So the new Reddit CEO — returning co-founder Steve “Spez” Huffman — announced the site’s much-anticipated new content guidelines today, and to say that they are disappointing is a bit of an understatement.
Essentially, he told the site’s many varieties of bigots that they could continue to spout their various bigotries on Reddit without repercussions, so long as they didn’t actually threaten to, you know, go out and murder or otherwise physically harm people whose sexual preferences or skin color or religion (or whatever) didn’t meet their approval.
Only now the bigots will be posting on Reddit s dime.
No, really.
Reddit’s new policy on hate speech is to make hateful content “opt-in,” like the site’s NSFW subreddits are now. Oh, and to not embarrass the site’s advertisers by running ads next to blatantly hateful garbage.
As Huffman explained in a posting on Reddit, under the new policy
it’s ok to say “I don’t like this group of people.” It’s not ok to say, “I’m going to kill this group of people.”
Hateful content — or, as Reddit euphemistically puts it, “content that violates a common sense of decency” — will be “reclassified” but not banned. The “indecent” stuff
will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.
What this means in practical terms, Huffman explained in a followup comment, is that
r/rapingwomen will be banned. They are encouraging people to rape.
r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning.
So, yeah, Reddit’s grand plan to deal with its bigots is to … subsidize them.
I can’t even.
Adding to the repugnance of this “hide the hate, but keep hosting it” policy is the fact that, in the wake of the #RedditRevolt against now ex-CEO Ellen Pao, and Dylan Roof’s racist murders in Charlestown, South Carolina, /coontown and other blatantly racist subreddits have seen a giant boost in traffic, with more than 18,000 subscribers and roughly 200,000 page views a day.
As MrTomFTW noted in a posting on r/GamerGhazi, r/coontown is
closing in to matching Stormfront’s traffic. This means that Reddit could soon be host to the largest active white supremacist forum on the Internet.
Actually, that’s understating things a little. If you add Reddit’s other racist subreddits into the mix, Reddit is already the number one destination for white supremacists looking for a place to talk online.
And Reddit will keep footing the bill.
@Catalpa and Robjec
You’re both talking about the dark web, not the deep web. The deep web is just anything that isn’t indexed by traditional search engines: academic databases, bank accounts, etc. It basically means anything you couldn’t find through a Google search. By most estimates the vast majority of the internet is the deep web. The dark web is a small subset of the deep web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Web_%28search_indexing%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Web
Huh, I am seriously not well boned up on my terminology and knowledge about the deep web/the Internet. I suppose I never thought about secure connection sites being unindexed as well. It makes sense.
Yah I mean dark web, I get the terms mixed up quit often.
Mass boycott surely only option for decent minded peeps?
Maybe Reddit will go bankrupt, then, subsidizing that hate. Cause let’s face it, there’s a ton of hate on Reddit that will have to be subsidized. A metric shit ton.
The darknet gets a bad rap too, though. It’s an easy way to access drugs, whether it’s pot from one state over (where it’s legal) or antibiotics that you know you need that only cost $25 on a darknet market instead of effectively $125 (doctor visit $100 just to get the prescription, then $25 for the drugs). People without health insurance use the darknet markets for all sorts of non-recreational prescription drugs. Lots of listings in that category. Plenty of buyers are just avoiding paying the doctor in specific cases where the doctor is only functioning as an expensive obstacle. Or to avoid embarrassment in the case of ED drugs.
I’ve never seen any racism or child abuse images or other horrifying things on the darknet, because I’d have to go looking for those things. On content sites, I’ve mostly seen some great conversation about taboo subjects like illegal drugs and drug prohibition that are too risky to have on the clearnet, especially if they include personal stories.
Oh, and the hiring-a-hitman thing? Not a thing. Experienced darknet folks just laugh when they see that in the media. There are hitman sites, but they are just ripoffs or possibly law-enforcement traps. No actual murders I am aware of have ever been traced back to a darknet “hitman” site.
So basically, y’all think that private enterprises, like Reddit, should just blanketly ban *all* speech that is somehow deemed “offensive”. Right?
I don’t agree.
I’m a card-carrying liberal and feminist, and I think that even assholes deserve to be heard, just like everyone else. In fact, I especially support assholes being able to wave whatever flag they want to wave. Makes it way easier for us to shine light on those cockroaches. Reddit is one of very few online places anymore where assholes feel free to wave their asshole flag. I say, let them.
