Reddit has quarantined /r/The_Donald
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
Sweeping it away - sure, they likely made their lives easier. But what's the real outcome? The real freaks who get off on that stuff will go off to some horrible other site to ferment and radicalize away from the normalising influence of the more well-adjusted participants there, and regular people, who just might have been curious, have been deprived of whatever insights they might have found. I think it's a real shame.
And for what it's worth, I don't think The_Donald should be banned either. People have a right to speak, and we can ignore them if we want - or we can at least try to engage. I don't buy the "private company, they can do what they want!" argument. The age of the internet has introduced powerful network effects into where we can conduct our public discourse with any efficacy - Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you don't like - you don't really support free speech!
Unlike Facebook and Google, which exert truly horrendous amounts of power over very significant aspects of people's lives, Reddit is, fundamentally, just another forum. It even has its older versions open-sourced.
In fact, There are reddit clones where these things are perfectly allowed.
And those clones are cesspits of schizophrenics, fascists, and deeply disturbed people.
the rest is filled with people accelerating the mentally unstable
try treating internet users like human beings first, maybe?
It started as a free speech reddit but it has just turned into a mob mentality with horrendous language and the like.
It makes me wonder if social media is a form of a sort of micro mob mentality. A lot of it really brings out the worst in people.
As someone who has dealt with close family members struggling with this horrible affliction, my first thought was to contact Dang and demand your lynching.
Instead I’ll take a breath, live and let live.
We all understand that there are people that have a negative influence on every network they participate in. The problem is that banning them is not a long term solution and in many cases it only make things worse. It is the easy one, but it makes impossible to build some difficult conversations.
There are also many different kind of communities and forums, HN is very special in this (no subcommunities, strong moderation clearly stated upfront) many are more like tumblr (as the FAQ put it: "Go nuts, show nuts, whatever").
Reddit is effectively used as a second life, with countless smaller groups, weird circles, and unusual communities. In this regard it is the social network most similar to real live.
Second, these are internet forums, not segregating society.
Third, if being around other people like yourself makes things worse, that isn't a problem that other people can solve for you.
Finally, check out voat, incel groups, the_donald, etc. and see if you think it is just a matter of 'difficult conversation'. There is no rationality to conversations in extremist toxic internet forums. People have an emotional investment and frustration that looks far more like mental illness than actual discord.
Agree, but not always in the direction we want or expect
> Second, these are internet forums, not segregating society.
This is an increasingly irrelevant distinction as we move more and more of our political debates over the internet (How often do people talk IRL with people of opposing view?)
> Third, if being around other people like yourself makes things worse, that isn't a problem that other people can solve for you.
Do you believe the same for addiction? Sorry for the strawman, but it is a silly statement.
>Finally, check out voat, incel groups, the_donald, etc. [...] there is no rationality to conversations in extremist toxic internet forums.
That is entirely the point, if you segregate the extremist and the moderate that is exactly what you get.
Yes, banning more people is the solution to the problem caused by banning too many people (the 'too' is important).
Without getting explicitly political it is important to point out that platforms ban people based on the consequences of not banning them. When you have strong external influences (like journalists asking loaded and threatening questions to create their own stories) platforms become a tool of political activists.
Democracy and eager banning people from political discourse (Reddit less, but don't tell me that twitter is not fundamental in that) do not work well together.
How? I've been banned from their subreddit by trying to engage with them (ironic isn't it?).
If anything, this is great, now they have a huge warning on their subreddit that tell pretty clearly that violence is unacceptable. If this is the only way to engage with them, then so be it.
They aren't being deplatformed, the subreddit is still there, they still can post on it (while I still can't ;) ). There's plenty of conservative subreddit not quarantine too if that's really something they consider an issue.
I'm pretty sure too that if they can show that violent speech is now under control, that they'll remove the quarantine.
The real freaks who get off
on that stuff will go off to
some horrible other site to
ferment and radicalize away
from the normalising
influence of the more
well-adjusted participants there.
If the internet truly shaped thought in the way that remark suggests, or nevermind the internet... If it were possible for people to influence one another in that way, by expressing opinions, all opinions would eventually homogenize into a placid average.
What really happens is people stick to their guns and never back down, but sometimes they lose, go quiet, and bottle up their controversy and stew in it until better opportunities come along.
