Nice PR move, tacking onto a lawsuit from a year ago in support of free speech.
That aside I personally think Reddit has far more serious speech challenges to overcome than Twitter. It's too easy to manipulate certain viewpoint to always appear on the front page. Especially blatant during election years. Too weird for me to visit.
I enjoy Reddit when logged in and unsubscribed from all the large default subreddits. I’m always shocked at how different it is when I accidentally view it logged out. The home page feels almost like a piece of carefully curated political performance art in order to somehow get a result allegedly from folks across the nation that is so perfectly aligned with a very specific agenda and advertising platform.
Certain subs are heavily curated. You will immediately get banned if you go against the mods view of the world. And they do this to even the most innocent posts.
If you are used to these subs, as soon as you leave your perfect bubble you will see a Reddit full of (to your eyes) lies and deception. Of course the same applies to outsiders visiting your sub, they will be shocked by the amount of lies casually presented as facts.
That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.
> That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.
Certain subs will automatically ban you if you ever participate in another sub mods of the former sub do not like. r_offmychest will automatically ban you at the first comment for instance.
This very thing does prevent good faith people from participating in subs that are antagonistic.
It's against reddit rules but admins do no care. Admins do not care about brigading either (a sub encouraging the harassment of another sub or person), unless some specific subs/users are victim. r_ch* p* tr* ph* * s* regularly engaged in the bullying of users and subs until they attacked the wrong person and got quarantined.
I don't care what the rules are, only that they are enforced very differently depending on who violates them and who is the victim.
> r_ch* p* tr* ph* * s* regularly engaged in the bullying of users and subs until they attacked the wrong person and got quarantined.
I'll admit I don't really understand the practice of censoring things that aren't clearly swear words from context, but in this case you've censored it so much (and I suspect thrown in spaces so Hacker News doesn't italicize bits of it) that I really have no idea what you're talking about.
I frequently read the specific sub he censored, and even I could not decipher the name initially.
The sub is chapotraphouse, based upon the podcast of the same name. I've never listened to the podcast, I tried once and within a few minutes found it obnoxious. As somebody interested in political theory/history/whatever label you want to apply to "the study of power structures", I often find the perspective of the sub interesting, and can usually be summed up as "21st century communists in America".
>That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.
So the solution to reddit's partisan and out of touch politics is to consume more of it, but make sure that you have a good cross section of dumb viewpoints?
I have a better suggestion: find political insight literally anywhere other than reddit. It's a naive place with all the perspective and context of a 15 year old first discovering the world and trying to express opinions about it.
I came here to say this. Mods on most major subreddits exercise their own politics and force their views on everyone.
What makes matters even worse is that there is a very narrow group of users being mods on the most influential subs.
These are perfect conditions for creating world view bubbles and what always baffled me is that reddit admins don't seem to care.
It looks like Reddit wants their platform to be like this.
Lots of subreddits will ban you if you post on a subreddit they don’t like..
Past totally apolitical random subs like /ski it is just silly. Reading stuff right now going on about US protests I can easily see how anyone with 2 brain cells can write a bot that will creat posts driving certain agenda. If you have few hundred minimum wage posters on staff and some tools it should be really trivial to creat a lot of shit
Not to mention that reddit basically pushed the_donald to its own website by removing all the mods and only allowing new ones they help handpick. Which has been zero to the best of my knowledge.
I’m actually surprised with how good the software powering theDonald dot win has become. I stalk them to see what kind of bananas they are throwing around and it’s a more pleasant experience than reddit is these days.
To be fair The_Donald was not really the champion of free speach themselves. They did absolutely everything they could to silence anyone who did not 110% agree with their views.
I assume you believe it to be left orchestrated. My guess? The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left. It's probably just a demographics thing.
I would argue this is precisely the impression they’re trying to manufacture. There’s a vast and stark difference between the Reddit of today and the Reddit of 2016. The viewpoints of tens or hundreds of millions of people have been systematically removed from the site in the last 4 or so years in one of the most aggressive and vast campaigns of censorship and manipulation I’ve ever personally seen on the internet.
It's not more diverse on unmoderated platform it's the opposite. Unmoderated platform (like chans) mostly attract those who despise any censorship, that's far from everybody.
It's impossible to have a diverse opinion when the range of acceptable opinions is enforced from on high on threat of banishment. At least the worst that will happen on an average chan is that people will yell at you.
