Reddit To Crack Down On Abuse By Punishing Hundreds of 'Toxic Users' (reuters.com) 233
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Social media website Reddit, known for its commitment to free speech, will crack down on online harassment by banning or suspending users who target others, starting with those who have directed abuse at Chief Executive Steve Huffman. Huffman said in an interview with Reuters that Reddit's content policy prohibits harassment, but that it had not been adequately enforced. "Personal message harassment is the most cut and dry," he said. "Right now we are in an interesting position where my inbox is full of them, it's easy to start with me." As well as combing through Huffman's inbox, Reddit will monitor user reports, add greater filtering capacity, and take a more proactive role in policing its platform rather than relying on community moderators. Reddit said it had identified hundreds of the "most toxic users" and will warn, ban or suspend them. It also plans to increase staff on its "trust and safety" team. On Reddit, a channel supporting the U.S. Republican party's presidential candidate Donald Trump, called r/The_Donald, featured racist and misogynistic comments, fake news and conspiracy theories about his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton, along with more mainstream expressions of support for Trump. Many of those supporting Trump were very active, voting up the r/The_Donald conversations so that they became prominent across Reddit, which is the 7th-most-visited U.S. internet site, according to web data firm Alexa. Last week, Reddit banned Pizzagate, a community devoted to a conspiracy theory, with no evidence to back it up, that links Clinton to a pedophile ring at a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor, after it posted personal information in violation of Reddit policy. Huffman then used his administrative privileges to redirect abuse he was receiving on a thread on r/The_Donald to the community's moderators -- making it look as if it was intended for them. Huffman said it was a prank, and that many Reddit users, including some Trump supporters, told him they thought it was funny, but it inflamed the situation.
Reddit is on the way out (Score:5, Insightful)
It was fun for a while, and now this crap starts.
Funny thing is... it was the CEO who started it all!
It's a theme (Score:3)
Nothing new here, time for a new service to take over and replace them. Not that I will miss them or was ever into Reddit, but I know others were.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is what happens when the host of a website abdicates responsibility for moderation of content to its users. The system gets gamed by special interest groups and political interests. Slashdot is a classic example of it, it only survives because it is not mainstream, though it has been on a steady decline because of this.
The website that will succeed (in both sensed of the word) will be one that has the balls to take responsibility for their content and not leave it to users to moderate it. It will remov
Re:It's a theme (Score:5, Interesting)
The theme I'm referring to has nothing to do with special interests using the site, but rather a specific mindset taking control of a site. Reddit became popular because it was a free speech zone, but I'd never claim it was "main stream" any more than Slashdot is/was. Free speech is a dangerous thing to people in power. Facebook gets tons of free advertising from broadcast media because they do not support free speech. Timelines is the only thing you need to see to understand that they are more worried about propaganda than free speech.
I don't know reddit and don't know if there is pressure for them to stifle speech or if the management was really against it from the start, but felt it was tolerable venting as long as it stayed away from main stream.
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You guys are all missing an important feature of Reddit: the subreddits. Yes, each subreddit has (unpaid) moderators who can squelch any speech they dislike, but unlike Slashdot, on Reddit if you don't like it you can simply create your own subreddit and moderate it however you like, or go to some other subreddit that has moderation you like better. There's hundreds of thousands of subreddits, so you're bound to find one you like; they're not all lumped together. *That* is why Reddit became so popular.
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Spez gets regular death threats, tags, general harassment from t_d users.
Spez harmlessly trolls a few t_d users that tagged him.
T_d users lose their collective shit and throw professional soccer player level of fake sissy outrage.
I've been on the internet since the mid 90s and I've never seen anything quite like like t_d and it's ilk. It's a den of manic (Literal textbook mania) mixed with a personalty cult. The tone of the posts jump from genuinely hopeful to batshit crazy to disturbingly sociopathic and
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Death threats? Can you substantiate that one? Preferably by pointing to police reports?