The difference the internet makes is that a wider diversity of opportunities are made available to jump into. The people don't change. They find comfortable places where no one tells them to stop or shut up, even if there's no "censoring" (banning, moderating, deleting or otherwise silencing) of the riff raff.
Here and there, the subsequent outcome to that, is that as birds of a feather flock together, some flocks reach a critical mass. Their noise and biomass becomes big enough that it ruffles the feathers of rivals, and you get collisions. The gang violence then spills out into the open, and the revolting conflict of contrasted polar extremes disgusts all of the outsiders.
But really, these different sorts of people were always running around, it's just that they never joined forces. They never wrote letters, had phone calls, visited, ate lunch together. They were all two towns apart, and total strangers, unknown to their subculture and often unaware of a potential for subculture.
Edit: another commenter mentions HoldMyFeedingTube, which is basically all WPD material and regularly makes the front page
Perhaps I can get a serious answer here since I have yet had anyone explain to me the difference when I ask elsewhere (and rarely is it relevant to bring up here).
Why do we treat videos of murders different than videos of more prurient crimes? Why is it acceptable to host/download/share/watch a video of a murder as long as no sex crime takes place during it? Even videos devoid of any crime except being videotaped can be far more illegal and socially unacceptable than a video of a murder made by the murderer.
And I don't mean those watching it for political/reporting/policing/etc. reasons, but the ones who do so for entertainment.
Even still, I think the question can be applied to either type, though I think the applicability to purposefully recorded videos of murder is stronger.
What I can't understand is how the r/HoldMyFeedingTube shows up frequently for me on the front page. At least with the other two I had to specifically go there to see that kind of content.
It is rather messed up to just be looking at the front page not knowing what that subreddit is and clicking on a silly video only to find out you're watching someone sustain serious bodily injury.
I agree with others that this ban on r/T_D only has to do with the recent media attention.
The thing is, with The_Donald, I don't think anyone could reasonably actually try to engage. Their subreddit has and had some of the most heavy-handed moderation. Read their rules on "concern trolling" [1] to get a hint of what kind of things they regularly removed. If you read their full rules, you quickly realize that not being a Trump supporter is a top level rule as well. They were a self proclaimed endless rally, and anything that doesn't fit their narrative was removed.
In my opinion, how notoriously heavy handed their moderation was probably amplified how upset the admins were that they had to regularly step in and clean up content. Anti-trump comments are almost always removed within minutes, and so the idea that they were incapable of moderating away things which violated the site guidelines is easily busted.
> "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views
But it's not because of their political views, it was because of how they ran their community. There's a huge difference here. There are plenty of conservative communities that remain on Reddit today. The difference is that those communities have chosen to cultivate and moderate a different environment. T_D cultivated a community that produced problematic content on the regular. They amplified the visibility of that problematic content by hiding downvote buttons and making it more difficult to report. They prevented any sort of self-policing in the community with heavy handed moderation that removed any dissenting opinions on almost any topic. For all the cries about censorship, censorship was at the heart of how T_D was run. Any hopes that you had of interaction with better adjusted individuals providing a counterbalance to the predominant content were removed.
In short, T_D is quarantined because they have intentionally developed a toxic echochamber that amplified content that the reddit administrators view as objectively bad enough to ban site-wide. It's not a matter of political views, it's a matter of views on how to run a healthy community, and a true community T_D is not.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5asj7o/announce...
That community is definitely for protesting the police, but I haven't seen anything calls for violence like this get upvoted or past the mods:
- https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/uploader/image/20...
- https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/uploader/image/20...
- https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/uploader/image/20...
- https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/uploader/image/20...
- https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/uploader/image/20...
- https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/uploader/image/20...
TD has the population of a midsize city. Of course there are a few violent comments if you look hard enough.
This is like quarantining Hollywood because a few celebrities made death threats in 2017.
Also, if it's now the case that these cop-violence-inciting comments are hidden everywhere, then why does it matter if /r/politics has them too in the first place?
This ban wasn't about an isolated instance of calls for violence slipping through. It is the culmination of years of cultivating a community and moderation practices that have made the admins have to interfere a disproportionate amount relative to the rest of reddit. You can find examples of bad behavior from individuals on any subreddit, but can you find a pattern of behavior that breeds and incites it driven by the moderators of a community itself?