I used 4chan a lot and got to know a lot of people of a subcommunity that started there nearly a decade ago, and "4chan has become an alt-right hellhole and I don't go back because of that" became a common enough position among them over the last few years. I get the impression from a few of the progressive online communities I've dipped into that there's a number of ex-4channers that got sick of the culture shift at 4chan, but it's hard to quantify. A lot of people on Mastodon use it specifically because it has more protective rules than Twitter.
I don't think people like to talk too much about why they leave online hangouts, because it's like admitting defeat, because people still at the place won't sympathize with you because they either disagree with your criticisms or think you're slandering the place (or else they'd have already left too), and because outsiders who agree with your criticisms of the place may have other criticisms of the place and judge you for being associated with or expecting differently of the place.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check then maybe social media sites, their admins, and their moderators should do the same in regards to conservative thought on their sites.
>but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check
Assuming this phrase is about biases about race, then this is a dumb comparison. Biases about race and minorities are different than biases about political positions and opinions. Political positions aren't a protected class.
It is due to systematic rule breaking even after multiple warnings. If you break the rules of HN you get banned after a while. And if there were sub-HNs here and one would take almost all the moderation time it wouldn't exist for long.
Also, if it is about a board usually called "TD" that one is quarantined, not banned.
That’s certainly a good argument for not using Reddit, but there is absolutely no requirement that Reddit be neutral in the law or in the first amendment.
That is the debate over Sec 230 though, with many people saying that if a platform wants to enjoy the immunity granted under sec 230 they need to be neutral, failure to do so means they lose that Sec 230 Immunity.
This would mean any moderation makes them liable as a publisher as under current law if you do not have Sec 230 immunity then the only other way to avoid liability to not do any moderation at all of user generated content (or to prohibit user generated content)
> with many people saying that if a platform wants to enjoy the immunity granted under sec 230 they need to be neutral, failure to do so means they lose that Sec 230 Immunity.
Who's saying that? That's very much not what section 230 says. And as a change to the law to do this would eliminate all social networks (along with newspaper comment sections and similar) it is highly unlikely to ever go anywhere.
None of what you said is actually true; Section 230 does not in any way require neutrality in order to gain its protections. The law is very clear about this, and the courts have been very clear about this.
Heck, we’ve been over this before on HN multiple times this past week; 230 does not require neutrality.
Well the current debate is on if it SHOULD not if it does
The secondary debate is on if the FCC has the legal authority to make a rule that it does or if that would have to come from congress
My personal opinion is that Congress should amend the CDA to state that any Public Company that wants to be considered a platform under 230 should be required to follow the First amendment of the US Constitution as if they were a governmental agency in their moderation policies for United States based Users. This would still allow them to moderate illegal, violent, and other content, but prohibit political bias that is rampant on all the major platforms
> Well the current debate is on if it SHOULD not if it does
Then say that instead of saying that 230 means they “need” to be neutral.
As far as “should”, the answer is a hard no. It is not wise or prudent to inject the government into regulation of private speech to achieve short term political aims.
And yes, your plan is an attempt to regulate speech, snuck in via the back door. You would give the government the ability to decide which forms of protected speech receive extra special protections, creating a 3 tiered system. It is wholly unconstitutional, and represents a massive growth in governmental power. Hard pass.
>>Then say that instead of saying that 230 means they “need” to be neutral.
umm, read the entire line.. I clearly states "many people say that is... then they need" in this context that is clearly an opinion that people are taking on CDA 230,
>the answer is a hard no. It is not wise or prudent to inject the government into regulation of private speech to achieve short term political aims.
The very fact that CDA230 exisist is government injecting itself into the market place, it is providing a liablity shield.
your statement is akin to the people holding a sign saying "keep the government out of my social security"
We are talking about reforms to an existing regulation, if you want the government out of it, then CDA should be repealed in its entirety
>You would give the government the ability to decide which forms of protected speech receive extra special protections
Incorrect, forcing companies to abide by the 1st amendment would in no way grant the government the authority to decide which forms of speech is protected, that is not how constitutional law works
>Hard pass.
Well it is hard pass from me in allowing Authoritarian left wing Silicon Valley companies that enjoy market dominance largely on the back of government regulations that prevent competition in the market place to control public discourse in a way that is clearly biased and has the objective to rig national elections in favor of a single political party
To be clear I would equally support a total repeal of the CDA and have no liability shield for these corporations. This would likely return us to Open Protocols and decentralization which I would prefer anyway. The world was a better place before Twitter and Facebook
Anything that ends Silicon Valley's reign over human communications is a Win in my book
> umm, read the entire line.. I clearly states "many people say that is... then they need" in this context that is clearly an opinion that people are taking on CDA 230,
You used weasel words to imply that 230 requires neutrality, which it clearly does not. If you want to make a prudential argument about what the law should do, do it directly. Don’t hide behind “many people”.
