This is pretty bad. That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act. No one can look at the integrity of the comments written by others the same any more.
Does it? Really? An admin played a prank on a bunch of insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls calling him a pedophile with a dumb silly find/replace rule. God forbid, next forums will start replacing words like 'shit' and 'fuck' with symbols to try and hide the truth of what we /really/ mean from the world.
Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this, I feel like there is such an enormous effort to pretend this is "serious business" and "the integrity of reddit" (?) is somehow being compromised. We all knew this could be done. On any forum. Reddit is a silly place. Reddit is a place for people to shitpost memes and puns with throwaway accounts. The Donald is a subreddit that revels in trolling and messing with people, spewing toxic garbage nonstop. They riled up the main admin of reddit so much he did something childish -- a pretty impressive trolling effort. That's the end of this story as far as I can tell.
Reddit comments and posts have been used in investigations. In the UK a teenager was sentenced for writing some "racist" comment(I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that it happened).
Just think, the admins have the power to edit your comment as they see fit and you'll have no proof as your comment isn't even marked as edited.
To clarify, are you suggesting that someone was indicted based purely on a Reddit post?
If so, that in itself is scarier than anything else being discussed here.
To assume Reddit is a unedited source of truth is just insane. Why people felt it was 100% tamper proof is beyond me. I wouldn't even trust public companies like Twitter to not have potential flaws like this.
It's nothing new in UK, they are literally CCTV state now. Don't forget American folks that in most of the countries over here we don't have free speech ;)
And in the light of this news that Reddit CEO edited comments -- it's scary stuff -- for fun or not.
No, nor elected prosecutors. There is however a system where if you plead not guilty and are convicted you have to pay towards the court costs: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32078676
What's disturbing is how many sane people are getting up in arms over this. The trolls are going to have a field day. Unfortunately, it has already blown up and has hit all the major media outlets. This is a perfect example of something on the Internet done "for the lolz". But people who don't have an understanding of Internet culture just cannot grasp this concept.
Trump did AMA there. Imagine when next time Trump does AMA on The_Donald subreddit:
- Mr. President, are you going to deport american citizens?
- No, I am absolutely not going to do that.
That gets ninja edited to:
- I am absolutely going to do that.
Can you imagine the uproar that would cause? We already have people in the media holding their breath for the next Trump's tweet - if something like this happened, there would be panic, hysteria, people having health complications.
This is extremely serious. Even if this were to be rolled back, damage would already be done by then. That would be akin to screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
Yep. It's not so much that Reddit management did something hugely awful in this, or are likely to repeat it. It's that it's opened the door to the suspicion of repeat behavior. Let a million conspiracy theories bloom!
Really, the one this actually hurts is Reddit itself. To hurl in this stinkbomb when a good chunk of the site already considers itself at war with the management... Just profoundly stupid.
Nobody's content was edited. Contentless shitposts saying nothing more than "fuck the reddit CEO pedophile" were edited. To say something equally contentless instead.
I'll humor you and imagine your ridiculous doomsday scenario. Trump would say "that's not what I said, it was edited" and his supporters would stop using reddit and everyone would stop trusting it as a serious source. Crisis averted, win/win/win. Can we make that happen please ASAP?
> An admin played a prank on a bunch of insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls calling him a pedophile with a dumb silly find/replace rule.
"All Trump supporters are dumb racist bigoted uneducated white hick hillbillies, fuck them with a rusty rebar."
So in this analogy the CEO of a cat meme shitposting website is Hitler? And he's "coming for you?" That's what you're saying? We have an anti-free speech facist in the middle of public discourse already, he's the president elect and that's a lot scarier than the CEO of reddit being sick of people using his own website to scream at him and call him a pedophile.
Yeah but for how long have you been in IT/Computers/A Sysop/Sysad????
You do know that this is the mortal sin in IT -- abusing access powers to data and stealing it or fucking with it???
