"According to the report, reddit received 33 requests to remove content ... to do with alleged defamation. reddit stood by its users and refused to comply with any of these requests."
Good on Reddit for not being swayed, but they'd better keep their servers out of the UK.
Here in the "libel capital of the world" hosting providers are treated as co-publishers of allegedly libellous content once we've been notified of it on our network. We _have_ to act, though many complainants don't really understand the precedent and try to hand-wave us into taking down a whole site without giving any specifics.
I'm not sure that's 100% they can be held liable if they refuse to comply with a judge, but I don't believe they're guilty by assosciation, thy have to follow a similar procedure to DMCA, do they not?
Also, they are not mentioning the cases where the SJW subreddits have terrorized the moderators and admins to delete complete subreddits. It's like if those incidents never existed.
Unless they did so using subpoenas, court orders, or lawsuits, I don't see how that's relevant to the content of this report? This is just a report about legally mandated takedowns and takedown attempts, not internal reddit moderation policies. That seems to be how other companies' transparency reports also operate. For example, Google's Transparency Report [1] lists information on DMCA takedown requests and other legal proceedings, not sites they've deindexed or penalized due to spam. (They do list malware statistics though.)
Don't know why your comment is being voted down. It's been known that the Reddit administrators will delete any and everything criticizing tumblr-esque sjw. It's been a long time coming but the mental image I had of Reddit was tarnished.
Ideal world: Reddit admins would only delete things that are illegal according to the local laws where their servers are located. Then they would only focus on making sure the platform works and leave the content policing to moderators of individual subreddits.
Your because is misplaced. Reddit bans doxing because of how often it is something they wouldn't want to be associated with. They do it to protect their image, not to protect some particular group of users.
(I agree that the ban happens to protect those users, I find it highly unlikely that this is a motivation for it)
Until someone can provide a rigorous definition of SJW with criteria that allows anyone to easily categorize whether something is SJW or non-SJW, I recommend that the term not be used.
>
If you are like everyone else on the Internet, your immediate response is "Whoever is saying that is obviously a racisty racist who loves racism! I can't believe he literally used the 'I'm not racist, but...' line in those exact words! The old INRB! I've got to get home as fast as I can to write about this on my blog and tell everyone I really met one of those people!"
If you've trained yourself to knee-jerk whenever you hear certain buzzwords, you're probably being intellectually dishonest.
"Intellectually dishonest" is a great buzzword. If you care more about playing according to some conversational rulebook than furthering the development of a just society you really have your priorities in line. It's a literal appeal to authority and it immediately allows you to write off the entire line of argument standing behind it.
> If you care more about playing according to some conversational rulebook than furthering the development of a just society you really have your priorities in line.
This is an adorable fallacy, but it's also the kind of thing that would get fixed in a freshman-level philosophy seminar. If you think that you're furthering the development of a just society by ignoring any dissenting opinions, you're not likely to accomplish much.
>I feel like every single term in social justice terminology has a totally unobjectionable and obviously important meaning – and then is actually used a completely different way.
The closest analogy I can think of is those religious people who say “God is just another word for the order and beauty in the Universe” – and then later pray to God to smite their enemies. And if you criticize them for doing the latter, they say “But God just means there is order and beauty in the universe, surely you’re not objecting to that?”
>The result is that people can accuse people of “privilege” or “mansplaining” no matter what they do, and then when people criticize the concept of “privilege” they retreat back to “but ‘privilege’ just means you’re interrupting women in a women-only safe space. Surely no one can object to criticizing people who do that?”
>…even though I get accused of “privilege” for writing things on my blog, even though there’s no possible way that could be “interrupting” or “in a women only safe space”.
>When you bring this up, people just deny they’re doing it and call you paranoid.
>When you record examples of yourself and others getting accused of privilege or mansplaining, and show people the list, and point out that exactly zero percent of them are anything remotely related to “interrupting women in a women-only safe space” and one hundred percent are “making a correct argument that somebody wants to shut down”, then your interlocutor can just say “You’re deliberately only engaging with straw-man feminists who don’t represent the strongest part of the movement, you can’t hold me responsible for what they do” and continue to insist that anyone who is upset by the uses of the word “privilege” just doesn’t understand that it’s wrong to interrupt women in safe spaces.
>I have yet to find a good way around this tactic.
So basically, every phenomenon (like language, culture, everyday behaviour) should be judged by whether it brings us closer to equality of outcome. If it leads the wrong direction it should be banned, if it leads in the right direction it should be mandated. People who refuse to comply should be punished harshly.
Your omission of which subreddits specifically is notable. Please, tell me why the site's reputation, community and society as a whole is improved by enabling r/niggers with a platform.