> The very fact that CDA230 exists is government injecting itself into the market place
No, 230 is allowing the market to decide, not the courts. That in fact is what judicial conservatism is supposed to be about; letting the markets decide and not the courts. Without 230, all online action would be subject to civil lawsuit, and I personally don’t want the judiciary to have final say over what is and is not allowed online.
> Incorrect, forcing companies to abide by the 1st amendment would in no way grant the government the authority to decide which forms of speech is protected.
You have already said that companies should be allowed to moderate violent speech; except most forms of violent speech are actually protected! So you are saying that the government should shield some protected speech, but not others. Where, pray tell, do you draw the line? And who draws it? And how do you survive the constitutional challenge from say, porn makers who argue that their protected speech should also be censorship proof?
> allowing Authoritarian left wing Silicon Valley companies that enjoy market dominance largely on the back of government regulations
This is the kind of argument that works well on people who agree with you, and sound like utter jibberish to everyone else.
> I would equally support a total repeal of the CDA and have no liability shield
Enjoy total moderation then! If Twitter comes liable for defamatory content posted on their site, they are going to clamp down on politics hard. Why risk it?
As an added bit of irony, without 230 Trump’s account would have been banned in 30s flat; way too much risk of a lawsuit.
> You have already said that companies should be allowed to moderate violent speech; except most forms of violent speech are actually protected! So you are saying that the government should shield some protected speech, but not others. Where, pray tell, do you draw the line?
And, going back to what spurred this; what would one call Donald's little outburst? It could easily be considered both political speech and violent speech. Which wins? Even more to the point, what about his libel? That's both political, and something that Twitter could easily be sued for without CDA230.
Of course, in the case of such narrowing actually happening and surviving the courts (which seems pretty implausible), Twitter would presumably just ban him on the violent speech thing (or for no stated reason at all, as permitted by their ToS); far safer. There is some considerable irony in the fact that it's only due to the strong protections provided to websites via the CDA that he has a platform.
And that’s the core of the situation; the politicians (well, most) at the heart of this know that an end of 230 means that Trump will get banned. This is about partisan posturing, not a bona fide attempt to change how internet regulation occurs. It’s exactly like Trump’s threats to “open up” the libel laws; ignoring the fact that he has no authority to do that, he would be the first victim of such a change.
Section 230 is essentially about the ability to quote someone else without fact checking or taking responsibility for what was said. It has nothing to do with neutrality and never had anything to do with neutrality until recent efforts to manufacture outrage started conflating Section 230 and the entirely unrelated concept of free speech.
Wholly incorrect, Sec 230 was in direct response to 2 lawsuits and mainly in respond to Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co
It was not about "quoting someonelse"
As far as recent efforts to "manufacture outrage" one would have to be completely bias or willfully ignorant to not see the clear political bias that is shown by silicon valley in the modern area of politics
Many of these companies have executives in power that have publicly stated their desire to manipulate the election in favor of their political ideology
Aside from that normal everyday moderation has a clear political bias to it.
So I do not believe the outrage is "manufactured" at all
> Many of these companies have executives in power that have publicly stated their desire to manipulate the election in favor of their political ideology
Which companies? Which executives? Do you have links to public statements made stating they want to manipulate the election?
Quite a lot of moderation is required either by law or other forms of liability. And then you have the international jurisdiction question: if a social media platform removes posts to comply with French or German anti-Nazi law, or UK defamation law, does that make them liable under s230?
Those should only apply to users accessing from those nations
It is a complex issue for a global company for sure, but I do not want the internet to be censored down to the lowest common denominator of Government regulations.
A Person in nation X should not have to be censored under the laws of nation Y
Reddit is the biggest echo champer I've ever seen. You can literally see hundreds of posts and thousand of comments about a certain topic and when you get out, you see that they take the bits of information that pushes their agenda.
The last big example I've seen is during the democratic primaries. I didn't really care at all about it but everyday I could see how Bernie was killing it. Then I saw somewhere else that Biden was the candidate getting the most delegates and was probably going to be the nominee. Not a single word about this in none of the main big subreddits.
That aside I personally think Reddit has far more serious speech challenges to overcome than Twitter. It's too easy to manipulate certain viewpoint to always appear on the front page. Especially blatant during election years. Too weird for me to visit.