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Reddit Bans Subreddit Dedicated To Finding Navy Yard Shooters
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reddit became a gathering place for amateur sleuthing in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing earlier this year, fueling what some reports called 'online witch hunts' that resulted in some people being falsely identified as the bomber. Now Andrea Peterson reports at the Washington Post that a section on the popular online community for finding the Navy Yard shooters has been banned. 'We banned it because it violated site rules by encouraging the posting of personal information,' says Erik Martin from reddit. The shooting at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday morning left at least 12, including a gunman dead. But police say there may be another suspect at large, and they 'have reason to believe' this individual was involved in shootings."
Since 4chan will just get it wrong for them.
Just tell me who to beat senseless with mob justice and I'm there
...went really well for Reddit. They probably banned it just for the potential deluge of bad publicity.
And right after they'd managed to finger Lee Harvey Oswald.
Coincidence? Follow the money, sheeple!
As I recall and TFS states these Sherlocks managed to wrongly identify at least one person in the Boston bombings and correctly identify none, so good riddance to any further efforts in that direction.
And are safer in general with less crime in general?
You might want to look at those crime stats again. The USA has a fuckload of homicides compared to Western Europe, especially by gun, but violent crime overall is not bad. And that's a minor miracle considering our public policy regarding the urban poor. So yes, in the US if you are involved with gang warfare, you stand a larger chance of being murdered than in Europe. On the other hand, if you are just walking down the street, you are a lot more likely to get mugged in Europe. So there you go.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What's wrong with a massacre? You make it sound like nipples were shown during the killings.
Sure they can. Reddit can allow/disallow whatever they want - the First Amendment covers rights of free speech against the government only.
For values of "you" which equal the Federal government, a State government, a municipality, or some other government actor.
First amendment: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech..."
Fourteenth amendment: "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;"
Held to bring the States within the umbrella of the first amendment in Gitlow v. New York.
However, Reddit is not a government actor. More to the point, Reddit has absolute editorial discretion under the Communications Decency Act -- so that even case law concerning speech in company towns and shopping centers cannot be used by analogy to create any obligation for the site to permit it.
Reddit could ban it, your local paper could ban it, and your ad-supported or paid email service could ban it. They simply don't have the power to throw you in jail or confiscate your money if you violate the ban.
In America, you have freedom of speech... but it's the 18th-century definition of "speech", which is more accurately described by today's use of the word "expression", because you have the freedom to claim any idea you want, rather than being required to pretend you like whatever the government likes. Speaking of government, that's the only entity offering you that freedom. The government promises you free expression, but others are equally free to express displeasure at your expression, to the extent of their other rights. Businesses can refuse to serve you, newspapers can reject your letters to the editor, and other people can even burn you in effigy... because those are all protected speech/expression as well.
Of course, in the past 237 years, people have abused that freedom of expression to curtail others' rights. The Supreme Court has determined that the right to free expression is not as important as someone else's right to life, and it doesn't override rule of law, either. Speech that incites "imminent lawless action" is not protected, even from the government.
Americans have the freedom of expression. You can post your ideas on a billboard and display them (in a lawful manner), and you are completely safe from government prosecution and persecution for holding those views. You are not safe, however, from the consequences of pissing people off.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The difference is they are the police. That is their job, they are professionals, they have training, and they are accountable.
Reddit users? None of those apply.
well said
it is unfortunate so many people out there think freedom means "i can do whatever the hell i want without consequence" like an immature child
and don't understand what freedom really is: something that goes hand in hand with responsibility, as any true adult understands
please note:
where there is no responsibility, there is no freedom
if you don't understand or agree with that statement, you don't even know what freedom really is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Social media is great for a lot of things such as getting different points of view on a news topic. Social media is not good for witch hunts. Anyone who's used reddit knows how easily the hivemind is swayed to hate or love someone. All it takes is a cleverly worded article romanticizing about how great or how awful someone is. People who know the formula can almost flip a switch to the entire community.
Witch hunts are bad enough when it is just a corporation behaving badly. Thread people talk about passing out pitch forks and so forth and so on. There definitely is a witch hunt mentality sometimes on reddit. And normally it is mostly harmless. Dumb, but harmless. Social media is good for a lot of things, but crime solving is not one of these things.
Real media is threatened by social media. So anything that is bad in social media, real media will highlight hard. They'll try everything they can to discourage people from using social media and outright close it down if they can. So it is better that social media witch hunts get shut down prematurely, before someone determines themselves to be a vigilante or otherwise act dumb out in public.
To conclude social media should be used for it strengths such as bringing attention to intelligent conversations, humor, and different points of view. This is refreshing compared to main stream media which every channel is corrupted by political agendas so there is no such thing as different points of view that are correct. Social media has weaknesses, and maybe we should really act to make sure these weaknesses don't go out of control.
God spoke to me
They have no power to insert things into the constitution that weren't there before...
...but the SCOTUS does have the power (and the duty) to interpret the law according to the circumstances at hand, reconciling the traditional written law with the current societal views. Ideally, the judicial branch is what determines whether something that is law is also right.
That "fire in a crowded theater" case? Used to arrest war [protesters].
Or, from the perspective of American citizens in 1919, the accused (Schenck) was weakening the American war effort, indirectly threatening the lives of every American. That infringes on their inherent and inalienable right to life, which as noted earlier, generally takes precedence over freedom of expression. The key detail in the ruling, of which "falsely shouting fire in a theatre" was an illustration, was that speech intended to create a "clear and present danger" should not be protected.