Also too, I suspect y’all think Reddit is way more influential in terms of public consciousness than it actual is. Even amongst millennials.
ktward:
Nope, that’s a total misrepresentation of most of what has been said on this thread. Try again.
ktward sez:
“Somehow,” huh? I smell moral relativism brewing. (P.S. No one is making that argument, and the concern isn’t “offensive” content in the first place.)
And? You can call yourself that in earnest and still hold conflicting values that work against feminism and other kinds of social progress, especially when you allow yourself to remain ignorant of what you’re talking about. Maybe you should go read Arthur Chu’s article for a start.
http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m726zq9AQe1rp79c3o1_500.gif
Reddit can give white supremacists and rapists a platform if they want. We can criticize it if we want. Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism or consequences. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
Even if we agreed with this view, why would it be laudable of Reddit to be the place where the cockroaches congregate?
Reddit – the 4chan you go to if you don’t want to be seen using 4chan.
And we can also vote with our feet and refuse to visit that site, and thus refuse to subsidize hate speech with our clicks anywhere on Reddit. That, too, falls under “freedom of speech”.
Hearing all this stuff about Reddit reminded me of a chapter from Terry Southern’s 1959 novel “The Magic Christian.” (Southern is best known as the principal screenwriter of the iconic film, “Easy Rider”, and the co-writer of the equally iconic “Dr. Strangelove.”)
The novel is about a multimillionaire who loves playing very expensive practical jokes. The relevant episode has him setting up a huge fire and cauldron on a busy Chicago street, having the cauldron filled with urine and manure from the stockyards, setting up a huge fan behind the cauldron, and then dropping a million dollars in small bills into the cauldron — and then watching as people chased and pounced on and fought over the shit-stained currency.
Except in the case of Reddit and its management, the currency is large denomination bills.
The only thing that could possibly be even remotely good about this would be if this happens:
“Welcome to /r/coontown. Please login with Facebook to continue. All your activity will be posted to your timeline and viewable to all your subscribers’ news feeds.”
And they need to realize what this means: If you need to log in, then that means the white supremacist lurkers will have to make accounts. And they’re probably not going to just stay on the racist subs, they’re going to leak out at a much greater rate than before. And if you read stuff like Stormfront’s BUGS guide, this is what they’re planning.
@ktward
your missing a big part of people’s complaints which is that reddit has banned some groups for abuse language such as fat people hate but not others. The company rook a stand and said you can’t discriminate against people for their weight bit you can for their skin color or religious beliefs. They can’t say anymore that they are just doing it for free speech unless they stand by that value equally at all times.
They are just doing the minimum they can and hoping it blows over before they have to do the real work they promised.
Also only 2 days ago one of the founders said they would ban coontown so of course people aren’t happy with this.
I spy with my little eye something beginning with #N__Y__S__.
Feminists don’t battle straw feminists on a feminist blog; liberals don’t argue that only über-right-wing conservatives are allowed freedom of speech on a liberal blog.
And this, in particular, is pretty fucking telling. Murderously violent bigotry of every awful flavour, idolising Breivik, Rodger and Roof, /r/PhilosophyOfRape, revenge porn, child porn – “Somehow deemed offensive-in-scarequotes”? Wow.
Also, running a Google search on your avatar turns up a bunch of right-wing forums you post on and nothing else, so.
Honestly, the problem is that we’re talking about a specific type of communication here – under normal conditions, what they say is either locked on paper or is gone the moment they utter it, but online, it’s both public and permanent and the sheer weight of it clogs up channels every-fucking-where.
Online hate speech is frankly a classic case of broken window theory – somebody’s gotta clean it up and fix the window or the whole place is going to hell in a basket.
I was a big fan of Huffman’s “I don’t want to ever ban content, but…” remark, because you can replace the polite, neutral “content” with the above, and make it sound increasingly horrible.
O RLY? I didn’t realize there were cards for those. I’m a socialist, and no one gave ME any cards. Where do I go to pick them up, Your Infinite Wizdumb?
Heh. Figures. You’re a card-carrying LIAR, KT.
Why do people keep thinking that they can call themselves liberal, feminist etc. and then make right wing arguments and that we’ll buy it? It never works, but they keep trying. Is it projection? They’re gullible and reactive so we must be too. They’re insecure followers whose values will be shaken if someone on their side disagrees with them, so we must be like that too.
@WWTH
I think it mostly comes from their bizarre belief that “SJWs” automatically believe and agree with everything women/PoC/LGBT+ people say. Which is just more projection, since they really do seem to automatically believe and agree with everything cishet white men (who aren’t “SJWs”) say.
I think this could be a good thing. Irs better than the current policy, and it makes hosting those groups more expensive…