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Comment by gfosco | Hacker News Reader

The subreddit moderators provided the admin logs, showing that on average, 1 post per day was actioned on by reddit admins. "Biggest headache" yeah, right.

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The members of the the_donald had a history of breaking rules and crying foul any time any sort of administrative action was taken against them for it. Whether it was for brigading and harassment, or flooding modmail in other subreddits, or other actions.

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.

I don't think there are many subreddits that praise and love law enforcement more than the_donald. They used a Media Matters hit piece to censor and contain one of the most popular subs, for purely partisan reasons.

Did you read the Media Matters piece? Here it is in case you hadn't:

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.

If I make a sockpuppet and post the same comments in r/politics, does that mean it should get quarantined?

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.

If you look at these accounts, many are 1+ years old. Calling them sock puppets is confirmation bias to avoid reading the article.

Age is not a good determination of sockpuppetness, at least with competent opponents. Past activity might be, since that at least costs something, while age just costs prep time.

Okay, did you look at the age and the comment activity of these accounts? Because they're not sockpuppets accounts.

You're making a textbook No True Scotsman.

I don't doubt that many of the accounts screenshotted in the article linked are actual, active accounts on /r/The_Donald. I doubt that you can usefully distinguish real accounts from fake ones for the purposes of identifying false flag attacks in other subreddits.

A lot of those screenshots are theses too:

- 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.

My impression reading the article was the more blatant the call to violence, the lower the score. I haven't exactly done a proper study of that, of course.

You may need to works on your impression then. All the ones I quoted were blatant call to violence. All with good amount of upvote and pretty old.

"None of this gets fixed without people picking up rifles." - 49 votes, 9 hours ago

"The only way to get it back is to burn Portland and Eugene to the ground." - 27 votes, 7 hours ago

"No problems shooting a cop trying to strip rights from Citizens." - 53 points, 1 day ago

"Where is the militia to help protect this man?" - 66 points, 1 day ago

>that the particular views they were banned for were making violent threats to law enforcement

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-...

Good correction, I'm outside the edit window on my comment to fix it.

I think if other subreddits behaved similarly to t_d, they would have been banned, and much more swiftly.

Reddit is composed of tens of thousands of subreddits, and relies on volunteer moderators to police them. For a single subreddit to demand at least one admin intervention a day is absurd.

One of reddit's most active subs would naturally demand more than most of those ten thousand mostly niche subs.

Do you have a data source showing this? Can we compare the amount of admin intervention across subreddits?

Comparing the amount of intervention the admins would not be a useful indicator of anything except their bias.

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...

> Comparing the amount of intervention the admins would not be a useful indicator of anything except their bias

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.

No point in talking with you if you're going to put words in my mouth. I didn't claim that "any other popular subreddit would have as much admin intervention".

It's clear that TD suffers much more scrutiny and restriction from the admins.

I was simply refuting your "tens of thousands of subreddits" comment.

For the record, you said:

> One of reddit's most active subs would naturally demand more than most of those ten thousand mostly niche subs.

This clearly implies that the amount of admin intervention in r/The_Donald is highly correlated with its popularity rather the relative toxicity of the subreddit, no?

Compared to the "tens of thousands of subreddits" you mentioned in the comment I replied to, yes. A sub with 750k users will generally have more intervention than a sub with 750.

Now you're changing the subject to "any other popular subreddit" which was not in the comment I replied to and thus was obviously not what I was talking about.

To make that clear, I'm saying there's a correlation between popularity and number of interventions, but that's not the only factor. Admin bias is another factor, and I'm sure there are others I can't think of at the moment.

As for "relative toxicity", TD isn't any more toxic than other political subs on reddit. The whole place is a cesspool. Unless you fit in perfectly with the group on any political sub you'll be treated badly. But right wing subs suffer additional toxicity from the admins.

I mean, the fact that you can get banned on TD immediately for commenting anything even remotely critical of the president suggests that it is very unlikely that TD "isn't any more toxic than other political subs on reddit." There were entire threads in TD calling for violent intervention in Oregon; similar posts are not found in any of the other political subs. Even in response to the quarantine, there are plenty of comments suggesting violent revolution.

This claim that "other subs are just as toxic" seems to be a common refrain among TD supporters (as well as white nationalist hate subs). Do you have any evidence to support this?

Where are these "entire threads in TD calling for violent intervention in Oregon"? All I've seen cited here are isolated comments with a handful of points.

So I spent a few minutes yesterday reading part way down the comments on a single post in r/politics and found similar comments advocating violent resistance to the government.

> Just do a 180 turn on gun reforms. They’ll take an armed population more seriously.

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c5og99/there_are_...

> It's because protests don't achieve anything. ... Riots on the other hand...

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c5og99/there_are_...

If someone were as motivated as Media Matters I'm sure they could find much, much more. If you doubt that I encourage you to investigate a bit yourself.

Doesn't the fact that such a heavily modded subreddit required administrators to intervene on a daily basis show it is a problem? Reddit admins shouldn't have to do almost anything to any highly trafficked and moderated subreddits. A different subreddit might be able to claim "Well there wasn't enough mods to catch a few comments falling through the cracks", but on the most heavily moderated subreddit on the entire site? I find it hard to believe that no mods saw the comments with calls to violence. Especially since T_D had been warned multiple times previously about poor moderation. Their response to such warnings in the past has always been some form of "Yeah well what are you going to do about?! We have lots of viewers!"

I doubt their headaches were limited to only a single post on average per day.

For admins thats a high amount, They require moderators moderate for the reddit rules as well as the subreddit rules to ensure they don't have to step in.

To be fair, in the same logs it shows they removed mod permissions from one of the mods. The picture it paints is that the Admins were making it harder for them to moderate the subreddit.

The mod was removed because they violated Reddit rules of not using mod positions to promote financial gain. The mod was promoting his gofundme campaign and broke the rules. This same mode also delisted three other mods, which was making it harder to moderate the subreddit.

Interpreting these actions as site admins intentionally making it more difficult for moderators of that subreddit is cognitive dissonance.

Remember when u/Seattle4Truth, radicalizes on Reddit, shot his parents for being "liberal cucks"?

He posted about it in advance on r/The_Donald. People cheered him on.

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