It no longer understands what the center is.
Considering Trump won close to 50% of the vote - regardless of that silly electoral college - I don’t see this ending like they think it will.
Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn't accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.
However, because of this, Reddit is becoming increasingly sterile, single-minded, and most importantly ad-friendly to the point where its fairly difficult to have an honest discussion about anything remotely controversial.
Unfortunately their selective banning of communities that I would associate with the "far-right" has seriously hurt any attempt to migrate away from Reddit (specifically Voat.co is unbearable for me trying to participate).
I don't know if there will ever be a straw to break the camels back, but I have been actively searching for reddit alternatives for years and have not found a truly viable replacement.
Like most media companies, reddit wants to promote its political agenda. It's natural and common (and expected of the traditional media), but since reddit doesn't pay for their own content, can only be done with censorship.
So they're making it difficult to have an honest discussion about anything they have an opinion about.
That's particularly concerning because reddit seems to be a natural monopoly, having operated for years with no successful competition. Perhaps this censorship will be the impetus that finally allows some competition to break through.
Still some possibility there, the leadership is open to fairness and free speech. It's the user base that has rotted.
It’s not the only subreddit with large bot populations, I’m just saying it’s one of the more toxic influential ones.
I guess an alternate explanation is a 10x inflation in the advertising interface, but that would be defrauding the advertisers.
Usually a pretty reliable sign of botism. You see it on corporate driven posts on movie promotions a decent amount too. (Along with some pretty lame top voted comments)
It implies it's unusual traffic, but it does not imply it's inhuman traffic -- doubly so because the difference has already been explained in a way that doesn't require invoking bots.
Somewhat amusingly, after r/the_donald discovered it could push pro-Trump memes onto r/all by making every post on the subreddit about upvoting content, some other subreddits managed to pull off the same stunt in protest.
1. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...
R_TheDonald is a forum on someone’s product, there’s a low barrier erected here, they could go buy a url and some servers and continue their speech.
The government is not guaranteeing that they will rebroadcast whatever you want to say, they are just not giving you consequences for saying it.
Businesses aren't imposing consequences of violence on speech, they just are choosing not to be a part of it.
Someone not listening to you is not censorship.
Insisting a private business promote any and all content from anyone whatsoever, no matter how abhorrent or anti-social, in a specific way, seems like a bigger step in the wrong direction. Content is removed from Reddit every day for violating various subreddit policies; the only thing changing here is the way /r/The_Donald is presented with the rest of the site.
> Since you believe in the paradox of tolerance do you agree that the US shouldn't let Islamic migrants come due to their belief in vile things such as throwing gays off roofs?
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Fascism implies censorship, but censorship does not imply fascism.
Get out of your bubble, arm yourself with some compassion, and go try and understand what motivates people to disrupt the status quo. Most trump supporters hate fascism. You are deluding yourself by tossing a mr. yuck sticker on people you don’t understand.
- Nobody here is saying trump supporters are fascists.
- Nobody here is even saying that the_donald subreddit represents all of Trump supporters.
So why are you playing that card?
GP is talking about the effectiveness of the deplatforming of hate speech in context to a subreddit that has been reported as inciting violence. The same subreddit that supported the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally that resulted in a Neo-Nazi murdering Heather Heyer.
Whether or not you think that extends to all Trump supporters, and are disappointed by that, is your own inference. Don't attack GP because of it though.
Because of the following comments: >>“On the contrary. Deplatforming fascism works[1]. This removes a small number of tools that they use to recruit. It is step in the right direction.”
I regret engaging in this discussion. I guess it’s time to give up on trying to understand each other’s point of view, because disagreement is currently seen as a personal attack on HN.
This article is probably what triggered it.
What if those two posts referenced in the article were written by the same person, and generally downvoted?
'A worldwide community supporting the violent threats of local militia backing their civilly disobedient politicians efforts to evade the government use of police force to mandate participation and speech' is a super interesting power dynamics story. Whos the oppressor in this story, government use of police force, militia chaos, insubordinate politicians holding process hostage? Is the use of police FORCE to strong arm their votes itself violence? Shouldnt people be banned for supporting police force?
To Godwin's law this topic, would reddit choose to ban advocating prisoner violence towards auschwitz guards, in their efforts to escape? Would the rebels be banned for advocating destruction of the empire and violence towards storm troopers? It doesnt seem like there is a line drawn anywhere, it does appear arbitrary, or biased against violence they disagree with. The actual policy seems more like "ban what gets us bad press." If the rules were enforced consistently, rap music would be banned. I'm not pretending there are easy answers, even the supreme court has been looking at whether rap music is artistic or a credible threat, maybe they arent mutually exclusive. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/politics/supreme-court...
You are complaining about phrases that are purposely under contextualizing what's going on, but then go on to commit the same thing in your third paragraph by contextualizing it to the holocaust.
I brought up two similar but different types of speech, observers advocating violence towards oppressive authority. If this were an elementary school analogy, prisoners would be the militia not the reddit commentators. The guards and police are both blindly following government orders, whether those orders are right or wrong. Is advocating violence wrong regardless of if the target of said violence is behaving morally or immorally? The topic at hand is where reddit does (or doesnt) draw the line of acceptable speech regarding advocating violence.
- 'get a rope' - 'So, firing squad time right?' - 'If he is not fired for this then wtf do we do next? Take matters into our own hands?'
What was Reddit supposed to do? Tolerate death threats on its platform? Then get sued if the person gets murdered?
And this isnt an isolated example.
Probably treat the situation the same way they do in other subreddits. The whole “taking matters into our own hands” and calls for violence against politicians happen in other subreddits, and yet they don’t get quarantined (looking at you, r/politics). Either quarantine them all or none of them.
Meanwhile, r/LateStageCapitalism, a sub whose premise is to induce lust for the guillotine, has been quarantined before because one user was running around yelling about Guillotines in the comments. This would happen periodically.
So the admins changed up the mod team. They kept the Anarchist/Communist asthetic, but Social Democrats run the sub now. And they keep the space guillotine-free.
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
I don't think reddit is the measure of acceptable discourse. If the_donald was banned it would just mean that its users would have to find another subreddit or site to use, it says nothing about what type of discourse is generally acceptable. Further, I think it's pretty obvious by now that reddit's problem with the_donald is not related to their political ideas since there other subreddits supportive of the president that have had no conflicts with the site admins (e.g. /r/conservative, /r/republican).
That's the problem though. The mods were repeatedly hostile to any attempts by the admins to handle the more egregious rule violations. The admins have treated them with kid gloves for years now. They were historically one of the worst sources of brigading of other (much smaller) subs. For instance, /r/legaladvice had huge problems with them in the past.
Even the chapo mods complied with the admins when they were asked to crack down on calls for violence... Even though those calls for violence were about _dead_ slave owners... Hard to kill someone already dead.
Edit: Found where I read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/gro...
Edit 2: my comment was moved from a different thread that was on a TechCrunch article on this. TechCrunch claimed that this quarantine would mean that ads would no longer run on T_D.
This source also shows T_D wasn't on the whitelist, since it was on of the subs being protested by /r/stopadvertising.
The result was that after the banning of the just as toxic "fatpeoplehate", admins were loathe to interfere with t_d. Any administrative response was met with charges of politicization, "liberal bias", and more rule-breaking.
I'm surprised it's taken this long, but it appears that Reddit's staff waited until they had an obviously non-partisan reason for doing it. In this case, threatening police officers. I think they wanted to wait until they had a reason that would be difficult for people to turn into a partisan brawl that would give Reddit bad publicity.
Imagine if you will the difficulty conservative sites may have in threading the needle that t_d is simultaneously being persecuted here for their conservative, pro-Trump political views, and that the particular views they were banned for were making violent threats to law enforcement.
https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...
Scroll down and read the screenshots. It doesn't quite matter what the subreddit praised before when they still broke the rules.
A lot of those screenshots are "1 point, 11 minutes ago" or "2 points, 17 minutes ago". If that's being expanded to cover an entire subreddit, then no sub would be safe when applied consistently.
- 49 votes, 9 hours ago
- 27 votes, 7 hours ago
- 53 points, 1 day ago
- 66 points, 1 day ago
Go do a sockpuppet and do the same! That won't last long and you'll get down-voted heavily.
They were quarantined, not banned. I honestly doubt they'll get banned at this rate, it was headlines like [0] that got it quarantined.
