5 years ago
8
You can't offer to murder cops on Reddit unless you're on r/TheDonald
Reddit has a very specific policy prohibiting people from threatening bodily harm or attempting to incite violence. It uses this policy as the basis for banning individual accounts, discussion threads, and whole subreddits. Basically if you cross the line, you’re gone. Unless you’re a member of the r/TheDonald subreddit.
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Reddit has a 4-year history (at least) of quarantining then banning subs that the admins don't like, regardless of 'site rules'. Suddenly, child porn, calls to violence, or doxxing are posted from accounts that are not regular users of the subs in question to "justify" pulling the plug.
Now that the Chinese are part owners, expect it to go full '1984'.
China has no intererest in disrupting the already disruptive schisms being developed in US social fabric. It's to their benefit to see it unravel. Ultra right and left wing factions are welcomed, as are the dim witted participation award advocates.
Relevant XKCD
Yes, but that makes them a publisher, not a platform. Publisher have different, and much more in the way of liability.
Reddit admins are arbitrary and capricious. Nobody paying attention to their hypocritical and inconsistent maladministration would defend their methods. Especially in this McCarthyite era, with outfits like the Atlantic Council and the Weekly Standard deciding who's allowed and who ain't.
However, the Magas' deluded persecution fantasies aside, I'm not buying /r/Drama and /r/WatchNiggersDie as victims. Who would is left as an exercise for the reader.
At least until lately, mods worth their salt tend not to have their subs taken away. Agents provocateur brigading in or no. Reddit's just not that picky what grows in their Petri dishes. Honestly giving a shit's not their business model.
Voat exists for a reason.
Voat has it's own issues. As reddit shut down some of the really terrible subs, they flocked to voat, and you can find such examples of high-brow speech as "nigger-faggot" and "kike" bleeding into cooking and humor subs. And if you aren't a fan of loli-porn, best block those subs to keep them off your front page (Though they may have fixed that as opt in, not sure)
T_D had somewhere around 650- 700K subscribers "officially" listed last I checked, but it was the 3rd most active sub. They were selling the site to advertisers as 7M, had "adjusted" the algorithm to keep them off the front page, and they were prevented from linking outside their sub (which no other sub was prevented from linking in, or out). I can see why they had/have persecution fantasies.
I'm sure the quarantine was in no way related to the first Dem debate, and it's pending luscious meme-material. (Probably lots of racist frogs, white-power "ok" signs and whatever 4Chan can troll them with next.)
As someone that's been watching /r/all every now and again for an embarrassingly long time, I've been blown away watching /r/The_Donald wagging the Reddit dog for so long. The more the Reddit admins try to bury it, the more obvious it is that they're absentee landlords not quite up to the job. Reddit, like most link aggregators, is a form of usury.
Then again I remember T_D's founder, /u/jcm267, from /r/Politics back in the day. So yeah, I don't have a lot of trouble making all the goose-stepping and sieg-heiling out to be what it is. Persecution fantasies fueling fantasies of persecuting are part and parcel of brownshirt outfits like that. Not everyone has the grace, the tact of a /u/SuperconductiveRabbi.
Angry brigading mobs being what they are, and that moderation team being what they are, I'm not going to second guess Reddit's limits on T_D. Mind you, I've been mistreated by Reddit corporate in my own ways. I'm not blind to their many, many fatal flaws, ruinous choices, and backwards policies. I don't think Reddit admins are uniformly Democrats working to suppress the deplorables, the way some might. I think they're more of an iron law of institutions shop.
Will say though, if your fascist movement depends on a platform like Reddit, it's not really your movement, is it? It's Reddit's. There're still brigadiers here from T_D, but then they don't pull the same antic shit here either. Conversation's better for it. That's what Reddit was supposed to be about. You know, in Aaron Swartz days, R.I.P.
Since this article came out, Reddit has "restricted" TheDonald sub-reddit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/politics/reddit-donald-trump-quarantined.html