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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.
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 remove content that is illegal in the country where it is hosted and leave everything else in place. No hiding content based on gamed user moderation systems - everyone will get their fair say. No shadowbanning, completely clear and up front rules that are consistently enforced.
User moderation systems are a failed experiment. I am thankful that their time is coming to an end. It is about time we had places where we can have free and open online discussion.
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Bullshit. Reddit's been attracting toxic assholes for the last few years because the spineless admins have been letting it run unchecked. /r/The_Donald claims to support "free speech" while banning anyone who even questions Fearless Leader. It's basically an umbrella for every white supremacist, islamophobe, transphobe, homophobe & misogynist on the site to post their hatespeach & propaganda in a completely uncritical environment, working under the assumption that admins can't take any action against a "political sub". For a few months over the summer, their head mod was literally a Swedish white supremacist.
Any service, network, app, platform, etc. with a "Trust and Safety Council" is useless.
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
This came up after people were already questioning whether some uses of 'cheese pizza' referred to child pornography (CP), so... yeah.
It doesn't help that they're proud of some very weird art that looks to be posed like one of Dhamer's victims.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC