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.
–
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.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
Vitriol is still traffic. Reddit has to “balance” what degree of hatred it’s willing to tolerate against how badly bannings will effect its ad revenue.
@ohlmann, I did content moderation for social media. And yes, the hours are shit, the quotas are high, the pay is low and I did lose quite a few coworkers to anxiety and ptsd.
Part of the problem is burnout, when you only have a few hundred videos between you and freedom for one more night you stop giving a shit and start tagging in a way that’ll get you done the fastest.
Yes, this makes excellent points! It’s frustrating that when misogyny isn’t taken seriously, the excuse is that it’d be inconvenient to do so. Sure. That’s a reason. 🙁
Also, I was just reading another article linking the attitudes of people in charge with hate speech/acts: https://ricochet.media/en/3197/quebecs-discriminatory-law-21-could-start-a-new-chapter-of-violence
@Kupo, Naglfar:
This. I feel like this and “that’s just the way people thought/acted back then“ are some of the most transparent yet least questioned excuses I’ve heard.
O/T, but relevant to hate on Reddit:
TERFs have now embraced the white supremacist idea that “diversity is anti white” (the thread contains other TERF crap as well, but the first tweet is a Reddit screenshot showing the cross-pollination of TERFs and Nazis on said site).
@ Shadowplay:
Sure. It was WAY more of a rant than a well-thought-out argument, tho. It addresses the idea that it’s supremely difficult to write an algorithm that checks for human values , like “meaning,” “intent,” etc.
It’s also irrelevant to this discussion, because Reddit does use moderators, and of course, as @ Dalillama said:
We all know Reddit has been LESS THAN ENTHUSIASTIC about policing their site for the hate they clearly know is there.
@Weird Eddie
Ah, got it. Thank you. It is librarians! 🙂
It’ll happen someday. Just not for a fair while.
@Weird Eddie
And this is why techbro engineers need to take humanities. I recognize that it is difficult to write these algorithms, but not many people try because they don’t recognize the value. This ignorance of human values is what got us to where we are.
@Shadowplay : we actually aren’t sure that computer will ever get roughly as good as humans for that kind of task. The current way is trying to brute force it by writing thousand of random programs and keeping the one that seem to do the job, which is obviously a very bad way to do it, and give us no visibility on what can or cannot be done.
A lot of people theorize that we will be able to write programs able to drive safely on roads, or to assign sentiments to messages, or discuss in an intelligent way. There’s litteraly 0 proof that it’s even possible with a computer.
@Naglfar : techbros need a lesson in humility in particular. Their worldviews is that they have a very nice hammer (computers), and that every and all problems is actually a nail.
That being said, maybe I don’t know the right persons, but apparently nobody have a decent, non-intuitive understanding of how intent and meaning work in human language. I have seen some say that you cannot express in human language how the human language work, which seem actual a possibility.
@Ohlmann
My first language was English and when I was younger I had a hard time understanding theoretical aspects of grammar, but I understood it a lot better when I started learning other languages in school. It’s very hard to discuss the grammar of a language without the frame of reference provided by others, learning other languages helped me understand a lot about how English worked through comparisons. I’m not sure if it’s impossible to explain in one language exactly how it works, but it’s hard without anything to compare to.
@Ohlmann:
It’s likely they will. Certainly there’s no technical barrier, so reverse-engineering of the brain should result in such a thing eventually. The big “if” here would seem to be whether civilization can survive for long enough for this to happen.
@Surplus : it’s not likely. It’s possible, but we have no idea if it’s doable.
There is a very simple technical barrier, called “we don’t know if a computer can do what a brain can do”. I work with machine learning specialized workers, and that’s what I have taken from what they say.
You take as granted that brains can be reduced to mathematics, which is what computers can do. It have never been proven, and we don’t even know how brains work exactly. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s false, and we can make a new kind of device who is able to emulate a brain. Maybe it’s just false and impossible.
Don’t buy the techbro propaganda. Most of the “miraculous” applications of artificial intelligence is straight up not working the way people it do. For example, we don’t actually have a solid path to self driving car, despite what Tesla say, and we genuingly don’t know if it’s possible, and self driving cars are basically a big scam.
The trolley problem, for all the amusing meme it generated, give the wrong idea we are close to have computers with moral problems, but computer programs aren’t closer to emulate a brain than in the 1990’s.
Brains aren’t magic. They’re physical mechanisms, and as such they can be reverse engineered. It’s only a question of difficulty and thus of when, not if.
Please tell me you don’t subscribe to some sort of neo-vitalistic ideas or worse, Cartesian dualism?
@Surplus : brain aren’t magic, and they can be reverse-engineered (but haven’t), but computers aren’t magic either, and they can’t do everything. In fact they can only do mathematics. Minds might not be mathematical.
You’re buying in techbro propaganda if you think computers can solve everything. That’s what they want us to believe to prop up their claims of being able to do everything with software programmers.
An important note is that physic currently seem to be very deeply modelizable via mathematics, but it’s not a given that every physic thing can be mathematiced ; and biological process have proven much, much, MUCH harder to mathematicize. There’s no equation that give the shape of a lung, there is an equation that give the form of an atom.
Since you do know what neo-vitalistic crank ideas here, I think you should think of mathematics and informatic as a stand in to the concept of soul used by thoses cranks. Unlike soul, it have some measure of success and at least some partial connection, but there is no known law of physic, or biology for that matter, that force everything to be reducable to calculations.
