By David Futrelle
Reddit is in the midst of a peculiar three-sided civil war. On one side there are tens of thousands of Reddit users who want the site to cleanse itself of racism and hate speech; opposing them are seemingly similar numbers of Redditors who want the site’s shittiest users to be allowed to spew their hatreds unmolested. Hovering over these two armies of users are the site’s administrators, who claim to be on the side of the angels but who have a long history of doing fuck-all about the hatred that permeates their site.
The current battle in this long-running war was triggered by a tone-deaf statement in early June from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman offering symbolic support for Black Lives Matter and declaring that Reddit staff “do not tolerate hate, racism, and violence.”
Bullshit, a chorus of Reddit users declared in unison: Reddit “tolerates” and has tolerated various forms of bigotry and hate speech with no trouble since the site’s very inception.
Huffman’s statement inspired an open letter from one of the moderators of r/AgainstHateSubreddits demanding that Hoffman put his policy where his mouth is and actually do something about the hatred he claims to be against. So far the letter has gotten more then 25,000 upvotes and support from the moderators of some 800 subreddits. The document puts forth a list of eminently reasonable demands, from banning hate subreddits and hateful users to diversifying Reddit’s staff. There’s no good reason for Reddit not to do all of the things the open letter suggests.
The Open Letter is a tremendously positive step — as is the media coverage it has gotten. (Reddit only seems to act to fix its problems when the media starts to pay attention to them.) But there’s one important word missing from the Open Letter: misogyny.
As I’ve documented on this blog over many years, Reddit is home to some of the vilest misogyny this side of Incels.co; there are misogynistic screeds in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit that are as hateful and vicious as any racist screed in the long-ago-banned r/Coontown.
Of course r/MGTOW is also suffused with racism and antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, as I have also tried to show in numerous posts. These things tend to go together, as someone who is a bigot about one thing will also tend to be a bigot about other things.(See my various quizzes here for innumerable examples of this.)
You can’t fight bigotry without fighting all of its forms — racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, ableism and all the other hatreds that have found such a hospitable home on Reddit over the years. But too often, misogyny is treated as a lesser form of hatred than, say, straight-up race hate or antisemitism; it’s somehow seen as more innocent or excusable.
It’s not, and can’t be left out of any broad campaign for progressive change, on Reddit or elsewhere. Certainly it makes sense for more focused activist movements like Black Lives Matter to center their activism around a single form of bigotry (just as this blog does with misogyny). But movements directed against hate speech online have to take into consideration all the different kinds of hate speech out there. Misogyny counts.
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For more on the current Reddit civil war and some further background on it, check out Kaitlyn Tiffany’s coverage in The Atlantic and this article in Fortune.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
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Yeah, I don’t think the mods are fooling anyone by claiming to be against hate. There are subreddits which when combined would potentially make Reddit home to the largest white nationalist forum on the Internet. Or the r/Jailbait saga, which only got taken down when they realized they could face consequences from law enforcement (and it was replaced by new subreddits within hours). Reddit invites hate because that brings them money. They don’t care about anything else.
This is probably because it is normalized. We live in a misogynist culture like air: most people don’t ever notice it because they breathe it each day without paying attention. This is why so many people don’t see misogyny in its many forms as a real issue.
Even then, IIRC BLM has been explicitly anti other kinds of bigotry as well. Racism is their main focus, but it’s possible to focus on more than one thing at once, and intersectionality of oppression is real. Many people involved with BLM are also involved with other kinds of activism like LGBT rights and feminism.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Damn straight, Reddit needs to do something about its misogynous subreddits. But then it also needs to do something about all the other hate-focused subreddits. If they only want to explicitly shut down one particular flavor of haterade, fine. That’s one less flavor of haterade available from Reddit. Kudos for that! But don’t let that be all that happens. Keep the friggin’ pressure on for all the other flavors of haterade that didn’t get shut down this time!
TL;DR—”Good start. Stay the course!”
Brianna Wu had a thread on Twitter a couple of days ago where she drew a line from Gamergate through election manipulation and Christchurch to our present boogaloo. She asks readers to imagine an alternate timeline in which the harassment and online toxicity incubators had been taken seriously. It’s so true and yet I remember how so many women were just ignored no matter how they tried to raise the alarm. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1274343193228840966.html
I feel like this is the reason we get so much pushback whenever we call out the “there but by the grace of God” commentary like in the other thread. It’s normalized to feel hatred for women, so some people’s reaction to us rightfully calling that out is to double-down on how that behavior isn’t bad, of course, it’s just normal.
I’ve long thought that misogynistically motivated violence needs to be considered a hate crime. It won’t just be women that will be better off for it if we take misogyny more seriously. As has been noted on this site many times, most mass shooters have a history of violence against women. But all too often, even on the left, misogyny is treated as a distraction and an afterthought, something only rich white women bring up to get attention – as if misogyny doesn’t affect poor women and women of color.
@Alex I am a bit skeptical of tracing it back only to Gamergate. At the time it took a while to even notice something unusual was happening because the He Man Woman Hater part of the gaming community was throwing some new tantrum with accompanying harassment campaign seemingly every other week.
@impudentinfidel
I think that’s why she started it there. That was where it got to the point where it couldn’t be ignored, where it was egregious even for the He Man Woman Haters of gaming.
@weirwoodtreehugger:
Fun fact! The major impediment to passing laws creating sentencing enhancement for bias-motivated crimes motivated by misogyny has been men saying that if we used sentencing enhancement for misogyny-motivated crimes, then suddenly every heterosexual man who abuses his woman partner or wife will treated as someone who committed a hate crime!
