Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"...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.
... 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.
Slashdot isn't even dead yet... Despite their attempts with BETA.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Sounds like that's fine with Reddit. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
That is all.
> 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.
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.
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 save.
Bye!
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
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.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
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.
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.
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.). 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?
/. doesn't let us delete our posts, we'll have some sort of record of this discussion in a year or two when the whole thing ends -- either with serious prison sentences or with nothing.
But hey, maybe you're right and we should take these claims seriously. And since
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I don't think they made up any real definitions honestly. People are just calling it what they see, including some colleges and universities
Well, if you want examples, the University of Chicago, supposedly one of America's most prestigious and selective universities sent letters welcoming students saying:
Emphasis, my own.
I just don't see the issue with calling out what it is instead of allowing people to confuse what those places are.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I should probably pre-fix this to say I am not in the alt-right, but I sympathize with the difficulty they have in trying to have intellectual discourse.
Honestly, this is how language evolves. Gimp used to mean beautiful person, but it was used ironically in a mean way to people that are defined as "gimps" now. Gay was used to describe lighthearted and happy people, but it became used to describe the stereotypical flaming homosexual, leading to 'gay' meaning 'homosexual' today. If you don't want that word to mean what it means to many people today, you should stop those physical places from being called "safe spaces" to begin with, because a debate online about word definitions isn't going to go far.
I know how it works, but I also know the reality behind the implementation used in many colleges and universities.
Your logic follows what misandrists do, who label themselves as feminists (supposedly to help justify actions and prevent intellectual discourse), declare everything they do is for feminism (while doing things that violate the officially touted lines of feminist ideals), when people call them out on it and define feminism as what they are doing, they then cry and say that's not what feminism is and therefore any point you have made is invalid.
Because this is an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another through experiences and these are wide-spread, it's doesn't seem unlikely these added meanings of these words would end up in official dictionary definitions in the next decade unless they stop abusing these words.
As for me personally, I have no problem with the idea that words will change meaning because people are trying to ride on their positivity to push negaitve realities; it's one of the few ways society can self-correct against people abusing them to obtain almost blind support for it, such as what you're suggesting almost when you say "How anyone could possibly spin this as a negative thing".
This point is actually an interesting discussion point. I genuinely haven't seen any videos of alt-righters invading discussions. The most interesting thing to me is when seeking videos from people who represent different ideologies, alt-right people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro when they go on campuses seem to the ones recieving loudmouthed aggressive chants, shouted down by people whom try to prevent any type of discourse. Meanwhile, people like Zoe Quinn and Emma Sulkowicz attend university campuses to speak about issues that the alt-right supposedly are opposed to vemently do not recieve interuptions while speaking, no crazy chanting in the audience, no human walls blocking entrance into the area, no false fire alarms being pulled etc. If this were as common of an issue you described, it wouldn't be the alt-right suffering it, right?
An other interesting point to raise here is that, even when being prohibited to do so, they still do it on campuses. The alt-right as you describe them, are equally prohibited in doing such things and don't do it on campuses.
I think the particular reason why as you so aptly put "alt-righters in particular hate safe spaces" is because it's disgenious and doesn't work the way you describe, it's intended to prevent any sort of discourse with the otherside to begin with and in turn from what I think is the alt-right's point of view, it infantiles a those people while indoctrinating them in a particular mindset.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.