Physics itself is mathematical, and so is everything in it. Including brains. If necessary we could, in principle, go to a lattice QCD emulation of the entire 1300 or so cubic centimeters of space inside a human cranium … but I very much doubt we’ll need to go anywhere close to that level of fidelity to capture the essence of what’s going on, any more than we do to make weather forecasts.
There’s an interesting philosophical question about human brains being reducible to physics, because if true it would mean that we can’t hold anyone accountable for anything, or credit anyone for anything. If every event has a cause, and that cause inevitably leads to the event, then every thought we have and action we take was fixed based on what came before, and we have no choices to make. Even if quantum physics are involved, of which there is no evidence, then we are still not making choices but instead are slaves to probability and chance.
Just throwing that out there that determinism is a consequence of the belief that physics are all we are and nothing more.
@PoM
That sounds rather reminiscent of BF Skinner. Therefore another issue with this view is that it gives credence to ideas like ABA that are often justified in terms of Skinnerian behaviorism.
Wondering if (well, hoping that) a more knowledgeable person than I am might like to chime in on where emergent properties/emergent behaviours come into attempts to understand/model the brain. Presumably there are a lot that cannot (even in theory???) be predicted from the properties of the components.
@Surplus
Wait, I thought that hidden variables were disproven pretty thoroughly?
But yeah I think AGI based on human brains would be… a lot more difficult than you think. Like, a LOT. Human brains rely extensively on feedback loops with the rest of the body. Just for starters there’s evidence that intestinal flora play an important role in mood, and good luck emulating a biome containing orders of magnitude more cells than the body itself.
Impossible? No. But, like, the human body is a kludge. It’s more tightly integrated than one of those Dell minitowers from the early 2000s. You don’t get to just emulate neurons, you also have to emulate support cells, hormonal axes, microbiomes. There are hundreds of neurotransmitters discovered so far, and I’m sure there are more. Biology is hard.
To be blunt, this is what Ohlmann means by techbro propaganda. It’s not just a matter of physics and math. The number of variables and inputs involves is immense. It’s the same sort of problem as with sociology, e.g. STEM people looking at some set of test results from women vs. men and being like “Yeah women are worse at X and Y.” It ignores so many known factors, let alone unknown ones, that it’s not even wrong.
Sincerely,
A former techbro
And like to be clear I’m not saying any of the above is impossible. It’s all material universe stuff. But the material universe is more complicated than computer people give credit for.
Not that I don’t have a vested interest in believing this either, mind. Would you want a bunch of straight white men to attain technology indistinguishable from magic? I wouldn’t. Mark Zuckerberg’s ilk make Haber from The Lathe of Heaven look downright humble.
Surplus : aserting that physics is marhematic don’t make it true. It’s only an hypothesis who might be wrong.
A typical, mundane example is that computers cannot predict how sand flow. It’s not that sand have a soul, but only that it’s a category of problem that computer ate utterly bad at.
@Cyborgette
I think this is a variant of the Dunning Kruger effect: people in a certain field (computers) know very little about another field (biology) but think they’re experts who can solve all the problems. It seems especially common among people in computing and engineering, who often have a disdain for or ignorance towards biology.
If such technology happens, like most other technology it will be created by marginalized groups and white cishet men will take the credit. I do fear that scenario.
@Ohlmann
Re: sand, we’re getting better at predicting how it flows. Not perfect now, but better than we were before. Of course, predicting sand flow is a very different task than emulating a brain.
@Ohlmann
There’s a hypothesis(?) that “pure mathematics” is a reflection of how the physical world works, not the other way around. Greg Egan wrote his short story “Luminous” about that a while back. It’s a spectacularly flawed story, light on characterization and whatnot and IIRC with gaping plot holes, but still quite fun.
Anyway yeah, the idea of pure math lying at the center of everything seems like a bit of Platonism now that I think about it. YMMV.
@Naglfar
Oh fucking tell me about it! Back when I worked in tech I got into an argument with a senior developer who thought we’d find a way around the second law of thermodynamics eventually. I forget exactly how it went, I think I’d brought up something about a thing being a waste of electricity and he was like “Oh that doesn’t matter, we’re going to have nuclear fusion and unlimited power soon, and that will end all resource scarcity.” And things ballooned from there.
It’s amazing TBH, and horrifying. These guys understand Marxism as a cult, but are completely blind to the cultish aspects of their own worldview, trying to see literally everything through one completely inadequate lens. Technological solutionism is pure fucking poison, as much so as nationalism and religious fundamentalism IMO, and we’ll be lucky if it doesn’t kill most of us this century.
Edit: and before anyone jumps in with it – LOL no I’m not anti-science, I’m anti-scientism. I’m not anti-technology; I’m anti technological solutionism. There is a huge, huge difference between having a tool and knowing how to use it, and believing it can be used for everything.
@Cyborgette
This is also a danger to non-tech people, as many people will hear that and believe it without a second thought, and pin all their hopes on it. So many people who don’t know much about physics hear these things from Elon Musk et al and immediately take it as gospel, so there are now people who think he’s a genius when he’s a pompous asshole.
Sorry you had to go through that.
Agree 100%. I love some of the things technology lets me do, and I like learning about science and how things work, but I am very cautious about any sort of panacea promise.