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Reddit To Crack Down On Abuse By Punishing Hundreds of 'Toxic Users' (reuters.com)
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.
It was fun for a while, and now this crap starts.
Funny thing is... it was the CEO who started it all!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
"...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.
> 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 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, 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" 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.
Meanwhile, /r/politics was literally flooded with paid Clinton minions, furiously pushing down voting anything not favorable to Clinton within the sub, as well as targeted downvoting elsewhere on Reddit.
Nothing was done, because Reddit is run by whores.
There are tons of great subreddits. Most of the crap is found on any political sub.
Funny... /r/The_Donald was the most stringently run safe space I've ever seen, and it certainly wasn't being run by SJW's.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
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.
> 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.
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).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Well, I still haven't seen any smoking guns just yet
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 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 conspiring with a handful of top default mods to find a way to ban T_D (y'know, the only sub openly supporting the goddamned president-elect of the United States of Fucking America without pissing off the userbase too much.
And you want a smoking gun? Hey, does this video footage of the gun firing repeatedly count?
/ Jesus, when will Slashdot allow HTML entities, never mind actual *gasp* Unicode!