I had a guy ask me "Well cant you just read their email?" - ME: "Technically yes, of course, but I would be fired and thats the last thing you do in IT"
Exactly my sentiments, and it only took place for an hour. I didn't mind at all, it was pretty entertaining, but then again I don't get drawn into the drama Reddit's userbase has frequently.
> insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls
This attitude is WHY YOU LOST THE ELECTION.
> Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this,
It is deadly serious. /r/pizzagate was just shut down for posting personal information. No proof was given. Reddit has users like Bill Gates who post regularly, it has interviewed the POTUS and countless movie stars. Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party, the founder of reddit reveals that he fucks around with people's posts. What's to prevent him going into a user's history and falsifying it? We've had the head of the FBI in front of Congress talking about a Reddit comment for crying out loud, because it was about national security.
His actions were extraordinarily poor judgement for an organisation that describes itself as a bastion of free speech.
I originally dismissed it before the elections, thinking it was all a whisper campaign but it has gotten legs after the election.
That doesn't mean it has substance but I now believe infowars objectively did a better job reporting the facts of what is presently known than the New York Times's supposed exposure of the story. The NYT piece contains a well placed lie I am certain isn't true.
There is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a careful police investigation.
I would put it like this: the odds are not good but the goods are definitely odd.
To those who think "too obviously in the open to be true" I'd like to point out the case of Jimmy Saville.
I think the media went out of their way to slant things towards Hillary in this election. I suspect they consensus in the media was something like "we created this monster, now we have to kill it" regarding Trump.
To me this was both wrong, since it basically ignored the basic responsibility of the media in our civilization, and counter productive, since it was so obvious that they were 'in the bag' that people stopped trusting the major news outlets entirely and started getting their 'information' from non-traditional sources, like the alt-media, social networks, etc.
So you can say that everyone is a bunch of 'whack jobs', but it seems like we have a competition here between the 'traditional media' who are being incredibly dishonest and more or less repeating talking points from the DNC, the 'marginally traditional' media like fox news, which is just as much in the bag for the right and so also not really a trustworthy source of information, and the 'other stuff' people are now getting information from, which is just a total mess of false information and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories mixed into all the actual things going on in the world.
So if you want to blame someone, blame the traditional media, of all the things that happened they were the only ones who abandoned their responsibility, and everything else followed from that.
The equivalence you draw is terrifying (and, I think, false, but mostly terrifying).
Yes, in a sense I think it's true that the "traditional media" is probably mostly staffed by people who tend to oppose the Trump presidency. But this is for two very specific reasons:
1. Trump ran a divisive campaign that was in many ways--perhaps primarily--a campaign against both the demographics of most media reporters and the actual institutions of media itself. Reporters, being humans with feelings, probably did respond to that a bit.
2. Trump ran a campaign that was founded on literal falsehoods.
Extending reporters some degree of professional respect, I tend to believe #2 is the primary factor here.
The terrifying equivalence here is between "traditional media" reporting factual truths where you can kinda-sorta-sometimes tell that the reporter probably doesn't respect Trump as a candidate and "alt media" reporting things of huge consequence that never happened and have no basis in fact.
Those are fundamentally different things, and what truly worries me about both the stupid shit like "pizzagate" and the significant lies (on economic measures, on science, on documented reality as we know it) is that our politics appear to have become unstuck from consensus reality.
There's no rational discussion--and, I believe, truly no hope for the democratic process--if we're not arguing about mutually agreed-upon facts. Yet that's where we are.
Do you actually believe that the 'traditional media' just reports 'facts' as they are? Do you have no historical perspective whatsoever?? Because if they were just 'reporting factual truths' in this election cycle, that would literally be the first time they've ever done it.
In every election since I can remember, both sides have claimed, and many have believed, that the person on the other side was literally going to ruin the country and should they win the country was going to fall apart.
You happen to feel that way about Donald Trump. You're just as wrong as the people who thought that Hillary was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bush was going to try to become a dictator, and the people that thought Reagan was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bill Clinton was literally a murderer who killed state troopers and who killed Vince Foster, and the people that thought Obama was a Muslim 5th columnist, and on and on.
So there have always been crazies, getting obsessed with them or paying attention to them is pointless.
This time we have the 'alt-right', whatever that is, some make believe group created by being named in the media. I'm not sure where they are or who they are, but if you listen to the media they're 'out there' and they are rising.
So my advice is read some history, get some perspective, and move on as though nothing is really different than it ever has been, because it isn't.
EDIT: here is a video of the media 'just reporting facts': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NVVwZVd6ZM Look how stunned the 'reporter' is when they mess up and don't manage to cherry pick the clip to support the false narrative they are trying to reinforce..
(I read a lot of history. I do find the suggestion to "read some history," absent any actual historical argument being made, to be condescending and sort of useless, but I may be misunderstanding your intent here.)
I completely agree that asking one to perceive the world without ones' own biases is quite difficult. Would I know if I had a biased worldview? Maybe not.
On the other hand, I hear a view similar to yours quite commonly expressed. I read it as, "Both sides lie, everyone lies about the same amount, and we shouldn't try to call bullshit on those lies." That's exactly the view I find terrifying: it implicitly rejects the notion of objective truth, or at least rejects the idea that we can benefit from such truth in any way.
To take a counter view: do you think it's possible, in a given election (if not this one), for one candidate to be significantly more mendacious than the other? If so, how could we discover it? How could we agree when it is happening?
Absolutely, some politicians are more honest than others.
How can we discover it? Well that's pretty much impossible to do perfectly. There is a whole industry that for a long time has owned the mechanism by which the world is revealed to us, and if nothing else positive comes from this election, they have been exposed as being a very broken filter that is using their position to intentionally push their own agenda.
My hope is that the new forms of media that are developing step in to fill the void, and that a new kind of journalism comes about that grows beyond the irresponsible and incompetent 'traditional media'. That hasn't happened yet, and it seems like the democratization of news has actually led to more polarized outlets and given people the ability to tune into 'news' that just reinforces their beliefs.
At least with the 'mainstream media' there was some corrective pressure since there were only a few outlets and they were at least slightly sensitive to criticism, so they had to maintain at least the appearance of balance. They've completely thrown away that appearance now, and sadly the alternatives are insane.
I don't think things are going to go back to where they were, where the newspapers and other sources of reporting saw themselves as 'up against the system'. Traditional media depended on a lack of alternatives as part of their business model, and that model is dying very rapidly. Traditional news is rapidly going bankrupt, and as a result our 'best' newspapers have been sold at bargain basement prices to people who want to own that influence while it lasts. This isn't new either, but you used to have to be a massive industrial conglomerate to 'buy the news', like GE or Westinghouse. Now we have Bezos and Carlos Slim able to personally buy that influence very cheaply (while it lasts).
Being concerned about children is not a wack job. With yesterdays arrest in Norway and allegations about UK elites. Why do you think same can't happen in America.
Is there any evidence for the accusation? On its face, the whole claim appears to be entirely baseless and without merit, and its defenders appear to argue that it's hard to disprove so it deserves credence.
Am I missing something? I read the subreddit (before it was shut down) and was quite unable to tell if it's just a big Internet in-joke or if the participants are serious. Are they serious? If so, why?
It was deadly serious. But the evidence is purely circumstantial. However, the more you dig the more data you find. From another comment of mine:
James Alefantis posts suggestive pictures of children on his Instagram AND He makes lewd comments about them AND Many of his friends do too AND Some of those friends are into weird things like making child-sized coffins AND There's FBI-confirmed pedophile codes and symbols everywhere AND Alefantis knows John Podesta WHO is into Spirit Cooking with Marina Abramovic AND Podesta hangs disturbing child abuse-style art on his wall AND He likes artists who produce disturbing images of abuse AND His emails have masonic images hidden in the attachments AS WELL AS Pictures of children with notes saying "Happy Birthday John" AND contacts of his mail him with messages promising "entertainment" from the young children in the pool AND He and his brother look EXACTLY like the photofits of two men who abducted Madeleine McCann in 2007 AND they were connected to the McCanns through a mutual friend who lived nearby AND ....
There's literally thousands of people digging and all they do is keep throwing up more connections and suggestions that there is a pedophile ring hiding in plain sight.
It also came out in another thread that moderators have this power also. Moderators being random reddit users, not employees, can be expected to have much less integrity.
Wrong. Only admins, not moderators, can edit content. I should know, I'm moderating /r/crypto in Reddit. You can confirm it too by simply creating your own subreddit and look at what moderator tools you have available - removal and adding flairs is really all you can do.
But, usually a company of this size/scale puts in place restrictions so that accessing privileged abilities like this is extremely difficult and requires authorizations / clearances / permissions from users, etc.
Generally big / public tech company employees are not even allowed to LOOK at PII or the data of a specific user name etc. You run all tests on staging / fake populated DBs only, etc.
CEOs don't get to break the rules just because. These kinds of restrictions exist to protect consumers (and their data) and the business legally from liability, etc.
It's not that people didn't know the admins have the power; it's that people didn't believe they'd use the power.
Your local police or military could just barge into your house and kill you at any time. They have the power to do that. Society functions to the extent that you don't believe they will do that. If you found out one day that your local police chief had, under cover of law, busted into someone's house and waved a gun at them over a petty personal dispute, though, your faith would be a little shaken.
People have the power to do a lot of things. You have the power to quite easily lie, cheat, and steal in this world. When you run a website, like when you run a business, you have to convince your customers/users to trust you not to do those things.
We already know that Reddit was originally filled by sockpuppets, so more deceptive behavior from reddit higher-ups today doesn't surprise me too much...although this isn't really deception, this seems more like admin trolling.
Sockpuppet is one thing. Altering a user's comment to frame him/her is another thing. Basically any comment cannot be trusted anymore. It takes years to build trust. It can be destroyed in an instant.
>That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act.
The admins kickstarted reddit by impersonating different users, they even had a field to enter the username which which to post/comment. Fake it 'til you make it. Nothing inherently wrong with it.
I'm not going to stop visiting reddit over this. Hell, if it erodes trust by /r/the_donald who'll move over to something like voat, fair enough. I have no illusions that content is safe from subversion, whether it be in-place or not, and I've myself applied some CSS during April Fools on a major subreddit that modified comments as a lark.
It was wrong of /u/spez, sure. But the guy's pissed off, he should be with the amount of upvoting bots on that reddit and no real solution. He fessed up almost immediately and it's not like they're going to go at it in scale - especially since it's so very easily provable with archive.is.
It was a juvenile messing around with a group that breeds on persecution complex. I consider this a joke. Not bad in taste, not the height of comedy.
But no curtain with the wizard behind it has been pulled open here in my view, it's fine.
...
I think there needs to be some control over the veracity, some intrusion into the bubbles with which we inherit the web. If it takes a reddit admin to cattle prod around the fucking bat-shit insane /r/pizzagate idiocy into outrage and feeding their persecution complex sarcastically and ironically then I may actually be for it.
>That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act.
Didn't they already do that when Morgan Freeman's AMA was staged? (If not Freeman, then another AMA. Some big celebrity's AMA was staged within the past year.)
That's different because it's an end-user action, not an internal action. I always know that the person who is saying that they're a Navy SEAL may not be or that it might be Morgan Freeman's or President Obama's PR person answering the questions. It's a lot different when the site admins use their root privileges to put words in people's mouths. Imagine if someone edited your comment or my comment to include a bunch of racist or hateful comments.
Also Clinton campaigns Correct the Record[0] took over Reddit during election. Most likely with reddits co-operation. To suppress the voices of Bernie supporters and later Trump supporters.
Oh please, it's not like the Trump campaign wasn't doing the same. If anything, they did it better because they had the support of SV's rich and powerful.