They never stop to ask, if misogyny is really motivating thousands of everyday crimes, maybe we should be doing more to oppose misogyny?
Nope, it’s just, “You can’t lock men up for violent assaults motivated by hatred of women!” because the freedom to hate women is a white American man’s right, I guess.
(BTW: I believe that they have, in fact, updated the hate crimes law to include gender at the federal level when they passed the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Hate Crimes Act in 2010 or so, but i’m talking about where the resistance comes from, not whether it was ultimately successful.)
Some police forces here do categorise misogyny as a hate crime.
https://www.nottinghamshire.police.uk/hatecrime
However as Crip Dyke points out, that’s only really relevant if that’s reflected in sentencing.
That gets a bit complicated. With regards to the sentencing guidelines judges use, there are general aggravating features, statutory aggravating features, and some crimes where the motive is one of the elements of the office.
But more here if anyone is interested.
https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/hate-crime/
Leaving aside the fact that the current administration has made seeking asylum in the United States much more difficult, there are (technically) many reasons why someone can seek to move to the United States under an asylum visa. If your life is in danger due to gang activity in your home country, for instance, or if your life is in danger due to political repression. But one thing notably missing is if your life is in danger due to gender-based oppression. If your intimate partner is going to murder you if you go back home, the US will happily ship you back home and deny your asylum request.
It’s been suggested more than once that the United States should alter this policy, but the argument has always been that if it did, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay lots of women would be able to take advantage of it to get into the US. Way too many to handle, and they would clog up the asylum hearing courts.
The argument against fighting misogyny on an international basis, then, is that it is so prevalent, and too many women are in too much danger to do anything about it, even the minimal effort of offering them asylum.
@kupo
Whenever that happens here, it reminds me of the whole “boys will be boys” defense of misogyny and violence. We are told to accept when men are misogynists so they get upset when told not to do it. And it starts at a young age, hence the “boys” reference.
@WWTH
This is especially common among the Dirtbag Left. They repeatedly try to silence discussion of misogyny because they think it disrupts “class solidarity” without acknowledging how it affects working class women.
Speaking of which, Peter Coffin continues his descent into edgelordiness by having a talk with Milo Yiannopoulos. This is just flat out irresponsible. But Milo is also another example of this: women pointed out his misogyny a long time ago and nobody listened until it was too late.
WTF?
Brainfreeze.
O/T, but relevant to male entitlement and misogyny:
A man is suing Twitch for $25,000,000 for showing him attractive female streamers which he claims have made him addicted to masturbation and damaged his computer.
Dude needs better aim and clean-up skills, not $25 mil.
Guy’s a serial/”professional” plaintiff and doesn’t exactly come off as in touch with reality. He’s also been doing stuff like this at least as far back as 2009.
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/06/the-new-lawsuit-against-twitch-is-completely-wild/
I think that Peter goes by they/them pronouns.
I think the most telling thing about their tweet is that Peter Coffin is like “hey, I announced that I’ll be debating (and agreeing with) fascists three whole hours ago and no one has #cancelled me yet! Come on! I need you to confirm my narrative that the intersectional left are a bunch of oversensitive, cancel-happy snowflakes! Pay attention to meeeee!”
@Catalpa
Oops, forgot about that. Sorry, I’ll make sure to use the proper pronouns next time.
This is very similar to how ContraPoints makes a big deal about being “cancelled” and leveraged the idea to get more opportunities. I think the reason nobody is “cancelling” Peter this time is because we’ve been trying to point out the issues with them this whole time and so this isn’t really all that surprising.
@Shadowplay
Or at least he needs to learn self restraint around Twitch.
@Naglfar
’bout as likely as him learning to clean up after himself, sadly. What, HE shoud change?!!!!!
@Shadowplay
Maybe someone can cut the internet access to his house and then it will be as if Twitch is gone for him?
If Reddit (or Farcebook, or Twatter, or….) can address an issue by modifying a mathematical algorithm, they MIGHT make an attempt.
If they can’t address the issue with math, they will ignore it, justify it, deny it, and any other response they can do for free.
The geek culture believes they are using algorithms to manipulate information. They are not. They are using algorithms to manipulate CONTENT, NOT INFORMATION.
Unfortunately, the culture has convinced itself that content and information are the same thing.
I have long held that the worst things we ever invented were money, metal weapons and church…. It’s clear to me now, that social media is orders of magnitude more dangerous than the other three.
I know it’s OT, but mind expanding on this some if/when you’ve got the time?
I tend to be of the mind that all content is information – of varying degrees of accuracy and correctness. (What the entire internet needs more than anything else in my mind is a shitload of librarians!)
I am not sure of what Eddie mean, but trying to overuse algorithms to try to solve problem that computers are horrible at and human are good at is a big problem in the tech culture.
In particular, it’s impossible to moderate social media without a shitton of human going through the complaints. Currently, Facebook and co avoid human moderation as much as possible, probably in no small part because they would need to ban thousands after thousands people to drain the sewers and make sure people understands the do and don’t of social media.
And their bottom line hate the concept of recruiting 50.000 peoples, ban severals millions users, and have quite a bit of thoses recruits with PTSD and/or other permanent traumas.
@Crip Dyke:
It’s like that bit I remember years ago that when it was suggested at one point that having a domestic violence charge should be grounds for a ban on gun ownership, police unions were some of the loudest people shouting it down… because in a number of cities, something like half the police force would have been forbidden from using a gun.
@Naglfar
No, it’s because the people in charge are bigots. It was never about the money.
@Dalillama
What do you think motivated Reddit in the first place. I agree it’s both reasons – hate against the left and money as a nice side effect.