[0]: https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2019/06/25/you-cant-offer-to-...
I think if other subreddits behaved similarly to t_d, they would have been banned, and much more swiftly.
As evidence of that bias, consider their curation of r/popular, where they choose what to show.
They actively promote posts from the left and actively hide posts from the right. For example, this 18 hour old Democrat talking point [1] with 10k net upvotes is displayed before numerous posts that received 3x to 8x as many net upvotes in less time.
And extreme left wing subs continue to be featured on r/popular (many brigading and harassing right wing subs) while reddit restricts right wing subs.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/c5kuhx/ukrauthammer...
So first you claim that any other popular subreddit would have as much admin intervention, but then you say that we shouldn't actually investigate this claim because even if we found that you were wrong, you're still right?
Also the "net upvotes" that Reddit displays are not literal net upvotes. Those numbers are fudged in order to prevent conveying too much information. Reddit skews liberal, this is no surprise. The height of a post depends on what subs you are subscribed to, and on r/all it depends on the preference of everybody else. Which skews liberal.
Interpreting these actions as site admins intentionally making it more difficult for moderators of that subreddit is cognitive dissonance.
He posted about it in advance on r/The_Donald. People cheered him on.
There are a few other subreddits like this and they all appear to work in a similarly ephemeral way. It's odd to me how they use the system. It's similar to 4chan in the ephemerality but it's more like IRC.
On the contrary, at least one study found that what you describe does not happen. Rather, a quantitative reduction in hate speech was observed when Reddit banned a number of toxic subreddits in 2015.
Inhabitants either moved off the platform entirely (accounts that frequented those subs ceased to be active) or those that stayed appeared to modulate their behaviour to conform to the norms of less-toxic subs.
Among social sciences a single study has very little weight. Given how often it is quoted despite this signals a flaw in popular cultures relationship with the field.
Sure. "I feel like ..." has absolutely no evidentiary weight, though, so in this case, a little weight is strictly preferable to nothing.
> Given how often it is quoted despite this signals a flaw in popular cultures relationship with the field.
I'd say rather it signals a blind spot in the social sciences, where researchers are failing to investigate emerging online phenomenon wrt communities and moderation in significant numbers.
More studies confirming or disproving the results of this one would, of course, be preferable. But we should hardly apologize for turning to what little study and evidence there is rather than pulling "this will cause X to happen" assertions directly from our asses.
Apologies, it appears I wasn't clear. I meant the extent that psychology and sociology studies in any part of their fields are quoted when there is only a single study, not just in relationship to internet/social media.
>But we should hardly apologize for turning to what little study and evidence there is rather than pulling "this will cause X to happen" assertions directly from our asses.
The difference is in the latter case we are well aware of the origin, while in the former case many can mistaken think there is the full weight of science behind the findings comparable to the theory of gravity or evolution. They shouldn't make the mistake, but I've seen it made enough times.
They may be, they may not be. So far we have evidence that, in general, banning a sub doesn't result in it simply diasporaing into other subs. "Something different will happen this time because I feel like it will" isn't a terribly compelling counter-argument in and of itself. Absent new evidence, and given the evidence already in hand, this seems like a reasonable move to me.
> Political-related speech won't disappear from Reddit, especially with an election year coming up.
I don't think Reddit is attempting to "eliminate political-related speech" in general so much as the "I'm ready and willing to put a bullet in an Oregon cop's skull" speech that was being given free-reign in this subreddit?
For reddit, that's their specialty. That's a solved problem. In their specific case their subreddit user groups don't act as filter bubbles. By some miracle they largely act as intended... As communities for like minded individuals to share their interests and largely in a positive context.
The money and advertising and focus is always on the "front page" and the jockeying for position to make headlines and drive traffic to affiliates but this is a huge distraction.
Reddit should focus on investing in the positive and great communities that are built on the site. Build tools to help these communities do what they do even better and use more front page real estate to drive people to these positive experiences since they already exist today. That's the real value of reddit.
Some censorship is inevitable, some bad actors need to be expelled from the site, but ultimately you need to lift up the good examples, not just play "bop a troll"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
/u/spez:
> While they can be offensive and antagonistic to the rest of Reddit, we have not found them to be in consistent violation of our content policies.[0]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/bwpqqi/we_are_us_...