I don't see it mentioned here [sli.mg] where it would've been relevant, it just says "outright threatened" and apparently some loser keyed his car, though it's not clear if that was just something random.
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R/the_donald is so utterly bizarre. I tried reading some threads before the election, and it was just weird. Completely mindless "RAH RAH DONALD DONALD" posts on top of mudslinging, threats, conspiracy theories, just all over the place. Utterly devoted "true believers" trying to see who can yell the loudest, working themselves up into a mad frenzy in every thread, just short 5-6 word comments, verging on incomprehensible spam.
It was a frankly rather frightening look into the minds of madmen.
In comparison, t
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Exactly. And this shows just how far gone this country is. About half the population is a bunch of uneducated conspiracy-theory-believing wackos. And the other half are better educated and are able to rationalize away their support for an utterly corrupt warmonger. There is no hope for us.
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Well, you can only really infer anything about the part of the population who voted, which was less than half.
And that's a huge problem.
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Spez harmlessly trolls a few t_d users
Spez did something that goes way beyond simple trolling. He showed that site admins can and will modify user content. Through its history, admin have claimed that they could/would not do this. Sure, any junior db or system admin knows that modifying a database entry is a basic function of that type of system, but the claim that they would not and have not done that has now been admitted to be false.
Now, the validity of every post on the site, past, present, and future, is questionable. Maybe it was a
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You said that last time. Ellen Pao was ruining it, Anita Sarkeesian had taken over to censor and feminise it, everyone was leaving for Voat and taking their fat shaming with them...
Yet somehow it's still going and the alternatives are floundering.
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Yet somehow it's still going and the alternatives are floundering.
Voat.co is doing so well they've had to upgrade their servers like 4 times. They are now asking for another round of donations thanks to the enormouse influx of Reddit users.
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Exactly. They can't even cover their running costs with VC funding or advertising. That's how well they are doing, i.e. about as well as 8chan which operates on the same model.
The fact that they can get by on donations should give you a hint about how insignificantly tiny they are compared to Reddit.
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Voat is getting so much traffic the servers keep crumbling under the load.
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Hardly (Score:2)
Reddit generates tons of traffic and needs to be profitable. Changes needed to be made to attract advertisers. They picked a CEO to take the heat while the changes were implemented. It worked as planned.
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Considering the code words used for other things found in the email dumps, it's looking like it's absolutely real.
The Streisand Effect has been triggered (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I still haven't seen any smoking guns just yet, only a lot of strange things that point in a bad direction or to bad taste in art & friends. I don't know too many Democrats these days eager to retain friendships with Republicans, let alone those who are also convicted child molesters [wikileaks.org], but it's not exactly illegal either. There's nothing illegal about saying that "traffic is really warm and really weird in light of Hastert" [wikileaks.org] but people who have seen enough strange uses of language regarding what they suspect are codewords could read that in a weird way.
But by banning pizzagate, they've only made it better known. They didn't even manage to shut it down, it /r/pizzagate lives on Voat now as /v/pizzagate [voat.co]. Twitter users outraged that they did nothing about pedo pics someone allegedly pointed out on twitter gab.ai [gab.ai]. Wikipedia censors all but a pitiful mention of it, so it's documented on Infogalactic [infogalactic.com].
There are still the usual problems with idiots who fake something to troll the community, though, but they're working on moderating that out. For example, I know at least one of the claims of steganography in the images appeared to be fake. There certainly wasn't any ZIP file marker in the image I found on Wikileaks, though it wasn't clear if you were supposed to use some steganography program first.
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Also, I should mention that it's amusing to see how many downvotes I'm attracting.
There sure are a lot of uncomfortable people eager to bury this. Google, Twitter, Reddit, ...
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Really???
So if CowboyNeil came out and admitted to editing your posts because he disagrees with your politics, would you have a problem with that?
