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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.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Might as well call it thoughtcrime.
Why can't people just filter what they don't like? The oversensitive idiots can wallow in their safe haven of stupidity.
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
And people thought that the Nazis wound rise on the right. How wrong they were...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"...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.
In other news, the moon landings were faked, contrails contain mind control chemicals and the earth is flat. PS it's "toe the line."
... 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.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
That entire thing was FILLED with evidence...
Not according to the New York Times.
will walk to other sites that will welcome them.
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.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Slashdot isn't even dead yet... Despite their attempts with BETA.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
> 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.
Reddit has one of the most open membership processes there is, with no email address or similar required. Throwaway accounts are extremely common. The posting history of an account doesn't reflect the visibility of its comments - while there's "karma", it doesn't work the same way as with Slashdot where postings from high karma users are given more visibility.
So banning users, however toxic, is going to be relatively pointless. At best, it means someone can't prove they're the same person as, say, the originator of a thread. But in all reality, if all you're known for is shitposting, will anyone want to?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
The NYT isn't exactly a beacon of truth. But I agree that pizzagate was a bit of a stretch.
There are tons of great subreddits. Most of the crap is found on any political sub.
if you don't tow the line
Toe the line.
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.
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.
Any service, network, app, platform, etc. with a "Trust and Safety Council" is useless.
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, 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" 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. Twitter users outraged that they did nothing about pedo pics someone allegedly pointed out on twitter gab.ai. Wikipedia censors all but a pitiful mention of it, so it's documented on Infogalactic.
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.
> 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.
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't add anything new.
I'm not looking for a bubble or a safe space or an echo chamber, but neither do I want to swim thru the sewers.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
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
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.
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.
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 consider forced..
And then it gets out of hand when the grammar nazis get in, and start banning people for bad grammar and typos and moderators ban people for disagreeing with em, and this is generally when either the place is overrun with trolls using VPNs due how easy is to "trigger" the users, or when the place gets so boring the owner simply pulls the plug.
This chan had several names, several owners, but always dies the same way.
Of course, a place like reddit is more resistant to that kind of crap due having professionals in and being a corporation etc.., but i still can see that happening.
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 might hope.
It doesn't help that Reddit, Twitter & Wikipedia all seem to want to make it simply disappear, an ironic stance as they were once the place for suppressed ideas to go. A trend that makes me wonder if we'll see a "censorship treadmill" like the euphamism treadmill, wherein new sites are constantly born to take over those that succumb to censorship at the hands of their owners.
Anyhow, for anyone keeping tabs:
Reddit's /r/pizzagate -> Voat's /v/pizzagate
Wikipedia -> Infogalactic
Twitter -> Gab.ai
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 campaign. There is little rhyme or reason to what gets promoted to the front page, which indicates to me that even if the site itself is free, the strings are being pulled by SEO types and/or people who have simply learned how to game the system for karma. That kind of thing can make the site effectively less than free--burying important ideas and events beneath a well-crafted cat meme.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
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.
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.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"The Podesta emails contain multiple references to Comet Ping Pong. [18]"
Except... all those emails contain discussion about a Political Fundraiser Gathering. There's little but tenuous claims linking Podesta to anything improper. If you actually look at all the supposed evidence, yeah it comes off like little more than a nutters vendetta.
Whether an official investigation would uncover anything is unknown... it still wouldn't LINK to Hillary.
Moon landing deniers have occasionally had their free speech abruptly curtailed in real life.
FARK died, there is hope...
So they'll be banning their CEO, right?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comments_us_5839cf32e4b000af95ee5b68
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.
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.
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.
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.
As an outsider to Reddit, it seems odd that it wasn't previously recognized that hosted content could be altered by the hosts. It's surprising and concerning that the CEO flubbed about like he did but the response seems...disproportionate.
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.
