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

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.

2 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Gesture by racknithi · · Score: -1, Offtopic
  2. Re:Good bye, old friend... by jedidiah · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Much of that is provided by the private sector. The best of any of that is the private version. There are very few situations where an actual government monopoly is the preferred or better option.

    Even liberals that want to give everyone free hand outs fixate on the overpriced private Universities.

    Even they fail to acknowledge that the more "socialist" options are even acceptable.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.