By David Futrelle
Is Reddit finally learning how to ban correctly?
On Monday, Reddit site admins banned the MillionDollarExtreme subreddit, ostensibly for hosting “violent content,” though this was merely one small part of what made the subreddit, a forum devoted to the alt-right’s favorite alt-comedy group, the foul and eminently bannable cesspool that it was.
Then earlier today Reddit took down the much larger and more influential GreatAwakening subreddit, the internet’s main hangout for QAnon conspiracy theorists too old or addled to figure out how to use 8chan, for harassment and violent threats, many of them directed at Hillary Clinton.
When the users of these banned subreddits scurried to hastily constructed replacement subreddits designed to circumvent the bans, Reddit shut these down as well.
[UPDATE: On Thursday night, Reddit also closed the nasty SJWhate subreddit.]
These new bans — in particular the bans of the replacement subreddits — have some wondering if Reddit is finally beginning to take hate speech — and the often violent harassment it encourages — with something approaching seriousness.
As The Verge puts it,
While previous Reddit bans have come about mostly as a result of external pressure, these are the first higher-profile bans directly tied to Reddit’s new, more explicit content policy, which was rolled out in October 2017. After years of inconsistency from the company’s leadership, the site’s handling of this set of bans suggests a more codified strategy being implemented across the board for policing toxic users.
In the past, The Verge notes, bans of such noxious subreddits as r/Jailbait and r/PicsofDeadKids were
more or less … one-off response[s] to lengthy campaigns from users, media, and the general public. … As Reddit has grown more popular, it’s become increasingly obvious that the norms and implied protections the site has offered are inadequate. Despite CEO Steve Huffman’s continued waffling in his resolve to ban Reddit’s worst actors, a change seems to be afoot.
It’s not completely clear what, specifically, triggered these latest bans. A new and still relatively small subreddit called TheBanout2018, devoted to banning as many of the worst subreddits as possible, is claiming at least some of the credit. But Reddit hasn’t been terribly receptive to similar campaigns in the past — not without massive media attention — and so it’s hard to tell if this latest one has actually played a significant role in bringing about the bans.
Regardless, some of the worst Redditors out there are freaking out, worrying that their favorite Reddit hangouts — from TheRedPill to r/MGTOW to The_Donald — will be next.
In TheRedPill, mods are urging subscribers to bookmark their off-Reddit alternative site TRP.RED, while Terpers themselves are talking as if they are fighting to protect the last dying embers of Western Civ.
![the99percent1 158 points 14 hours ago Good times are built by strong men. Good times make men weak. Weak men make good times become hard. Hard times build up strong men. Rinse and repeat. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]Random_throwaway_000 74 points 12 hours ago From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/f7t8y9gu0hi.png?resize=505%2C833&ssl=1)
In r/MGTOW, the regulars can’t seem to decide whom to blame, with prospective villains ranging from the Deep State to, er, Serena Williams? (Don’t ask me to explain that one.) Some are convinced it’s part of a devious plot to sway the upcoming elections.
Whatever the motive, the bans have left noted MGTOW philosopher BitchesBHating worried that we are entering dark times indeed.
Sad!
Reddit’s Bannables agree on one thing: they’re so opposed to all this evil banning that they want TheBanout2018 banned at once. Indeed, they’ve started up their own subreddit, BanBanouts, to push their anti-banning ban. As the subreddit’s mods explain in their sub’s sidebar:
This might be a lot funnier were it not for the fact that the banned subreddits were — and the others possibly on the chopping block still are — energetic encouragers and exporters of the rankest hatreds, and that the worst of these subreddits have caused real damage to decent people by encouraging and enabling online and real-world harassment and violent threats. So, yeah, I’m not going to apologize for wanting this shit banned.
Let’s hope that Reddit is indeed taking a new and stricter stance towards the hatred and harassment that their platform has enabled over the years — and that the bannings of the GreatAwakening and MillionDollarExtreme subreddits and their various attempted replacements are merely the start of a much wider, and long overdue, crackdown.
I’m not sure I buy it, but we’ll see.
PS: Hey, did I mention that Amazon banned a bunch of books by Roosh? Well, it did.
Good.