Though in general, I would say Reddit does benefit from allowing lousy subreddits. Not because those subreddits are good things. But the policy of allowing easy creation of subreddits is also what's made Reddit good. There are plenty of great niche subreddits.
Once you get into quality control, it's going to reduce the potential for the creation of good communities too. You also need a lot more admins.
Well, yes, that was my point. However, that particular subreddit has been reincarnated as another I have no particular inclination to name. As yet it's unbanned.
By banning that subreddit, and creep pics etc. the admins have already made some broad stances on what is or is not acceptable. Banning them as the reemerge can not be, I imagine, such a huge task as to require multiple people.
One of the things that irks me about current US policing is that police use tactics which imply they have more authority than they have (e.g. administrative subpoenas, demands for information, demands with withhold information, etc) and never (that I know of) get into legal trouble for doing so...
In fact in the current system such demands are not only legal but are rewarded. Police will call the resulting evidence "voluntary" even if the company had no idea it was volunteering anything (and thought, often because they didn't hire a lawyer, it was required).
Small companies in particular who don't have a staff lawyer, and who don't want to spend a thousand dollars in fees to check an incoming request, are particularly susceptible. Even if they do have a lawyer on retainer, that lawyer may not specialise in this type of law.
Let's not forget that Reddit was censoring the Fappening subreddits, along with plenty of other censorship on a smaller scale (usually censoring specific stories in some subreddits, which is done by the moderators of said subreddits, but in the case of default subreddits, it's de facto approved by the company). Sometimes, censorship and privacy attacks by internal actors is as big a threat as external attacks.
And other times, the benefits of censorship outweigh the costs. I believe that stolen naked pictures is one of those situations. Moderators "censoring" spam and off-topic submissions is another.
I'm not talking only about stolen pictures. I'm talking more about censorship of ideas, or information Reddit finds inconvenient. For an example, just these days such a ban occured - read about it here[1]; TL;DR: a new subreddit gets created, its moderators are then shadowbanned. I don't care much about the contents of the subreddit (could be just a conspiracy theory), I care about Reddit's reaction, which is pure and direct censorship.
Well, the post is only five hours old. I'd say you should give it another 24 hours. If, at that point, there's still not a comment in that thread with a big red [A], then I agree, that's inexcusable, unless there's some kind of a gag order or other complicated legal thing going on. Heavily-upvoted petitions deserve at least a brief official response.
That said, there could be all kinds of reasonable explanations for what happened, including automated anti-abuse defenses that malfunctioned.
Not sure if you're disagreeing with tomp's comment or just changing the subject.
TwoX is a default and at least before I quit the site a contrary view in that sub was likely to earn a shadowban. I understand the mods have to deal with trolls but when contrary viewpoints are being censored as "trolling" it's gone too far.
The toxicity of the reddit's "social justice" movement and SRS in particular is poisoning the site and making discourse about controversial topics nearly impossible.
That's great but I'm not talking about subreddits banning topics, I'm talking about the enforcement of acceptable views on topics that are already being discussed.
I agree with having safeguards against things like hate-speech, I disagree with how conveniently and broadly that's defined by certain people in order to push their social and political agendas.
Certain subreddits are set up for specific political or social causes. Should a subreddit set up (say) for "Catholicism" should accept discussion about whether the Pope is the Anti-Christ?
This is difficult. Most everybody can agree that gay-bashing is unproductive and not part of civil discourse. The problem is I see people online and in real life attempting to engage in honest discourse and getting silenced as if they were gay-bashing. That's going too far.
I was also talking about default subs where people are being activists and pushing stories to the front-page. Blowback is a part of activism, if somebody gets pissed about a social justice story that's been pushed to the default front-page that's different from the person who searches out a LGBT sub to go pick a fight.
So if you're OK with a gay subreddit banning people trying to discuss "should gay acts be legal?"/"Should gay marriage be legal?", surely you're OK with SRS subs (or other feminists/anti-racist subs) banning things they think are against the core tenants of the sub?
SRS and the SJW subs aren't default subs. So don't use SRS as an example of "all of reddit".
I'm talking about discourse being shaped in default subs and not just TwoX. I don't begrudge people their safe spaces, but I do think it's deplorable to take an "if I can't feel safe nobody can" stance. Especially when "feeling safe" implies being sheltered from anybody who disagrees with you.
SRS wasn't supposed to be the point of this but I feel confident that any reasonable person who reads their FAQ will realize they aren't just keeping to themselves. Their reason for existence is to change the entire site. They justify and celebrate their bullying tactics.
Out of respect, and since my last throwaway has already lost posting privileges I must bow out of this discussion. But I'll leave you with some thoughts from Christopher Hitchens on free speech. Earlier in the video you can hear the arguments for abandoning free speech, I think the reasons given for this are often as hateful and fearful as everything they fight against but I'm linking the version of the video with their arguments, in their words, left in.