This isn't speculation, Spez admitted [reddit.com] to depriving Reddit of its default protections under 47 U.S.C. 230. Spez didn't just commit a minor faux pas, he opened Reddit-the-company to serious legal liability as a result of his thin skin.
He then got caught in a leaked chat transcript [archive.is] conspiring with a handfu
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Well, I still haven't seen any smoking guns just yet
Really???
He's talking about PizzaGate.
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You should really look into these conspiracy theories before repeating them. Pizzagate was banned for harassing the staff of the restaurant because fake news websites claimed it was the centre of a paedophile ring. In particular, the name "Comet Ping Pong" was taken to refer to "ping pong" as code for child rape, even though the fucking Wikipedia article has photos of the ping pong tables set up for patrons as a gimmick.
It was mostly an attempt to smear Clinton when it looked like she might win, and now is
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Listen to yourself for a moment.
all the businesses on that street have logos that look suspiciously similar to known pedophile logos as can be seen in a doc released under FOIA by the FBI
So your argument is that these paedophiles, some of them in high office and under immense public scrutiny, rather than using a clandestine network for trusted people decided to simply advertise child abuse on the street using secret signs that were already known to law enforcement.
That's batshit insane.
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There are lots of weird uses of language that make people suspect code words are in play, not just one or two. I mean, I'd like to write this off as a "damn you autocorrect" kind of thing, but some of them are just weird. Look here, for example:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/32795 [wikileaks.org]
Thi
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Oh please. Slashdot's method is a complete and total failure, and partially responsible for this site's massive decline. Good people don't even bother moderating, because the disincentives are too high: you don't get enough points, and also you can't post in the entire story after that without undoing your moderations. I stopped bothering to moderate ages ago because of the latter. If I'm interested enough in a discussion thread to read through it, I'm most likely going to want to put my 2 cents in some
Is /u/spez On That List? (Score:4, Insightful)
We have identified hundreds of the most toxic users and are taking action against them, ranging from warnings to timeouts to permanent bans.
Unless /u/spez is on that list of toxic users, the list is meaningless.
Three strikes prank ... (Score:3)
... I was a member of a local forum (and I'm all for 'em) and I discovered, by accident, that it was "user-moderated."
If a comment was reported more than three times, the board automatically removed it.
They relied on cookies to determine that I had already reported it so I searched for that cookie.
I'd report a post and then delete that particular cookie and then report it again, about seven times.
The only administrator, a local TV personality (and nice guy) had to field questions about censorship and I'd salvo-report his comments.
Six months after the forum was replaced by Facebook, I called him and told him what I did.
He laughed about it.
But we both agreed I was a shithead.
All the fun users (Score:2)
Who wants be stay behind on the safe space sites? No fun, no jokes, nothing new, just boring SJW mod approved topics?
Freedom of speech and freedom after speech sells globally and is the fun that attracts users. The freedom to read a comment day, weeks, years later is also a great selling point.
What the SJW do on some sites will be great free branding for all sites that support freedom of speech.
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Sounds like that's fine with Reddit. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
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While I am not sure what they will do, I am going to guess that the 80/20 rule in some form will be applied. IE: those that really were on the extreme of the review will get removed. maybe reddit won't look the same, but it might become something different and just as interesting.
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That still kills the mood for participating. If you have to fret that your account can be removed even if you posted in good faith because someone overzealous may consider it out of bounds, you may decide it's not worth wasting time. And then all that's left is whack-a-moled trolls and timid or self-censoring posters. Hardly a recipe for something interesting.
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You dare challenge The Donald's narrative? You're ~~fired~~ banned!
Believe what? That /r/The_Donald is a "safe space" where Trump supporters can circlejerk/play with crayons and ball pits without being exposed to anyone that might hurt their feelings? You bet it is.
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Exactly. /r/HillaryClinton is exactly the same way. As a Bernie supporter, I went on there one day, posted something very mildly critical of Hillary, and BOOM! I was banned immediately, within minutes IIRC.
