Reddit uses the ban hammer

Reddit changed it's own rules in order to narrow the scope of "acceptable political debate".

Reddit will ban r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and about 2,000 other communities today after updating its content policy to more explicitly ban hate speech. The policy update comes three weeks after Black Lives Matter protests led several popular Reddit forums to go dark temporarily in protest of what they called the company’s lax policies around hosting and promoting racist content. It marks a major reversal for a company whose commitment to free expression has historically been so strong that it once allowed users to distribute stolen nude photos freely on the site.

“I have to admit that I’ve struggled with balancing my values as an American, and around free speech and free expression, with my values and the company’s values around common human decency,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a call with reporters.

In a blog post that cites the company’s new rules, Huffman said users of the r/The_Donald subreddit had violated the site’s policies for years. (The site has no official connection to President Donald Trump, although he did do an Ask Me Anything there as a candidate in 2016.) “The community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average (Rule 1), antagonized us and other communities (Rules 2 and 8), and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations,” Huffman said.

Similarly, r/ChapoTrapHouse had also hosted content that violates the site’s rules, Huffman said. The subreddit is a spinoff of the popular left-wing podcast.

WayOfTheBern narrowly avoided being banned, but that's probably just a temporary status.
The_Donald gets the most news, but ChapoTrapHouse was five times the size.

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Something appears fishy with WayOfTheBern, a prominent Reddit page dedicated to advancing the prospects of Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, according to experts who track political social media.

The second-largest Sanders fan page on the massive social media platform sometimes acts like a foreign trolling operation, they say, exposing its 24,000 members to the same pro-Moscow and American dissension stories associated with other fringe sites and suspect social media accounts, say experts who have studied the page.

“I consider it extremely suspicious,” said Josh Russell, a prominent analyst on social media politics who tweets about it as @Josh_Emerson. Mr. Russell thinks it more likely that WayOfTheBern is a false flag run by alt-right people than Russia, although he said the patterns of posts are quite similar.

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14 users have voted.

Establishment Democrats have had a lot of success controlling the meta real estate of political subreddits but they can't seem to get their shared blue hands on Way of the Bern. People are mostly allowed to say what they want there so you get all kinds of independent opinions and the disagreement can't be neatly dismissed with a snarky one-liner, and that seems to be giving the groupthinkers a terminal case of the redass.

I think one or more of the Chapo guys sometimes hangs out around here (were you a member over there, gjohnsit?) sympathies to all you dudes, this is bullshit, but you know that already.

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14 users have voted.

@Reverend Jane Ignatowski
although I miss a lot because the sheer quantity of info.

Unrelated note: I just went to TOP to see if they said anything about reddit. They didn't.
But get this, from the rec'd list:

#1: Hillary says "I told you so"
#3 and #4: Praise for the Lincoln Project (In case you don't know, the Lincoln Project are NeverTrump Republicans)

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10 users have voted.

@gjohnsit

I guess we can't realistically expect more or better anything from people who continue to blame Nader and Nader voters for Bush and Cheney when they don't even blame Bush or Cheney for Bush and Cheney anymore.

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16 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@Reverend Jane Ignatowski

anyone believe that McGrath is better than Booker? McGruff said that she would have voted for the Kava for supreme court and that she would support Trump way better than McConnell does. Anyone there who is supportive of Booker are told that they are wrong to support him because McGruff is more centrist and has a better shot of beating McConnell. More centrist my l buttock. She is just a republican running on the D ticket. Oh yeah and she is a better fundraiser for the dims. Well if you raise lots of money but still lose then.... oh never mind.

gjohn they did talk about R/Donald getting the banhammer and they are tickled pink that they did. Just like they were when Alex Jones got banned from social media. Who'd a thunk that so called progressives would cheer censorship?

More and better what? Better ______ by embracing the enemies you once despised. Like Comey. Mueller. Mattis. McMasters. Gee Waya and now John Bolton. Explain how one can bend their minds to do that?

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11 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@snoopydawg All we need to do is realize the "Resistance" is THE EXACT SAME PEOPLE WE FOUGHT IN THE '000s, it all becomes perfectly clear.

YHBTVYSTD.png

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8 users have voted.

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

That place was my home; Zuckerberg and Huffman didn't grow up there, I did (the former's from "The Empire State", and the latter's from fucking Virgina - what's he know about a free society???).

I hate these people who talk about it like it's "The Kremlin" or whatever, yet anything bad comes out of New York? It's always "Madison Avenue" or "Wall Street".

I feel like I'm being annihilated.

Yeah, sure, black lives matter...what about MINE, and all the people I grew up with???

I just found this, sharing it because it looks decidedly pertinent...but the title makes me downright sick. This is the book title I wanted to write - and the subject matter should've been the dead-opposite:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667400/silicon-values-by-jillia...

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4 users have voted.

