Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

If you have a controversial, non-mainstream opinion you need to be extremely rigorous with verifying your information. That’s something NNN users didn’t do enough of. They got banned for a fake pedo sub being created by someone (maybe a member, maybe a brigadier) that was then used to say “look at the people supporting vaccine mandates… pedos.” That claim got upvoted on NNN so it made them look like they’d upvote anything.

Should be a lesson to everyone to check the claims of the poster from multiple sources so you can call it out before it goes viral.

NNN needed more posts about the science supporting their views against vaccine mandates, and less BS about left-wing globalist conspiracies.

For example prior infection offers way better immunity than the vaccine… https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

Actually the difference is so large that if we were to restrict people it should be based on who had the virus. Those who caught it or not are a bigger difference in having a chance to spread it than those who are vaccinated or not. So maybe we should have an antibody mandate - not a vaccine mandate?

I think the main problem of all these “alternative” sites is that there really are just a fuckton of shitty people waiting to go in at the very beginning. So even if people have legitimate concerns and the desire to build fresh, they are quickly pushed out by real cesspool denizens.

contrary to what you might believe truth and lies do in fact exist and while the line can be blurry at times, anti-vax misinformation happens to be firmly on one side of that equation, and taking it down prevents real physical harm.

>They have essentially trimmed all alternative thought or discussion from the website and turned places like /r/news, which used to be a moderate and balanced place of discussion, into a completely one-sided echo chamber of modern progressive politics.

This has been going on for years. After the Orlando nightclub massacre in 2016, /r/news and /r/worldnews completely shut down postings about it because a Muslim was the killer. /r/askreddit and, yes, /r/the_donald opened up discussion threads because there was no alternative on Reddit.

Reddit continues to insist that its sitewide administrative policies are based on behaviour rather than content, though it appears that this is a somewhat narrow distinction, and that behaviours which draw attention … tend to be associated with questionable content.

I’m not criticising the action. I support it. (The reasons are complex and difficult to articulate, though what I had to say ... on Reddit ... about limitations on speech some six years ago seems strongly appropriate. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2g8e8c/shoutin...)

It's the rationalisation which seems thin.

The more so as what I’d based that argument on at the time --- falsely claiming no harm where a harm clearly existed is precisely at the centre of current discussions of the topic. This also seems to be a major, though under-discussed mode, of deceptive speech, and more pointedly a mode in which the downplaying of risk accrues benefits and gains to the parties promoting that message.

That said, Reddit’s lack of principled leadership and very-late-to-the-party redress continues to erode trust in the platform among those who live in a reality-based world and support strong epistemic systems. Which is one of the key challenges the firm faces: neither of the two principle sides in this matter are or will be happy with how it aquits itself.

I’ll note as well that the principles of “free speech” are not synonymous with the US first amendment (which concerns only government limitations), that speech on a privately-operate platform is both not the same as government censorship, but also not dissimilar in many regards, and that in any regard, free speech itself is not an absolute principle but one existing in balance with other considerations. I’ve been thinking in terms of a set of related, though often conflicting principles as Autonomous Communication (or variously: "informational autonomy" or "communications autonomy" --- naming things is hard --- discussed in “Which has primacy?”). The rights to privacy, free-assocation (both positive and negative), against self-incrimination, of obligated disclosure, and to accurate information, all collide, though there are some common principles which might help in adjudicating amongst them. I’m not aware of others offering any similar construction.

See: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/622677903778013902fd002590d8e...