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Reddit Conducts Wide-Ranging Purge of Offensive Subreddits (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the gone-with-the-wind dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, [Reddit] announced a new policy clarifying its rules against content that incites violence. "We will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people," Reddit administrator landoflobsters wrote. Promoting harm to animals is also against the rules. Within minutes, moderators started to ban a long list of controversial subreddits, including /r/Nazi, /r/DylannRoofInnocent, /r/SexWithDogs, /r/WhitesAreCriminals, and /r/PicsOfDeadKids. The bounds of propriety remain fairly wide at Reddit, however. Commenters pointed out that /r/WatchPeopleDie -- which is exactly what it sounds like -- is still around. Landoflobsters said that site administrators have "no plans to remove it for now." The self-explanatory -- and horrifying -- /r/CuteFemaleCorpses is also still active. Evidently, merely depicting violence is fine as long as people in a subreddit don't glorify violence. In practice, of course, the line between these things is pretty thin. A subreddit devoted to merely discussing violent acts is naturally going to attract people who like to promote violent acts -- especially after bans of related subreddits where those people previously hung out. Reddit's new policy seems like the basis for an endless game of Whac-A-Mole as the Internet's creeps search for new places to exchange disturbing content.

5 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Finally they get some backbone, can't wait for all the simpering fools on /. to whine abut free speech once against where it doesn't apply

    If you want reddit to be a platform for hate you should have no issue with any social media being a platform for ISIS or literal nazis

    1. Re:Good by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 2, Interesting

      (Not to mention, there's no such thing as an inalienable right. That's stupid. Inalienable rights come and go as society deems them appropriate.)

      Inalienable rights are not defined by society, but rather by nature. Your right to your own body is inalienable, for example, because you can't stop controlling your own body or give control of it to someone else. Without your body you aren't you. The same goes for rights which are yours simply due to your existence as a sentient being, such as the rights to homestead unowned land, own property, and enter into contracts. (Rights to specific property are alienable, of course.) There aren't many things like that, however, and a number of rights which are often claimed to be inalienable aren't. Anything right which you can choose to transfer to another person, thus severing it from yourself, is not an inalienable right.

      Whether a right is inalienable is academic, of course, if the person in question does not choose to alienate the right. "Alienable" does not mean "optional" or "so long as others consent". Alienable rights are not any less important or worthy of respect than inalienable rights; they are simply rights which the right-holder can choose to forfeit at will.

      --
      "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
  2. I miss Usenet. by Mal-2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Other than spammers, nobody bothered us when we used alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque for this purpose.

    For the record, I was in no way responsible for the "Di Death Pic" hoax... but I know who was, an a.b.p.g regular. It was an accidental hoax anyhow, it was not meant to be taken seriously. We didn't know lurkers would forward it without the disclaimer.

    --
    How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
  3. Re:More Like Narrow-Banded by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This argument over the relative badness of one sub to another is just a distraction. It's one of the most common logical fallacies these days - "he is terrible, but she is worse," or "okay Nazis but what about these guys?"

    It's not hypocrisy to not be omnipotent and capable of evaluating everything on a precisely calibrated scientific scale and then enacting a mass cull in one single hit for maximum fairness. It's just the nature of large web sites with limited resources to do a difficult job.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. Community defines standards by e432776 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Its been interesting to read that apparently some of the limits reddit instituted last time (amid much controversy and gnashing of teeth) were in reducing hate speech.

    The take-home to me is that groups online should define and enforce their standards; doing so will determine what sort of people participate and whether the site is a "cess pool". Seems obvious now.