Representative quote: A user wrote, “Rifles are the only way we're going to get any peace in our lives ever again,” adding, “It's either war and we get rid of these guys or a lifetime of listening to this shit over and over again start getting yourself ready.”
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
That's a great and concise way to describe what those people have done, or are trying to do. I've seen it on several old forums or games, like the Something Awful Goons invading Eve Online with the stated aim of ruining the game for everyone else.
It's this weird immature streak of "everyone pay attention to me" that these hateful vandals thrive upon. They have to be the only ones making noise, and everyone must listen to that noise. If things don't happen exactly like they want, they throw fits, threaten, and whine as a group so much that people give in just to shut them up. And since it's just attention that is being sought, any actions are valid, good or bad. Appeals to admins/moderators, spamming, arguing in bad faith, harassing others, defacing the site or simply breaking as much as they can. How that attention seeking validates these people, I have no idea.
/r/politics is only left-leaning because of how heavily skewed right american politics is. Most of their opinions are centrist at best. Their obsession with trump is a bit annoying, but it's only annoying, not actively harmful.
This seems like it would be easy to replicate this on any subreddit, doesn't it?
Get a group of people and deliberately target subreddits in various hours of the day with calls for violence, and then report them to the admins of reddit.
Wouldn't this, in theory at least, quarantine any subreddit?
Something doesn't add up here.
[0]https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...
During 2016 on Facebook, similar spamming tactics were used to shut down many pages promoting Bernie Sanders.
If it really were something orchestrated by users of T_D, then why would they report it to reddit? It's more likely that outside forces had a hand in this.
I was merely commenting how easy is to do this to other subreddits, so any subreddit can get banned etc.
So maybe Reddit should reconsider their position on banning solely because of this, if this is in fact the only reason they quarantined T_D.
TD has always been toxic, racist, and bigoted, it was just a matter of time before this happened. I think it happening near an election cycle is just coincidence, I think more the civil-war inciting of the current events in Oregon is at play here.
that is not true
> Trump began his reelection campaign unusually early for an incumbent President. He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2020_presidential...
> He began spending for his reelection effort within weeks of his election, and officially filed his campaign with the Federal Election Commission on the day of his inauguration.
and
> On June 18, 2019, Trump held an official campaign launch event at the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida
links?
Years from now, controversy will still roil. Historians will have a colorful character to teach about.
Is the Millenial generation just so indoctrinated that they can't see how destructive what they are doing is? When you side with the left, you are making a very clear statement about the value of individual human lives (zero). Try having a little self-worth.
An estimated 262 million people were murdered by their own governments between 1900 and 1999. That toll is a silent testimonial about misplaced trust and idealism. It is real, it is reality--bodies stacked like cordwood, piled by the thousands, mass graves, misery beyond comprehension. Are we doomed to repeat that? If so, in the next conflagration it will be billions.
Selfishness is the root of it. Can you imagine giving up your place of superiority so that someone else gets a chance? They can't.
Well no objectively it is not. that's why better keep politics away from it
e.g. i lean libertarian and i just deleted 2 of my comments which were beginning to get downvoted fast (no replies). The last thing i care to do is argue with a mob, and this is not the first time it happened. I 'm testing the waters repeatedly and it's not working. I would encourage you to do an experiment.
Show me something better. I'm not saying it's as balanced as you _could_ get.
Again, it's about how you post it. I've posted at least a handful of libertarian or conservative ideas that have gotten upvoted. You just have to make your case carefully. Snark gets downvoted, for instance. Rightwing or libertarian snark gets downvoted more, granted. They police tone here, not so much ideas. I think it's a fruitful policy.
> it's about how you post it
I dont use snark but my posts are blunt. If i have to preface all my comments with social engineering fluff , i already know it's not the place to post it.
The following is an excerpt of the message the Reddit admins sent the moderators of /r/The_Donald:
(Edit: I originally posted an excerpt of the message from the OP in the SRD post. I've since found the full message in a comment [1], so I'll be replacing it here with that version. Of note is that the admins have disabled /r/The_Donald's ability to use custom styling, as they abused CSS to hide the report button in order to prevent people from reporting violent content to them. The comment also mentions that one of the moderators of /r/The_Donald was stripped of most of his permissions as well.)