Many subreddits want to change the world. Any political subreddit wants to change to suit their politics. Gay subreddits (like /r/lgbt) want to change the world outside their subreddit.
Really, the social justice movement is poisoning the site? Please, tell me how you've been made feel unwelcome by that. I'm sure it'll be very revealing.
This is a perfect example of reddit-style commenting. It's paternalistic, dismissive, sarcastic and it adds nothing to the discussion.
This type of commenting is done to dehumanize and marginalize those you disagree with so you don't have to think about what they're saying. It's bad for discourse and it's how echo-chambers are built.
If you've looked at reddit and come to the conclusion that people who are concerned about social justice is the most pervasive problem with the site's community, don't be surprised if people dismiss you.
Having fat sympathy will get you banned from fatpeoplehate, or being fat, or saying you find fat people sexually attractive, or even socially. And the moderators are praised for it!
I agree that they should do it for everyone. In fact, I believe they should generalize the rule to "No sexualizing someone without their consent." That takes care of jailbait, creepshots, and thefappening all in one fell swoop.
But that's neither here nor there; my point was that not all censorship is wrong, and based on this comment, it seems you agree.
I agree completely, but I also think that it's always worth asking exactly what power structures the "principles" organizations espouse actually support.
What? They also banned creepshots and similar subs.
It's more like they'll be quick to ban things that make noise and make them look bad. There are lots of creepy or illegal small subs, it's not until there's a huge stink made about them that they'll act.
I'm pretty sure the reason why Reddit banned the fappening subreddits is because it was easier to just ban the whole sub rather than taking down links one by one (which I assume is their current DMCA policy).
Lawyers were the cause of the deletion of that subreddit, not some censorship boogeyman. If you believe that Reddit should have weathered millions of dollars in possible legal fees in order to protect their user's ability to view illicit pictures of celebrities then take your problem to your congressman and the DMCA.
So mods moderating their subreddit counts as "censorship" now? Cripes subreddits are made for a purpose, moderating is part of that./r/AskHistorians requires that you provide sources, and comments are deleted if not. Is that censorship?
Why should I care about any of this? Serious question. Transparency is double-speak. It's marketing and branding for the demographic that Reddit caters to.
Notifying users of requests by law enforcement that they are legally allowed disclose is just stupid. What matters is the nature of the requests - not the number of them!
Interesting: in this article, EFF praises Reddit for its quick publication: "Published within 30 days of the reporting period.... That means more recent, and potentially more relevant data." But in the FAQ about warrant canaries, also published by EFF (and linked from this article), they recommend otherwise: "How often should an ISP publish the warrant canary?
Various ISPs have published canaries on a wide range of schedules. To allow time to file a case and for the court to rule on the important legal questions, we suggest at least few months between the transparency report and the time period covered."
So it's not really clear what the best practice is here.
Reddit has never had a warrant canary, so the recommendations on that page have little bearing on this. Even if reddit did get a couple of NSLs, it gets so many actual requests for information that it grants that there's little reason to have one, especially given that it could report it received 0-249 of them 6 months later anyways.
Kudos to the reddit team for setting a great example. Given the relatively poor resources of the site administrators, hopefully this will help to disprove the idea that transparency is too onerous to be done thoroughly, proactively, and promptly.
On a side note, I've been a reddit user for some years but this is the first time I've noticed that the name is preferred un-capitalized.
Good from EFF to advertise companies who have a good behavior, but what sensitive information does reddit manage? It seems to me like it's only logins and IP addresses, so it's not like they are in charge of emails, maps of where you've been/where you go and personal calendar, is it?
I'm not entirely sure the comment you are replying to is correct but I believe gcb0 is suggesting that paid posts are blended into reddit seamlessly. Your image clearly shows several differing elements which distinguish an ad from a traditional submission.
My image clearly shows several differing elements which subtly distinguish an ad from a traditional submission. I have trained my ad-blindness to skip the HN ads, usually without even consciously reading the company name, but it took training, just like it takes training to find the tiny "sponsored content" disclaimer elsewhere. That's the point of "native ads" -- to slip in seamlessly with the rest of the content. If HN wanted to advertise openly, it would use a different background color for the ads, and/or clearly label them as such.
Good on Reddit for not being swayed, but they'd better keep their servers out of the UK.
Here in the "libel capital of the world" hosting providers are treated as co-publishers of allegedly libellous content once we've been notified of it on our network. We _have_ to act, though many complainants don't really understand the precedent and try to hand-wave us into taking down a whole site without giving any specifics.
I wrote https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2010/02/07/adventures-in-libel-o... in 2010 though Simon Singh's case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Chiropractic_Associatio... was a precedent that improved things.