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
Now where will they go with their sexism, racism
Thank you for conceding the argument.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now would this https://www.reddit.com/r/Reddi... be considered abuse.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
Hundreds down, only a few more tens of millions to go!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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 what's going on and jumps into the fray, then applies the ban hammer. Instead he should have just stepped back and directed efforts on making Reddit better by fixing the issues at hand and not just in one sub. Or just for one issue. Big picture is needed.
"When you're CEO, they let you do it. You can just walk right up to them and edit their posts." -- /u/spez
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
Who will be defining 'toxic'? Liberals? Oh, well then, it'll be just another cesspool of safe spaces and 'trigger free' hate speech against any and everyone that doesn't agree with them.
When will the sane people in America stand up and smite these benighted, narrow-minded, morally bankrupt children?
Pax Vobiscum
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.
I haven't seen an update to Slashcode in recent history...
Furries make the internet go.
Fuck /u/spez.
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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Toxic users.... on Reddit?
That's unpossible!
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Well, it depends very greatly on whose definition of "harassment" they're going to use. There are plenty these days on the SJW left who define "harassment" as pretty much any public statement that disagrees with their views or challenges them in any way.
If they're just going to ban direct threats ("I'm going to kill you!"), doxxing, calls to violence ("We should go burn this guy's house down!"), etc. then I doubt most people would object.
If they're going to ban anyone who says "I think we should deport illegal immigrants" or "I support a border wall" that's a VERY different story.
It's also a very different story if they decide to get into the business of deciding what ideas and news are worthy and which aren't. One man's "conspiracy theory" or "fake news" is another man's "story that the mainstream media are ignoring, but shouldn't be." Right now, other media companies like Wikipedia are already beginning to ban "fake news" on the right, but not on the left. You can learn all about discredited pedophilia claims against Donald Trump, for example. But search Wikipedia for the equally dubious "Pizzagate" and you'll see that it's been blocked as "A conspiracy theory falsely claiming the existence of a child trafficking ring". It's that double standard that people are worried about.
It's hardly a secret that most of these media companies are located in SJW-central Silicon Valley and that their leadership skews radically left. So you would have to have your head buried pretty far into the sand to buy into the idea that they have any intention of applying their new censorship policies fairly.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So it hasn't appeared in the NYT?
You can't find it discussed on Scott Adam's blog?
There aren't multiple stories about shutting it down?
Oh... right.
So it hasn't appeared in the NYT?
What? You still read the NYT after all their paywall shenanigans? roflwaffles.
You can't find it discussed on Scott Adam's blog?
Oh no, I learned a long time ago not to read Scott Adam's blog, nor Scott Adams' blog.
There aren't multiple stories about shutting it down?
Go back and read my comment again, son, before you reply to it. You clearly didn't understand it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well no, I don't trust the NYT these days, but I still kind of expect it to show up in Google searches relatively more prominently than some truly obscure matters.
Especially when one sees this change. It's been quite effectively slid.
Finally, here's some fact-checking of said NYT article: http://www.renegadetribune.com/new-york-times-fact-checks-pizzagate/
There are plenty these days on the SJW left who define "harassment" as pretty much any public statement that disagrees with their views or challenges them in any way.
There sure are plenty on the right like that, like that notorious SJW Donald Trump...
If they're just going to ban direct threats ("I'm going to kill you!"), doxxing, calls to violence ("We should go burn this guy's house down!"), etc. then I doubt most people would object.
If they're going to ban anyone who says "I think we should deport illegal immigrants" or "I support a border wall" that's a VERY different story.
All the evidence so far suggests that, bar the occasional mistake that is usually rectified, most people should not be upset.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Are we talking about the same reddit? The reddit where The Intercept was not allowed on the world news or politics subreddits because of the reddit staff insisting it's "just a blog"? The same reddit that did PR cleanup for Hillary in october? https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak... If reddit was truly a bastion of free speech, Voat wouldn't have come about 2+ years ago.
Another good rebuttal to the NYT article: http://archive.is/X6KxW