…. wait, what now? That whole thing about intolerance… First of all, confusing as hell. Second, what the fuck. I mean, I was just reading a dissertation (yes, for fun) about nerd/geek masculinity and how it’ll co-opt the language of oppression (among other things, but that’s the relevant bit here), but I never thought I’d get such a clear example so quickly. I mean, they can’t really believe THEY’RE tolerant, right? They barely tolerate women existing in ways that aren’t strictly defined heteronormative gender roles!
Damn. That’s some serious self delusion.
250 years, eh? The Holy Roman Empire begs to differ. And for a bunch of dudes always harping on about Rome, seems he forgot how long it was a thing. Or Egypt, the pyramids were ancient while the Ptolemies reigned 2000 years ago.
Buhbye, and please DO let the door hit you, you feckin’ weirdos.
250 years MIGHT be an average (depending on what you are talking about when you say “great civilization”), but that could be 50 years for some and 1000 years or more for others. The Roman republic was around for hundreds of years before becoming an empire 2000 years ago, and that was solidly around for at least 500 years, and didn’t fully dissolve until the Ottomans captured Constantinople in the 1400s.
These people just don’t understand how numbers work. They saw polls that said Trump had a 20% chance to win the presidential election and have claimed ever since that polls are invalid and fake and biased because they said he had NO chance… when in the world of real facts 20 is a very long way from 0, and no poll gave him a 0% chance (we’re also leaving out the fact that pre-election polls didn’t take into account the interference our intelligence community concluded had occurred).
The average lifespan of historical civilizations is descriptive, not prescriptive, and it’s an AVERAGE.
Only slightly off topic, when developing jet fighters, the air force took detailed measurements of every pilot, hundreds of pilots, averaged them out, and created a pilot seat intended to fit everyone. NO ONE FIT IN IT, and they had to design adjustable seats. Very few people actually have the “average body” across the board, and averaging measurements like that is useful only in abstract ways, if at all.
All the edgelords and shitposters will look up and shout, “Save us.”
And I’ll whisper no.
Serena Williams’ husband is Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and executive chairman of Reddit. A few have hypothesised that the ordure heaped on Williams in the past few days, and especially by the alt-right, was Ohanian’s “finally” point – though this isn’t known for sure.
why would her husband abuse to Serena? he can’t control everyone on reddit, that is what his moderators must do. also from what I seen, mostly this abuse is on Twitter and actually, mainstream media and news papers. I don’t think closing Qanon is related to this.
I really wonder where these folks will go next, ’cause certainly they won’t go away entirely without a fight ’till the end.
I say this as I still remember the banning of r/Incels (and what a glorious day it seemed to be) and yet all that happened was the making of new places and they dispercing all over. I see that the main argument against banning (besides muh free speech) is that these cesspools are “containment boards” precisely so that these guys don’t invade the rest of the internet. If it’s true of these sites promoting violence, guess that the dams broke down long ago.
In the end we’ll see what happens, I guess.
Deplatforming is always valid, every fracture and splinter weakens the reactionaries, because they have to set up their infrastructure of hate again, which takes time and effort, and as fractious as they generally are, they rarely agree on what forum is a worthy replacement, and which one is a honeypot from the Feds/$oros Agents/Random Pizza Place.
While roosh is, in my never humble opinion, slime mold of the very worst sort (and that is an unintended insult to slimes and molds everywhere), I am not at all certain that book banning is ever a good thing.
I do not imagine, for a nano second, that he has anything to say that could ever be valuable – or even marginally interesting – but ideas cannot be stopped by banning the books that contain them. If I were Amazon I would not ban his books. I would, rather, emphasize reviews and comments that show the world this turd brain for the fool he is, sell the books for a ridiculously low price, offer intelligent and feminist books at good bargain prices for every copy of roosh vomit sold…And the list goes on. There must be ways to, basically, laugh him out of town without resorting to the fascist tactic of book banning and/or burning.
Ideas?
@Samantha:
Amazon is a private business, and can publish or refrain from publishing whatever it likes. If Roosh doesn’t like it, he can find someone else to print his books for him; there is no shortage of vanity presses and PoD services who would take his money.
Only governments have the ability to censor. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean anyone owes you a platform. I have pretty serious ethical problems with Amazon, but I’m on their side in this instance.
I may sound out of touch for asking this, but what’s MillionDollarExtreme?
@Chris Oakley: An Alt-Right subreddit founded on the premise of a cancelled Comedy Central show featuring rightwingers pretending to be funny. It was a Nazi hatesub full of Misogyny, Racism, Homophobia and any other horrid perspective you can dream up.