> Dear Mods,
> We want to let you know that your community has been quarantined, as outlined in Reddit’s Content Policy.
> The reason for the quarantine is that over the last few months we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community and an over-reliance on Reddit admins to manage users and remove posts that violate our content policy, including content that encourages or incites violence. Most recently, we have observed this behavior in the form of encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon. This is not only in violation of our site-wide policies, but also your own community rules (rule #9). You can find violating content that we removed in your mod logs.
> As we have discussed in the past, and as detailed in our content policy and moderator guidelines, we expect you to enforce against rule-breaking content. You’ve made progress over the last year, but we continue to observe and take action on a disproportionate amount of rule-breaking behavior in this community. We recognize that you do remove posts that are reported, but we are troubled that violent content more often goes unreported, and worse, is upvoted.
> User reports and downvotes are an essential way that Reddit functions to moderate content. Limiting or prohibiting them prevents you from moderating your community effectively. Because of this, we are disabling your custom styling in order to restore these essential functions.
> As stated in our Moderator Guidelines, our goal is to keep the platform alive and vibrant, as well as to ensure your community can reach people interested in it. Accordingly, here are the specific terms of the quarantine and the next steps we are asking from you as a mod team to resolve this situation.
> Quarantine terms:
> Visitors to this community will see a warning that requires users to explicitly opt-in to viewing it. This messaging reminds users of the importance of reporting rule-breaking content.
> Custom styling has been disabled to restore the report and downvote buttons.
> We hope both these changes will help improve the signal around rule-breaking content and improve your ability to effectively address it.
> Next steps:
> You unambiguously communicate to your subscribers that violent content is unacceptable.
> You communicate to your users that reporting is a core function of Reddit and is essential to maintaining the health and viability of the community.
> Following that, we will continue to monitor your community, specifically looking at report rate and for patterns of rule-violating content.
> Undertake any other actions you determine to reduce the amount of rule-violating content.
> Following these changes, we will consider an appeal to lift the quarantine, in line with the process outlined here.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe...
https://twitter.com/thedonaldreddit/status/11439265704086446...
Edit: It's important to note that there isn't a report function that bypasses subreddit moderators, unless you directly message the admins. So if the reddit admins are having to step in on reports it means that the moderators are ignoring them, either deliberately or due to a poorly managed moderation team (not enough members or time zone coverage).
Does this effectively measure the incoming complaints/requests to reddit admins? If those went up, but their admins' capability to moderate was already saturated maybe the rate of comments removed would stay the same.
Can't people that don't like the content just not read it?
It’s not about people who want to go to fan sites (or don’t want to go) - it’s about misinformation / inappropriate content leaking out to folks who might inadvertently view it and not understand the rat hole they’re about to go down.
Putting the subreddit into the quarantine just means that there’s an extra disclosure and opt-in before viewing content from that subreddit (and content won’t be shown in popular, /r/all, etc.)
Election meddling.
A question like that could a) but some of the Democrat candidates in a bind comparing their answer to any voting history/previous statements on the issue or b) could cast light on the sort of topics that obviously Democrat-supporting/anti-Trump big tech doesn't want people to investigate or learn about for themselves.
Anyway, the real point of my post was to see how quickly it would be downvoted. Petty partisanship is rife on HN.
Conservatives just need to move off of these platforms. They're private property, let them have their bubbles. This moral outrage at being censored is a waste of time, and staying on these platforms just continues to enrich them. I'm all for avoiding echo chambers, but it's futile to try to have neutral debate on a biased platform.
There are still going to be lots of conservative people on reddit even if /r/The_Donald gets banned, and there are still tons of conservative people on youtube, facebook, etc. Just because a few highly controversial right wing personalities have been removed from these platforms (usually for hate speech) doesn't mean the platforms are biased against conservatives in general
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c4miq0/insider_...
The Reddit account of Project Veritas appeared to have used self promotion per their own screenshot, which is banned on Reddit. Not sure if the ban was prior to the new release or not.
Maybe that's because said shooter was: female, minority, immigrant, and vegan. Definitely doesn't fit the stereotype of a threat, if you live/work in an SV echo chamber. https://www.celebgossiptoday.com/2018/04/04/watch-videos-fro...
This is of course the same company that fired an employee when other employees threatened him enough for him to stay home. Damore.