You have to really be devoid of critical thinking skills to support either one of these horrible people, so it only makes sense that forums devoted to them would be completely intolerant of dissenting opinions.
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You have weird definition of "safe space".
A safe space is one where you can express yourself without being judged for who you are. That is, a prejudice/racism/sexism/ageism/etc.-free place to discuss ideas openly, that would otherwise put you at risk of ridicule, hatred and attacks. It is not a dissent-free zone, in fact thoughtful and honest criticism is encouraged.
But I guess that's just a little bit too complicated when you're used to one-line "zingers".
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That's simply a matter of bad phrasing, they have to phrase it in a diplomatic way.
If you actually bothered to find out how it works, it's to provide at place where people won't be shouted down for having unpopular opinions, and won't be shouted down by the people who tend to dominate public debate. It's a huge help for people who are a bit shy or maybe not fully comfortable with who they are in relation to the rest of the world.
How anyone could possibly spin this as a negative thing, is a mystery for the a
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They're welcome to go. So are you! The truth is that the vast silent majority still hate trolls far more than they hate speech. As usual a knee-jerk'd reaction from a person who's mental picture of censorship can only be two bars: 0 (regulated kindergarden) and 99 (free and open of all -- except those pond scum fucking spammers) nay? If you wanted to actually convince people of this somehow horrible policy change, try finding real examples of censored people/material that people will really really want to s
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.. hate *restricted speech.
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Trust & Safety (Score:3, Interesting)
Any service, network, app, platform, etc. with a "Trust and Safety Council" is useless.
Who's going to build a community for me? (Score:2)
As a reader of various online forums, I would like a community where I can read a broad spectrum of polite, well-thought out responses to current events. Leading up to the election, I wanted to hear from the Trump supporter, the Hillary supporter, and even the Sanders/Johnson/Stein supporters.
What I don't want is (1) spam, (2) astroturfing, (3) straight-up lying ["fake news"], (4) personal attacks, (5) abusive language, (6) people who can't follow context, and (7) simplistic/repetitive comments that don'
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As a reader of various online forums, I would like a community where I can read a broad spectrum of polite, well-thought out responses to current events.
And I would like a pony and a blowjob (unrelated to the pony).
What I don't want is (1) spam, (2) astroturfing, (3) straight-up lying ["fake news"], (4) personal attacks, (5) abusive language, (6) people who can't follow context, and (7) simplistic/repetitive comments that don't add anything new.
You must be new here, then ;) since Slashdot is (1) a spam substrate, (2) legendary for astroturfing, (3) incompetent about vetting stories even when it tries, which is almost never (4) (5) (6) (7) not even going to bother to illustrate, read literally any story's comments.
Reddit hasn't been known for free speech... (Score:2)
Reddit hasn't been known for free speech for quite some time. I've only been on it for less than two years, and in that time we saw the banning of Coontown and other offensive groups. Not that I endorse the content of those groups; but if you're going to hold yourself out as a bastion of free speech, you have to at least allow anything that's legal and AFAIK the mere existence of the offensive groups wasn't illegal.
Aside from that, there was an alleged astro-turfing campaign sponsored by Hillary's campaig
let me get this straight (Score:3)
Steve Huffman alters people's comments that he didn't like, but says "Toxic Users" should be punished? How about firing his dishonest untrustworthy ass?
Oh, and he's getting hate mail? oh that's so surprising.
Moral Lecturing by Hipster Douchebags (Score:5, Informative)
So let me get this straight.
The site that proudly hosted the fappening's pics.
The site that let a group called "coontown" run for years without any issues or concerns.
The site that runs "Shit Reddit Says," a doxing, harassment, and bullying network that the admins openly support.
The site that, to this day, has gigabytes of pirated music, porn, art, and software indexed on it.
NOW has a problem with free speech, because a conservative candidate's followers organized on it and beat the political candidate their admins supported?
