddit he did it to was a super serious one like AskHistorians is.

Personally I don't think that action in itself is a big deal, but it shows that Reddit has a lack of internal security i.e. reddit employees are admins in the old-school CMS/forum software sense: they simply can do anything. (Edit: Reply points out that spez says not all admins can do this) For comparison, I don't expect that a Google employee, or C-level executive, has an "Edit" button next to every single post on G…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #116

adzzzz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cartoon depiction of sex with minors is almost certainly illegal in many districts and countries.

Photos of the Tiananmen Square protest, arguments that Mohammed was not really a prophet of God, arguments that God doesn't exist, and maps that claim that the actual boundary between two countries are on one or the other side of disputed territory, are also illegal in many districts and countries. Probably it would be bad if the only speech allowed on popular web sites were speech that wasn't illegal anywhere, or il…

Post by fieryscribe » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

robbyking wrote: post #70

Sebb767 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, yes. For one, the original title has them. Secondly, as stated in the article, Reddit denies the allegations: > [...] admin u/landoflobsters explains that it was not the company’s intention to remove any mention of Knight’s name, but that there had been “overzealous automaton” when it came to preventing doxxing and harassment. The admin explained that an internal error had led to the suspension of a mod…

I moderate a reddit community with ~200k users, and if I didn't use strict filtering along with a slew of Automoderator rules I'd spend half of my day removing spam, shitposts, and submissions that break our posting rules. A few posts a day get caught by mistake, but it's a lot easier to free those posts than it is to remove the dozens of bad ones that would have made it through otherwise. I think it's at least plaus…