All 4tehLULZ and Ironic, obviously…
Banned?
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group of assholes.
BitchesBHating says he’ll be “ruined for wrong thought if I speak my mind.”
I suppose he means he’ll get his feelings hurt because he’ll be called on his shit. What a shame.
Phryne,
I think my favorite instance of aggrieved white male nerd appropriation of oppression was when I saw some refer to Big Bang Theory as “nerd minstrelry” Because a show that stereotypes college educated mostly white men who like science and comic books is exactly the same as racist entertainment, apparently.
David Gerard,
I’d totally forgotten Serena Williams was married to him. I just remembered it was some rich guy. Yes, I do have to wonder if she’s been a positive influence on him.
Valentine,
He was just saying that Alexis Ohanian might be one of those people who doesn’t realize that misogyny and racism are real things that harm people until he marries someone effected by them. Especially now that they have a daughter.
Perhaps seeing that disgusting Australian cartoon made him see that bigoted jokes are never just jokes and they can do real harm.
Shortly after the banhammer came down on the Great Awakening, there were folks on Twitter claiming this was because Qanon was getting too close to the truth.
I swear, some people would talk themselves into putting a windshield on a billy goat.
Censorship and the issues re. government or big-business platforms is nuanced and becoming ‘cloudier’. So there could come a time – and soon- when being banned from a major comms channel could amount to censorship – particularly if there is a little net-neutrality regulation/protection.
The Amazon book ban bothers me not at all because there are indeed other platforms for Roosh’s crap, the ban was selective and I imagine that the particular books banned were the ones which encouraged rape – and was therefore incitement to violence which is not protected speech.
I don’t yet think we’ve come to the big corporates as censors as the alt-right sometimes claims, but we are on the edge of slippery slope. Still no one deserves any platform for hectoring and harassment and incitement to violence. What we do need to move forward with as a society is the understanding that not all violence is physical and bullying can create real harm even if does not lead directly to physical violence (which it sometimes does anyway).
Remember when MillionDollarExtreme had that Adult Swim show? World Peace? I watched a clip of it (actually a skit that was cut from the show because it was so blatantly racist) and it was one of the most painfully unfunny things I’ve seen. I get that they’re into that whole Tim and Eric “anti-humour” mold (which always struck me as lazy), but coupling anti-humour with racist talking points and conspiracy theories you actually believe only makes it even worse.
The reason the right can’t do comedy is they can’t deconstruct things. Because deconstruction requires understanding and critique, and supporters of the status quo would sooner chew their own arms off. So instead, they just say things that are awful with the expectation that the audience will mistake it for ironic hyperbole, but then they’re so insular and aggrieved that they start getting riled up and angry and cram every little weird talking point into their routine or scripts.
A glimpse at any of the fictional works of today’s right-wing luminaries is often unintentionally hilarious in how they have to weave elaborate conspiracy theories linking police shootings and Black Lives Matter to Iran terrorists and illegal immigrants while somehow working in teleprompters, tan suits and 57 states. Ben Shapiro’s book True Allegiance was absolute comedy gold in how bizarre and convoluted the plot was.
These passages still never fail to crack me up:
https://twitter.com/willmenaker/status/818172640506613760
@Samantha Kaswell
Deplatforming a rape advocate is very definitely not a fascist tactic.
Nothing was burnt. Nothing was banned. Nobody is owed a platform.
I also believe that free speech absolutism is a plague on society, but your mileage may vary on that one.
I understand that Amazon has every right to ban Roosh’s books, and I’m not shedding any tears over it. However, I don’t think it was a good idea on the part of Amazon. It will only give more publicity to Roosh, and others like him. These MRA types already have a persecution mindset, and this ban will probably exacerbate it.
I’m glad, though I wish they would get rid of all the toxic communities. As a member of several reddit subs that are very helpful and useful, it always irks me that when I mention them to people who as not on the site I have to explain that all of Reddit is not a cesspool. Even if the toxic assholes go make new communities elsewhere like the incels did at least everyone else who uses Reddit won’t be tarred by association.
Please tell me the rest of Shapiro’s book isn’t as cringeworthy as those excerpts. Jack Chick may have portrayed black people better in his tracts.
Kobun, I heard Reddit explained as a massive buffet, with all these wonderful dishes. And a few buckets of shit slurry. And the caterers defending the right to have those buckets of shit slurry on the table. I feel it is an apt description.