All at the same time the faux-liberal, progressive news sites and other social media networks are making a push to censor any and all conservative new media outlets by calling them "fake news" and taking measures to do the same thing to conservatives using their sites?
Forgive me if I'm a bit suspicious.
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All at the same time the faux-liberal, progressive news sites and other social media networks are making a push to censor any and all conservative new media outlets by calling them "fake news"
So... if the left uses their free speech in a way you don't approve of, it's censorship now?
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"The So tell for cognitive dissonance."
Also, Strawman.
No, if the Regressives were using their free speech, we wouldn't be in this mess. Instead, the Regressives decided they had perfect morality and anyone not part of their tribe was a racist / sexist / islamophobe / homophobe / etc, and more importantly, they decided shouting names at people and silencing their political opponents (and even moderates) was an appropriate substitute for debate and a good argument.
Which led to 4 -- well, lets be honest, 8 --
Hundreds? (Score:2)
Hundreds down, only a few more tens of millions to go!
This was done but look over here (Score:2)
The Reddit CEO edited a post on Reddit other than his own within the systems set rules. That has to be a clear violation. However he just points to another issue, the trolls, and off they go. Trey and Matt are really on top of things. Which is just amusing. I wonder if someone in the history of Reddit's employee's has done the same thing and been terminated for it. If so their HR department is probably going to have a mess on their hands.
This guy acted like one of those board admins who can't handle w
Grap 'em (Score:2)
I didn't want to have to say it, but... (Score:2)
Re:Die (Score:5, Funny)
AOL isn't even dead yet.
Zombie reddit will live on. Shambling from butthurt circle jerk to butthurt circle jerk, seeking brains, but finding none.
Re:Die (Score:5, Funny)
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Slashdot isn't even dead yet... Despite their attempts with BETA.
They handled it well considering the amount of gratuitous abuse they got instead of feedback. The as-built doesn't actually suck, though the early betas certainly did.
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They handled it well considering the amount of gratuitous abuse they got instead of feedback.
Abuse (gratuitous or not) is feedback. It says "no". Astoundingly, they responded. I am still using classic, and still enjoying it. Obviously, the abuse had the desired effect.
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SRS (Score:5, Insightful)
> will crack down on online harassment by banning or suspending users who target others,
I wonder if this rule will be applied to the SRS sub, which more or less exists for that very purpose? I'm guessing "no" but it's not a surprise after reading the leaked admin chat log [sli.mg] and seeing what happened to the person who made that public.
I'm also guessing they won't explain why the anti-pedo sub /r/pizzagate got moved to /v/pizzagate [voat.co], but why they're happy to keep subs like /r/pedochat /r/pedofriends, etc. Just look at this image just shows a picture of Reddit's description of /r/Pedochat which is a private NSFW sub for "pedos and friends of pedos" [i.sli.mg] for an example.
Surely /r/Spez knows about this--when he edited all those posts, most of them were swearing at him for that very reason. And he has notifications turned off since forever (refer to the aforementioned admin log), so this would appear to be what got under his skin.
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Sorry, that should be /u/Spez.
Though I wouldn't be terribly surprised if he had his own subreddit, honestly.
Re:SRS (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm also guessing they won't explain why the anti-pedo sub /r/pizzagate got moved to /v/pizzagate, but why they're happy to keep subs like /r/pedochat /r/pedofriends, etc.
Which is completely fair and consistent with their rules. The only problem is that YOU don't understand the rules.
The rules say no harassment. /r/pizzagate was used to harass the completely innocent owner of a pizza restaurant. In case it isn't obvious, the way to deal with this situation is to take evidence to the police or journalists for wider publication, not launch a vigilante harassment campaign.
The other groups don't appear to be running harassment campaigns, so they stay. If you support free speech then you must support people being able to discuss controversial issues like paedophilia.