Meanwhile, as rhegart commented below, far worse is permitted in other subreddits. The bias is clear as could be.
It's not crazy to think this has something to do with Google. Immense pressure is being applied by Google. Nobody dares risk being blacklisted from Google search. We've partially lost our ability to have public debate that might negatively impact Google.
https://twitter.com/thedonaldreddit/status/11439265704086446...
On the contrary, I'm a former moderator of r/science which had an order of magnitude more traffic and am unaware of an admin ever having to step in during my many months tenure.
The justification also ran much deeper than the fact that they had to step in at all, and discussed the fact that the community moderators took actions which actively prevented the community from policing itself. Downvote buttons being hidden and renaming the report button increase the probability of these posts staying up and visible for longer periods of time.
I read T_D, and a lot of other sites on reddit. T_D is 99% of the time pro-police. You are much more likely to see anti-police sentiment and posts which encourage violence against police officers on other subs on reddit(usually, the more liberal ones like /r/politics).
This Media Matters article[0] contains screenshots showing more than one user supporting violence against the police.
Of course, any such comments have been deleted from Reddit proper, now, and you may well consider them faked, but given the number of outlets reporting on this, and the fact that no one here seems to be denying that these comments actually ever existed, I think it's safe to assume that more than one user and one post was involved.
[0]https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...
I'm not sure why you think this is better.
> the more people will rebel and fall into the arms of conservatives
So they're not actually "conservative", but they will be? Sure. Unless of course, that already happened, and they actually are.
Some of the liberal values will remain mainstream. Some of them will be abandoned as passing fads.
I think people are not against, subconsciously, to the evolution of some of these values, but to the rate and way they're imposed onto society.
It's also incredible divisive. In my country we had a football star doing a GoFundMe for legal fees after he was sacked for a religious and homophobic cartoon on his social media. GoFundMe blocked his campaign, as it's against their views, and now he's making more money than before through a private donations drive.
The banning of The Donald is going to drive an even bigger wedge between the two sides of the political spectrum. For a political movement obsessed with power/privilege, the left seems oblivious to its own power/privilege. They wield the cast majority of the societal power currently and they're throwing it around like a hammer.
This keeps getting repeated over and over again and does not correspond with reality.
/r/the_donald is a forum full of obvious bots, spin doctoring, and people with openly extreme and antisocial views. Out entire history has shown that the "deplatforming" of these views works.
The views in that forum are not part of a majority, nor what most people would associate with mental sanity. You would do well to dive into the content.
Like it or not Donald Trump actually is the president of the United States. It's not like this is some fringe forum of weirdos, it's the fan site of the sitting president of a major country. It's also very likely that it played a big role in helping him get elected.
If you think quarantining or banning The_Donald won't sow the seeds of discord, you're sorely mistaken.
1. Openly leftist media outlet [1] sensationalizes posts by a few users, and proclaims a non-sequitur - that the problem lies with the entire sub-reddit, instead of with a few users
2. SV tech company feigns umbrage, cowering behind the sensationalism of said media outlet, legitimizes their false claims and BANS the entire sub-reddit. Instead of banning the offending users.
3. Ecosystem of left leaning outlets (techcrunch et. al.) publish opinions in agreement with the actions, though similar actions from their preferred political faction (say for a few illegal posts by far-left activists on AOC subreddit) goes ignored and free of media amplification.
The frequency of the above steps happening has skyrocketed as the democratic presidential campaign gains steam. If you trained an AI on the above phenomenon, the internet would be rid of any speech not condoned by the left faction of the democratic party.
Techno-fascism is well and truly here.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759967/reddit-quarantin...
[Citation Needed]
Edit: the Chapo one is out of quarantine. Apparently there were a bunch of posts soliciting violence towards slaveholders and once the mods removed them they lifted the quarantine.
Slaveholders? What kind of violence?
One could perhaps attribute to the difference to a supposedly neutral framing vs. an explicitly partisan one; but much of the opposition to Trump (including from conservatives) has to do with flaunting democratic norms and other such "meta-politics", rather than policy positions, which I think is certainly fair game for the /r/politics hivemind to have an explicit opinion on.
The problem is /r/politics pretends to be a general politics subreddit, while /r/the_donald is explicitly just for Trump supporters.