However, the SCOTUS was eventually swayed by later societal focus on the right of free expression. In 1969, another case reached the court (involving a man indirectly threatening the President), but the opinion had changed. The SCOTUS opined that even though the speech was advocating violence and literally even promoting treason, it was not directly inciting "imminent lawless action", so it should indeed be protected. That test remains the standard to this day, overriding the earlier "clear and present danger" concept.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Reddit has terms of service and rules that you adhere to when posting or otherwise participating in the community. They don't have an obligation to accommodate those rules to your liking.
That doesn't destroy your freedom of speech. You're free to email or use some other service which allows you to communicate that information. You can try Slashdot, if you want.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
more like "your freedom to swing your fists ends at my nose"
i can't play my music at 3 am, i impinge on my neighbor's right to sleep
i can't speed 120 mph on the highway, i impinge on other driver's right to live
i can't smoke in the office, i impinge on my fellow worker's right to breathe
and when the boss/ police/ landlord comes by and complains, there will be some, like yourself, who in their immaturity, will see it as the state taking away their rights, when the only person infringing on other people's rights is you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Except the purpose of this banned subreddit wasn't actually to find the shooter. It was satirical. All the posters were making fun of how bad they fucked things up during the Boston bombings.
And you know that:
1. Some posters will miss the /sarcasm tag, take it seriously and post personal information of real life people. /sarcasm tag and flog stories about how Reddit is screwing the lives of innocent people. Again.
2. Some posters will take the opportunity to post personal information of their ex's, their enemies, their bosses...
3. Some media company will miss the
Reddit did the right thing by shutting it down.
Guns owned by Americans still outnumber Americans, as they have since WWII. Americans are still more likely to be killed by an agent of the government, or themselves, than another armed citizen. Ownership of guns is not the problem. Lack of mental health care is the problem.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I like the definition I heard a Black man on TV use once a few years ago.
"Freedom does not mean doing what you can get away with, doing what you please. It means, instead, having the opportunity to do what you ought to do--for family and for community and for humanity as a whole."
The difference compared to the US is that in Switzerland, all those guns are kept at home by people who have been trained and serve(d) in the military. As in, they have been through a selection process to weed out the unstable idiots who should not have guns, because you do not want unstable idiots to have firearms period, whether in the military or not.
In the US, any Billy Joe Bob Gun-nut can go out and buy an assault rifle with little more than a basic background check. There is no training requirement and there is no psychological check in place to prevent guns from ending up in the wrong person's hands.
That's not what the article actually says. What it says is that the murder rate in the USA is much higher in general (it makes no mention of gang warfare), but that the mugging rate is lower than in Europe. Perhaps because people get shot instead of mugged instead?
Also, although it's a minor issue, I take umbrage with your phrasing of the first statement. It can be read to imply that violent crime in the USA is somehow doing better than normal. In fact violent crime rates have fallen everywhere in lockstep with phasing out of leaded petrol. The US has merely followed that trend, as would be expected from a phenomenon rooted in heavy metal poisoning.
So essentially what we have is that violent crime fell everywhere, including the USA, but in America muggings are generally replaced with shootings.
Not only can you print ammunition, but making bullets in a mold is beyond trivial.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
maybe instead of fellatio over the imagined protection of a gun you get your fuckign society in order and create an enviroment where poeple dont feel the need to shoot or be criminals int he first place?
Sadly, we can't create that country by outlawing guns.
Fuck you and your guns and your short sighted bullshit.
You're an anonymous coward. Emphasis on coward. You'd have to stand on a stool to even fail at penetration. But go ahead, try and fuck some gun owners, let us know how that works out for you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, SCOTUS exists to reconcile laws with the current views. Laws are slow to change, whereas technology and morality can change overnight.
When current societal views say [bad things] are we still okay with SCOTUS...
Just stop right there. "We" are society. If current views are in favor of censoring speech, that means that Americans generally consider such censorship to be right. Since this is a democracy, ruled by the people, it is ultimately the people's opinions that matter most, even more than the original wording of the law.
There are many good reasons to reject the morality of 1776 to suit modern tastes. Eliminating the three-fifths compromise is a glaring example, along with expanding voting rights, abolishing slavery, implementing term limits, and federating infrastructure. When the Constitution was written, society generally assumed that such changes would be unnecessary. After all, it was really only white male landowners who did anything politically anyway, so naturally they were the only ones who needed to be able to vote.
Privacy, as you so blindly pointed out, is another reason to diverge from the Constitution's original intent. In the decades leading up to the Constitution's writing, the British military had used searches as a means to deny service to colonists. If someone had annoyed the local commander, they could expect their shop to be shut down for the next week while soldiers searched/destroyed it for no particular reason, with no oversight. The Fourth Amendment was included not to ensure secrecy, but to protect only against harassment. Note that it's placed in context with the right to not quarter troops, and the right to not incriminate yourself. That's why the Fourth Amendment's applicability to third-party storage is in question, because a search that doesn't interrupt your daily business is much less likely to be harassment.
More recently, though, the expectation for a "reasonable" search has grown to include respect for secrecy as well. Society's idea of "reasonable" has now shifted enough that a SCOTUS ruling in accordance with the original intent would be outrageously wrong. Remember that in 1776, walls weren't insulated, glass windows were expensive, and gossip was the primary local news source. The only expectation of privacy happened outside the town - and somebody probably would see you leaving.
By the same principle, consider that the morality of today may not apply in the future. One opinion currently changing is how free speech applies to corporate entities. Currently, corporations are allowed to choose how they conduct business as a matter of expression. This is how companies can choose not to do business with a group they find offensive or otherwise don't like. It's also how a company can make political donations to further their own goals. There's growing controversy surrounding both of these issues, so I expect that within the next few decades, we'll see a SCOTUS ruling clarifying how much free speech corporations (along with store managers, employees, and other representatives) can actually have while operating.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
That's exactly when you need a concealable weapon, otherwise you're the first target.