So maybe now you can see that Reddit does in fact go a very long way towards supporting freedom of speech, to the point of allowing paedophilia to be discussed on its site, but does not tolerate harassment and other illegal activity.
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The sub was very much against people doing that kind of thing and told people not to.
I understand rules by how they're applied, not by how they're written.
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FARK died, there is hope...
Re:Die (Score:4, Insightful)
> most users regard being able to use Reddit without being harassed as a positive improvement.
You mean like the abuse coming from SRS? A sub that, essentially, exists for the sole purpose of harassing individual redditors? A sub with a history of doxxing people? I think people are more upset over the selective enforcement of the rules than about the rules themselves.
No harassment is a great thing. Just have a good definition of harassment and apply that to everyone. Not just the people you don't like.
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Because it's a well-known sub that has been there for years with a long, storied history of doing things other subs can't do?
It's not like it's some obscure sub nobody knows about.
Re:Die (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the selectivity of it that has people pissed.
If it's just the CEO banning people who annoy the CEO (in a direct, personal way), that's silly but understandable.
If, as is so often the case on social media, it's harassment if and only if the speaker is conservative, that's different. That's a common pattern these days, and not a good one. Echo chambers aren't good for anyone, nor is chasing off half your customers a good business plan (as ESPN is discovering).
Re: Die (Score:4)
Is it merely "silly" if the CEO who recently promised not to abuse his position gets special support from enforcers in a form that no ordinary user can get?
I don't use Reddit and could hardly care less about what happens to it, but this "it's easy to start with me" approach smacks of hypocrisy and a broken promise.
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Now would this https://www.reddit.com/r/Reddi... [reddit.com] be considered abuse.
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Now where will they go with their sexism, racism
Thank you for conceding the argument.
Re:Die (Score:5, Insightful)
most users regard being able to use Reddit without being harassed as a positive improvement
Yeah, because I'm sure they'll also crack down hard on all those users slinging hate and harassment at Republicans and Donald Trump supporters.
I'm holding my breath in anticipation for all the fair, not-at-all-biased ways in which this censorship policy will be applied.
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Take Slashdot. If you don't adopt a shrill "Microsoft is evil!" view, you ARE considered toxic.
Oh bullshit. This place is absolutely full of both Microsoft and Apple fanboys. Posting anything anti-MS here will get you all kinds of nasty responses from the MS shills and trolls.
Re:No Evidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
"...Reddit banned Pizzagate, a community devoted to a conspiracy theory, with no evidence to back it up, that links Clinton to a pedophile ring at a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor..."
The only reason they care about a pedoring are to find ties to Hillary? That pretty much sums up the problem with the Right.
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Actually, there are very few links to Hillary and you're taking that out of a quote the GP post is disagreeing with.
Wikipedia won't cover this one, it's on Infogalactic: https://infogalactic.com/info/Pizzagate [infogalactic.com]
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Google is also hiding it. You find the other "pizzagate" an obscure story I had never heard of.
Wikipedia (last I checked--it could've been edited by now!) had a disambiguation page referencing that other event and an oblique mention of a "discredited" theory.
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Google is also hiding it. You find the other "pizzagate" an obscure story I had never heard of.
The only and I mean only reason I am aware of this non-story about something that is not happening somewhere on the internets is because it has been linked here on Slashdot. Nobody else is dumb enough to go for it.
That sums up the problem with the left (Score:2, Troll)
That sums up the problem with the left, actually. The left wouldn't care about a pedo ring involving their anointed candidate, just like they didn't care of Bill's frequent flights on the "Lolita Express" to the pedo island. The reason why Clinton is mentioned in Pizzagate is because the "conspiracy theory" originates in her emails published by Wikileaks.
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The only reason they care about a pedoring are to find ties to Hillary?
No, that's a lie. That may have started the dig during the campaign, but most of the people looking now are just after potential pedos, regardless of political affiliation.
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That entire thing was FILLED with evidence...