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat link

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.”
To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

So White = Original Sin

And now for something less stressful

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8 users have voted.
The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@gjohnsit Please understand: I don't enjoy this stuff; my involvement in politics is driven by mental illness (like Joan of Arc and John Brown, among others; I don't want to be like them); I...CANNOT TAKE IT ANYMORE. I'm autistic, I'm vulnerable, I have PTSD, I am struggling to have ANY life for myself whatsoever, my degree has nothing to do with my career aspirations, and I have spent the last decade-and-a-half going from ambitious prodigy to something far too reminiscent of one Boo Radley...or Arthur Fleck; I am inferior in practically EVERY way to what I used to be half my lifetime ago. Nobody would believe my story...especially not now. If you're going to share that stuff, please include some factually-sound reassurance as to why/how this can be overcome.

On a less personal note: You know what this all seems like? Anti-Semitism warmed over and diabolically repackaged. JudenHass is a tricky form of racism; it operates completely differently from Afro-centric doctrines about "race" - and yet, Jews and blacks (I'm sorry, I won't be capitalizing that, we need to be working on dissolving nationalisms, not building new ones) have managed to cooperate beautifully and for the good of all since FDR. This, then, is another attempt to nuke the once-mighty New Deal coalition - but I digress. What this...diarrhea a la Hitler does with its "privileged so-and-sos" is scapegoat not Jews (Israel would have opinions about that - truth be told, it would be a little bit interesting if America suddenly started going after Jews precisely because it would finally show who really 'wears the pants' in the Israel-US relationship), but the most Jewish-like people they can find they can get away with persecuting while still having those nifty Jewish bully-magnet properties: Weirdness, smallness, intelligence, and enviable, somewhat mysterious, success.

On a related note: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/06/return-of-nerd-culture
Something similar from The Federalist...: https://thefederalist.com/2015/08/24/the-hugo-awards-why-the-waronnerds-...
...and The Daily Caller, which can be good despite some very dubious funding sources: https://dailycaller.com/2015/05/12/the-media-is-losing-the-waronnerds/

What's really awful is that this feels like an actual incentive to want Trump to stay in office; he'll oppose this shit for ALL the wrong reasons (and he'll probably catch one or two of the right ones, as well), but AT LEAST he'll oppose it. I'll be surprised if a Biden Regency does anything other than go absolutely hell-crazy with it. A divided Big Brother is a preferable Big Brother.

At least I have my kike-card (50% off though it may be) to ward these vampires off with; pity those who cannot wriggle free of the "White" epithet.

Shall I start wearing what Donny-Boy assures me is a "sheriff badge" in public now...?

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8 users have voted.

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

thanatokephaloides's picture

Reddit will ban r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and about 2,000 other communities today after updating its content policy to more explicitly ban hate speech.

Hate speech bans never accomplish anything save suppression of all discussions. And such bans accomplish that obscene goal 100% of the time.

Same goes for "safe space" policies.

Open discussion is impossible without some clear freedom to offend.

"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

h/t Fishtroller02

But it's Reddit. What did you expect? (And yes, I did tell all of us so!)

Bad

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9 users have voted.

"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

gulfgal98's picture

@thanatokephaloides

Open discussion is impossible without some clear freedom to offend.

We must remember that here too.

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6 users have voted.

Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

gulfgal98's picture

on any open forum are becoming narrower and narrower. This is exactly why I was so outspoken against the banning of Alex Jones. Many on the so called left cheered but those of us who take a big picture view could see where it was leading and now we are seeing just that.

Banning of unpopular speech or persons on any platform effectively shuts down all discussion of issues outside the ever narrowing range of what is acceptable. The future for a broad range of ideas, discussion or organizing on line is grim. This is very dangerous.

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11 users have voted.

Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

@gulfgal98 If you listen to the most recent Chappo, they really get into this idea. They say Reddit banned Chappo as both a tit for tat sort of thing promoting a fake balance. But the real reason was it took out two places TPTB received criticism and people were deviating from the accepted narrative.

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12 users have voted.

Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

@gulfgal98 There has always been censorship but this new era of censoring social media started with Russiagate. Russiagate made social media/Internet censorship acceptable and even necessary as the Russians were accused of ruining America' perstine viginial elections. You know, worse than 9-11 and Pearl Harbor combined. I would say the Alex Jones censorship and Sen. Warner threating Zuckerburg were the compelling events. From there it was not a slippery slope but a sheer cliff of censorship.

Totally deranged that people defending free speech are the ones being attacked.

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7 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@MrWebster

because they won't ban hate speech. Who decides what is hate speech anyway? We are seeing more congress critters starting with Harris calling for Twitter to ban the president of the US. And more of them are backing her. Twitter did hide one of his tweets that said that when the looting starts then the shooting starts. But they let his tweet saying he'd nuke North Korea stand. Violence is bad unless it further US hegemony right? Then it's good.

Beautiful site tonight as we see missile after missile land in Syria. Brian Williams.

Keep cheering you dumbf*cks on the left. It will come for you one day. How can you forget the saying that you constantly post for other issues?

First they came for....and I didn't speak up....

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6 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.