Reddit, Banned In China, Is Reportedly Set To Land $150 Million Investment From a Chinese Censorship Powerhouse (gizmodo.com)

Reddit is about to get a huge new round of investment of up to $300 million. As Gizmodo points out, "the first $150 million is reportedly expected to come from the Chinese tech giant Tencent, the first ever Asian technology company to pass a $500 billion market value." The investment is complicated since Reddit is banned in China via the Great Firewall of China. Also, "Tencent is not merely a resident of China's internet -- the company is one of the most important architects of the Great Firewall," reports Gizmodo. "It's an interesting source of cash for a Silicon Valley company whose product is essentially speech." From the report: Tencent is, at great cost and ultimately for great profit, literally reinventing censorship in China. The Great Firewall was not built by the Communist Party in Beijing, it's built by the tech giants all around China. This opaque but clearly powerful relationship between the $500 billion company and the Chinese government raises interesting and unanswered questions about Tencent's forays into the West, including questions about Reddit's future.

The pending Chinese investment in Reddit, a social media company with relatively little Chinese-language community, is a richer twist on that old tale, and it's a part of Tencent's expanding global investment strategy. The Chinese company owns about 12 percent of Snap, for instance, even though Snapchat is banned in China. Tencent also owns a piece of the chat app Discord even though, you guessed it, Discord is blocked in China. If Tencent does kick in $150 million on a nearly $3 billion valuation for Reddit, as TechCrunch reports, it will be interesting if we ever find out exactly what it means. What kind of influence and position, if any, will Tencent gain at Reddit? Neither company responded to Gizmodo's questions.

Comments

Mystery solved

[elrous0]

Well, at least I don't have to wonder anymore why I was perma-banned for posting "I think Xi Jinping may be overrated."

Re:Mystery solved

[ShanghaiBill]

Slashdot is not yet a chinese propaganda machine.

Correct. It would need to support Unicode for that.

Not good optics for Reddit

[MikeRT]

There is no way they're going to prove to anyone now that any controversial moderation decision wasn't forced on them by outside pressure now.

Re:Not good optics for Reddit

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no way they're going to prove to anyone now that any controversial moderation decision wasn't forced on them by outside pressure now.

It has already been shown that a relatively small group runs the moderation of both Reddit and Wikipedia and they have some disturbing beliefs and relationships that no one is mentioning because the MSM is not reporting on it, so it's up to places like /pol/ and other fringe outlets to do the research and reporting.

To get on topic, a certain Tom Edwards was Microsoft's head of geopolitical strategy which meant censoring products for the Chinese market. He joined the transgender cult and changed his name to Kate Edwards, then became head of the IGDA and was coordinating with the San Diego FBI to shut down alleged "harassment" of Zoe Quinn in July 2014. Note the date. When the Gamergate scandal broke a month later, Reddit was one of the forums that Shut Down Everything. Four years later, the now heavily censored Reddit attracts $150 million in Chinese investment.

Re:Las Vegas Rules

[youngone]

Which is why if the new Chinese investors try to impose their censorship stuff on Reddit, they will lose their money as all the users bugger off to somewhere else.
I'm sure they're not stupid, and are well aware of that too.

Nah, they'll fit right in

[DNS-and-BIND]

Tencent will fit right in at Reddit. Reddit isn't some kind of free speech platform. In fact, they censor daily and with great enthusiasm. The top admin was caught red-handed altering people's posts in the database. The problem with youtube, google, facebook, twitter, reddit... we took this open platform of the internet where anyone could do anything and we gave control over our behavior to a few big players because their products were slick and had a lot of cash invested in them. We centralized... and in centralizing we gave control over this free wheeling space of the internet to a handful of companies.

And now we're seeing the problem with that. The same problem we had before with the handful of media companies that provided our TV, Newspapers, Radio, etc...The freedom is gone if you centralize.

Wikileaks released emails which showed that Shareblue/Correct the Record was astroturfing many subs on Reddit.

Re:Nah, they'll fit right in

[AmiMoJo]

we took this open platform of the internet where anyone could do anything and we gave control over our behavior to a few big players

Bollocks.

Even if you hosted your own site on your dial-up connection back in the day, your ISP would eventually cut you off. Usenet is still around but the server operator would just ban you if you started abusing it. When was this golden age you speak of?

Things are actually much better these days. We have TOR and hidden sites, we have platforms like YouTube that give people immense reach on a very effective medium, and we have 4chan if you really want to go nuts. All free.

The people moaning about being banned are mostly just complaining about not being free publicity or getting paid. It's not enough that they can post their messages or host a .onion site, they want to be promoted on YouTube, suck up that ad revenue, be on the prime-time platforms.

Reddit is already a lost cause

[nehumanuscrede]

It's nearly impossible to have any sort of civil discussion there since anything posted either:

1) Gets removed by the moderators because your opinion doesn't align with their own
or
2) You just get banned by the moderators because your opinion doesn't align with their own

The moderators basically control the microphone. I liken it to folks calling in to some talk show host thinking they're going to argue with the
host on the air when they can silence you with the push of a button.

IF the moderators don't get you, the users themselves will down vote into oblivion any opinion that clashes with the echo chamber group think.

Re:Reddit is already a lost cause

[coastwalker]

Curious, I have never even seen a post removed from r/UK. Apparently our politics has not yet been infiltrated by trolls as yours undoubtedly has.

Re:Reddit is already a lost cause

[mccalli]

Undoing moderation in this thread to respond to this.

Yes, the troll problem is an issue and it frustrates me that I use so many mod points clearing up rubbish rather than promoting good comments. It's endless, and some of it is copy/paste and I think there's a case to be made for sysadmin-level filtering of a lot of it. There's a slippery slope argument to have about that, but it's one I would sit on the "ok so long as we keep an eye it" side of things.

I've been coming to Slashdot for a long time - this is my second account, after losing/forgetting contact details for resetting the password on my other. The quality of discussion here was why I kept coming back. Slashdot was and still can be a place to discuss the implications of things, rather than just the specific detail. It used to be seen as an influential venue on tech culture, and sadly is less so now but the core discussions are still quite good.

The trouble right now is the massive troll spam issue. Obsessive vendettas and an inability to understand that not every sentence of every subject ever is to do with US politics. I do my best when I get mod points, and I'm sure the other moderators do as well. But it's just a bit wearing having to clean things up rather than promote good conversation.

Re:Las Vegas Rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully. China is increasingly growing more powerful, influential, and interconnected with the rest of the world. Love or hate the Communist Party of China and their authoritarianism and human rights stance, they're a major player on the world stage. It would be chilling if a country as increasingly powerful as China was able to get the IP information of those posting comments anti-CPC comments, and could then trace those comments to individuals. I do not trust Chinese investment in social media platforms.

Re:Las Vegas Rules

[coastwalker]

Amusingly Facebook sells you to the highest bidder so the Chinese own anyone they want already. Reddit forums are probably of use to the Chinese with appropriate oversight. Everyone seems to forget that the great firewall of china does not mean they are technologically backward. They adopt things like mobile payment faster than the rest of us.

Re: Different forms of censorship

[astrofurter]

"Why would anyone give Alex Jones equal access? They guy's an incoherent arsehole, and no civilised person would want to be associated with him."

No doubt Chinese censorship apologists would hurl similar insults at anyone challenging their Party's official narrative.

Re:Different forms of censorship

[stealth_finger]

Prove me wrong. Show me where Alex Jones has equal access.

His own website. Twitter and all that before he got himself banned for being a massive knob. Any other website he might care to sign up to. Before he gets banned for being a knob that is.