8 years ago
9
Reddit’s Racists ‘Celebrate’ Charleston Terror—and Worry About the Blowback
While most humans with hearts mourned the church massacre, the trolls of a racist subreddit worried about how the killings would make them look in the ‘Jew-owned media.’
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http://www.thedailybeast.com
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Well, I guess the lesson here is that if you happen to hop into a subreddit named /r/coontown you'll probably see what you expect to.
Thing is, the American concept of "freedom of speech" is inclusive of all speech, even the stuff that makes you sick and angry. While I don't condone anything that coontown or the WBC says, I fully and strongly support their liberty to say it.
Allowing the loud freaks to yammer is, ultimately, a canary for all free speech liberties. You start putting a muzzle on the loud, the profane, the hateful, you will start muzzling those less loud, less hateful. And eventually you will muzzle yourself.
A lot of this is at the core of the fatpeoplehate debacle at reddit. You stomp on one group of (relatively tame) assholes, but let the racists and the creeps fapping to dead girls go? Where's the line? The moment you start drawing lines is the moment that you've lost the narrative.
Not to mention, allowing such reprehensible speech allows it to be open to all. Everyone can see for themselves how awful they are. Also, by allowing WBC to exist, we can monitor them as well. We can see the places they plan to picket and plan accordingly. Whereas if they were criminalized, they'd be underground and harder to monitor.
Think about it in the context of /r/fatpeoplehate. They were relatively contained on their own sub. Hardly anyone knew the place existed because no reasonable person would link to it, and anyone that did know about it spoke negatively about it. By being on Reddit's site, they are bound by reddit's rules about brigading and whatnot. Now what happened now that they've been snuffed out? Immediately they flooded other subs since they had no place to call their own; they were angry as well. They moved on to Voat which ISN'T bound by Reddit's rules. If you ask me, they're more of a threat to Reddit now; being able to coordinate invasions, brigades and whatnot without Reddit interfering.
From what I gather, they're still brigade get reddit from voat.
But I get the point. A contained cyst is better than an active infection.
The problem with Reddit is that they can't have full 100% free speech (as in their core values, not the constitution) and at the same time not have these kinds of subs and communities on their site. You can't be worried about image and yet want to allow truly free and open discussion. Half the reason people got pissed at current and prior admin decisions is because they caved, or at least appeared to cave to media pressure. If violentacres wasn't doxxed and Gawker didn't run those articles, /r/jailbait would probably still exist; If media sites didn't point to Reddit as a major hub where the leaked celebrity pics were being shared, /r/thefappening would still exist.
Reddit could have easily answered such accusations by saying that the views of subs do not represent the views of Reddit Inc. and that aside from illegal content, they won't remove such things. Instead they institute vague and subjective rules or rules that aren't applied consistently. For instance, in banning /r/thefappening they didn't address the fact that sharing of private pictures of non-celebrities are STILL widespread on the site. In the most recent controversy, the banning of "harassing subs"; when asked about why SRS wasn't banned, an admin said it was because said harassment by SRS happened "years ago", effectively adding some arbitrary statute of limitations that were never mentioned in the harassment rules.
Yet after all this, Reddit still has an image problem AND they look like hypocrites to their own userbase. They should have picked a side and went with it instead of riding the fence. Either add reasonable limits to their "free speech" value which, lets face it, people wouldn't have a huge problem with OR stood up and taken the negative press while maintaining their current values. They've effectively reaped the worst of both sides.
Well said, they tried to run with both sides and that made them look even worse.
insightful
Thank goodness for snapzu.
Admins are still not banning it - maybe they aren't all power-crazed after all?
Is not about power. Is about the look of the website. No post from /r/CoonTown has never made the front page and it never will. Posst from /r/fatpeople hate made the front page regularly. Is all about image, they could give two shits about "safety" or whatever excuse they gave for banning subreddits.