Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#291

Post by tzs » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:27 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #8

I would love to see a statement from Reddit/Twitter... explicitly stating that they will remain politically neutral. There’s certainly content that should legally be taken down, there’s probably content that isn’t advertising friendly and could be taken down. It seems like these companies are being very slanted in their evaluation of the latter category. Basically right leaning = bad, left leaning = good. All I want…

What happens when being impartial leads to an appearance of bias?

There was an interesting segment on NPR sometime after Trump won the Republican nomination, looking back on how they had covered Trump during the primaries.

When they got a sense that they had been running more negative things about Trump than they had about the other Republican candidates, or less positive things about him than about the others, they started skipping negative things Trump did or said that would have been top stories if, say, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich had said or done them, to bring the total number of negative Trump things they ran more in line with the negative things about the others. Same with positive Trump things...they adjusted to keep those at least in the ballpark as those of other candidates.

In retrospect, they realized that they were simply unprepared for a situation where a candidate would have as many negatives compared to others of the same party as Trump had. If they had set some impartial, objective threshold and covered everything from every candidate that crossed that threshold their news segments would have been something like 90% about Trump.

They had implicitly assumed that no candidate would ever be that far out on his party's bell curve, and so killed legitimate, newsworthy stories to try to make the results match that expectation.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#292

Post by abiox » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:27 PM UTC

topgunsarg wrote: post #37

rightos wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That study if I recall correctly completely misses the spillover to other websites, considering only reddit itself - but bans on sites like reddit and Twitter have lead to the rise of sites like Gab, 8chan and Voat in recent years. The spillover is very real, just not on the same site.

Right, but the CEO of Reddit couldn't care less about that.

i'm not sure they should. perhaps they shouldn't.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#293

Post by s73ver_ » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:28 PM UTC

alexanderstears wrote: post #107

tdb7893 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard because people will always be mad when their stuff gets taken down and it's hard to tell where the line is. A good example on reddit is that r/the_Donald is often very racist, islamophobic, and misogynistic (and it's not a small portion, often the top comment on a post will be something that is islamophobic) but they don't see themselves as that way. I don't think they should ban that sub but even being imp…

Can you define "Islamophobia"? It's a serious question, I don't disagree that there's some prejudice against Islam on the western right. However, a lot of the top posts are ultimately factual claims. Sweden has a rise in grenade attacks and sexual assaults, British police looked the other way when Muslim Men formed a pedophilia group, most terrorism is motivated by Islam, and there are Islamists whose purported goal…

Most of those things you listed are dubious claims at best. However, if you promise you're in good faith, pointing out the crimes of one group disproportionately is a pretty bigoted thing to do. Breitbart had (maybe still does) a section called "Black Crime", in which they exclusively had stories about crimes involving African American people. Hitler's regime would put out news bulletins highlighting crimes committed by Jews. When you focus exclusively on one group and they bad things they're doing, it leaves the impression that these groups are disproportionately committing crimes, making them out to be worse than they really are.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#294

Post by abiox » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:28 PM UTC

ema wrote: post #225

zimpenfish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The spillover is very real, just not on the same site. Which is good - concentrate the hate speech into a single place and then take it down.

How would that help? It's not exactly rocket science to open up yet another reddit clone for the untouchables afterwards.

help what? is it a bad thing for reddit if other 'reddit clones' exist around certain worldviews?

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#295

Post by tambienben » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:28 PM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #236

ema wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that help? It's not exactly rocket science to open up yet another reddit clone for the untouchables afterwards.

Sure but a registrar / hoster that has just closed one hate site isn't going to let someone spin up another immediately. And soon enough they'll be out of options.

Your brazen support of censorship is troubling.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#296

Post by ignoramceisblis » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:32 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #130

zimpenfish wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the only argument that reliably gets trotted out whenever someone mentions curbing hate speech.

This isn't about hate speech. Hate speech is illegal and should be removed. This is about material that advertisers don't like. Advertisers aren't cops. They don't necessarily care about illegality. Rather, they might tolerate some degree of hate so long as it gets eyeballs. This is about marketing.

> Hate speech is illegal and should be removed.

This is a lie. Hate speech is not illegal, and the SCOTUS has explicitly made this clear.

To not have an understanding of the critical importance for private individuals to speak freely shows an extraordinary lack of knowledge of history, for one. And you declare you are an attorney in your HN "about" page?

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#297

Post by s73ver_ » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:32 PM UTC

ksk wrote: post #200

malvosenior wrote: post #8

I would love to see a statement from Reddit/Twitter... explicitly stating that they will remain politically neutral. There’s certainly content that should legally be taken down, there’s probably content that isn’t advertising friendly and could be taken down. It seems like these companies are being very slanted in their evaluation of the latter category. Basically right leaning = bad, left leaning = good. All I want…

Yeah, Twitter fucked up IMO. They wanted the check mark to mean verification, not endorsement, and ironically after removing the checkmark from people they don't like, its back to square one.

I think the problem is "who gets to be verified?" Why can't I be verified? The implication was that verified users were special in some way (maybe just in a Sneeches "stars upon thars" way), and so giving it to admitted Nazis and white nationalists was seen as saying they deserved to be special. And then taking it away made them and their supporters feel they weren't special anymore.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#298

Post by stale2002 » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

anon1385 wrote: post #207

Ralfp wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if the Nazi party came into power? What people tend to forget is that all totalitarian systems that came to power, have their origins form reactive movements acting to ineffectiveness or oppressiveness of existing systems. NSDAP was formed in response to worsening national situation. Reds and Whites were formed in response to worsening national situation. Italian fascism was response to political turmoil in po…

>what if anti-nazi party came into power I would hope that describes virtually every post war western government. And many of them have implemented various levels of 'authoritarian' systems to prevent the (re)rise of Nazis. Ranging from the banning of books in Germany to more mundane things like the British police spending a lot of time and money infiltrating neo-nazi groups and banning them. In the latter case exact…

> no problem with the police targeting Nazis

So what you are saying is, that all the police have to do is label someone a Nazi, and you'll give them a free pass for whatever it is that they do?

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#299

Post by anthony_romeo » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #173

AliAdams wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Slippery slope' arguments are not inherently invalid.

Please explain. I was under the impression the reason why slippery slope arguments are unacceptable is because events do not necessarily cause more extreme events to occur.

Not really. "Slippery Slope"-type arguments are fallacious when there is no evidence provided to support the slope. The fallacy is arguing that the closeness of each "step" in the slope necessarily means that these steps will likely happen, but not providing evidence to support that these steps will occur. If one provides evidence which support that certain steps will likely occur, then it's not a fallacy.

As an aside, there is something called the "fallacy fallacy" wherein pointing out a fallacy in someone else's argument doesn't necessarily mean that the argument's conclusion is false.

With that said, I'm not making an assessment of the above poster's reasoning.

Re: Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

#300

Post by j_s » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 5:35 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #65

adekok wrote: post #13

Similarly, Youtube is demonetizing videos with "bad words". Such as referring to "the naked eye". See here for a deconstruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlRFoYr-XuY&t=306s This kind of censorship is nice, until it turns into censorship of "things the company dislikes", versus "bad / illegal things." See recent vidcon for an example. Despite rules against harassment, a panelist out-and-out harassed an attendee…

I’m not familiar with vidcon- can you provide a link to the incident?

https://medium.com/@VidCon/vidcon-debrief-e6bb4e187a28#5f56

I think this observation summarizes even this thread:

> do not violate harassment policies, but the result is often that the vitriol of their followers ends up focused not on ideas, but on people

I was looking for any attempt at a neutral-ish video of the incident but came up empty.