Not according to the New York Times [nytimes.com].
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That article simply says it's all fake and that people are being harassed. It doesn't address any of the alleged links or any of the evidence presented by the people who dug through the emails and found the connection.
The article also spends a lot of time whining about fake news and a lack of fact checking without even a hint that it's aware of the hypocrisy its engaged in.
NYT is a joke.
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"The Podesta emails contain multiple references to Comet Ping Pong. [18 [wikileaks.org]]"
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The focus in this is on the Podestas and maybe the Clinton Foundation. You won't find many people claiming it's Hillary's fault, so you're rebutting a claim nobody is making.
The censorship treadmill is moving (Score:2, Informative)
They barely covered a couple of items of evidence in that.
Now, with as many connections as have been found, I'm sure there are more than a few bogus ones. The problem is that there's a ton of them. Now, it's very possible that it's all smoke and no fire, the problem is that you can't fairly decide that without the painful task of going through every little thing, so declaring "no, that's wrong" without actually touching most of the evidence is far less convincing to anyone who has looked into it than one
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They barely covered a couple of items of evidence in that.
Fair enough, but there appear to be blatantly fabricated "evidence" from the pizzagaters (photos taken from random websites, etc. [snopes.com]). There's a huge difference between innocent mistakes or sloppy journalism, and intentional fabrication. And while we're at it, what ever happened to the Fun Time Kidz Day Care conspiracy [vice.com]?
/. doesn't let us delete our posts, we'll have some sort of record of this discussion in a year or two when th
But hey, maybe you're right and we should take these claims seriously. And since
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This is an ongoing investigation. When I look at the forums, I see people debating over whether certain things are real or not, bogus, irrelevant, etc. I'm more than willing to entertain the idea that it's nothing more than a lot of oddly worded emails and questionable taste in friends and art, but if it dies out it'll have to die out naturally, after exhausting leads.
Yes, there have also been a few hoaxers who have been called out for it--fake hack videos on YouTube and some other nonsense. You can find
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Fair enough, but there appear to be blatantly fabricated "evidence" from the pizzagaters (photos taken from random websites, etc. [snopes.com]).
Look how they try to muddy the waters. Here's an archive [archive.is] version of the summary Snopes is "debunking". It has links to other archives, including one [archive.is] of a photo with a very young girl with her arms taped to a table, taken from "jimmycomet"'s instagram, a.k.a. James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong.
Just a harmless joke? Maybe, in isolation, but there's lots of creepy shit surrounding this to make you think otherwise.
The real stuff can be found in archive.is. One thing learned in GamerGate early on was to a
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if you don't tow the line
Toe the line.
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Well, it is also filled to the brim with lunatics filling it with conspiracy theories.
But that won't work that well to stop it.
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To give an odd anectodal example, "the current most popular brazilian chan".
It generally starts with the basic rules: No illegal content, no spam, no underages.
But then, as gets hard to moderate due well being a brazilian chan, they start to get moderators from the user pool, and as a result, they end getting quite a bit of oversensitive people along.
And then it truly starts, with those people wanting a "pure chan", and banning taboo things like self identifying as a woman, left wing politics, memes they co
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Well reddit is a free site it can do whatever it wants. You are free to use it or not.
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Yawn
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And with people like Xenographic talking about "investigations" and using other grand terms to describe what sounds like a bunch of twerds scoping for victims, it sounds like Reddit may be making a move in the right direction.
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How can it be determined that any given Reddit user was "toxic", when the CEO or other Reddit employees can edit the users' posts?
Basically, Reddit is so fucked...
I wonder if people really think this is limited to Reddit.
Don't they realize that any forum, comment section or social network can be edited by those who run it?
All of them allow for editing, but there is a strong implicit social contract that the content of a post cannot be edited except by the poster. It is somewhat accepted that they can be completely removed or hidden. but not "put words in their mouths", so to say.
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