Reddit Starts One-Sided Censorship

[Purgatio]

Are their ideas so dangerous and threatening that they need to be booted off websites? Rather than debated in the free marketplace of ideas? There are people who disagree with the definition gender-critical feminists use to define "women" as an oppressed class under patriarchy, be it via concrete biological sex, rooted in material reality, or the more amorphous, nebulous concept of 'gender identity' that fluctuates based on subjective psychological identification. This is surely a debate worth having, but you can't have it if you keep censoring the side you disagree with because you're so threatened by what they have to say.

Sorry, the free marketplace of actual money has decided that there isn't enough money to be made from the free marketplace of ideas.

I'm not saying Reddit doesn't have the right to do this as a private company, I'm specifically levelling these accusations at the close-minded and small-minded trans activists who kept pushing for r/GenderCritical to get shut down and kept maliciously reporting them in bad faith, without a real basis for doing so, all because they were getting hurt feelings about the reasonable arguments gender-critical feminists were making about the GRA. We are moving to a very intellectually-intolerant society where people are encouraged to block and censor views they disagree with and get offended or triggered by. Trans activists suppressing r/GenderCritical instead of debating them is just emblematic of that kind of 'snowflake mentality' that is destroying and wrecking rational online discourse.

[United Dependencies]

Surely then the answer, as you say, is to block the people responsible? You know, rather than ban the group where those people and others post.

My understanding was that the moderators of those very subs participated in the rule breaking or at least turned a blind eye to it. At some point the rule breaking became so prevalent and the number of accounts involved became so numerous as to make it impractical to do anything else.

[Greater vakolicci haven]

They had 1 post in 100 days. I think this was more about reddit sending a message, rather than about them actually combatting hate.

When T_D was still a young sub (around 4 years ago), there were days where /r/all was almost entirely filled with Trump spam made up of posts with ridiculous amounts of upvotes. This led Reddit to change their algorithm and create a new sub-category (/r/popular), just so it could avoid banning T_D. When spez was asked why T_D was still around, his response was something along the lines of "we must let the other side have a voice, too". Over time, T_D members were observed brigading other subs or witch hunting people.

Many of the subs banned were actually promoting hate, including left-wing subs like chapotraphouse.

Sorry what's 'hate?'

[Ifreann]

Other than being incubators for anti-trans campaigns and legislation? Naaaaaah...

This is you just being narrow-minded. If you disagree with how gender-critical feminists define the concept of "women" as an oppressed class, based on biological sex, then debate that, debunk that, rebut that, rather than close-mindedly and parochially censoring them and suppressing their views. That's a rather petty and authoritarian approach to the people you disagree with.

Why would Reddit debate, debunk, or rebut anything? It only exists to make money.

[Purgatio]

Except of course that people who didn't like or disagreed with Donald Trump were banned from the donald. Further, they and the other banned subreddits frequently used their subreddits as a place to plan harassment and brigading designed to reduce the speech of others.

I agree in principle that it's better to debate poor ideas than try and suppress them, but, to borrow a phrase, the market place of ideas is not a suicide pact. We don't need to entertain the speech of those who would use the platform to harass and suppress the speech of others.

T_D also used bots to promote their posts, filling the entirety of /r/all at some point. They weren't banned for being conservative, they were banned for breaking the rules over and over again.

Then ban the people briagding and breaking the rules, not the whole subreddit. r/The_Donald was not banned for that, they were banned because their content violated Reddit's nebulous 'Remember the Human' policy which prohibits "promoting hate on the basis of identity and vulnerability", against a group that is "marginalised and vulnerable". Whatever the fuck those vacuous phrases mean in a given case.

[Toshavo III]

Ehh, I've been on the site since 2013, there's always been a sort of bias. Just flock to Parler, because in a few short years Reddit will have it's own automated Thought Police. Soon they'll be tracking posts that oppose site-wide policies, then they'll start monitoring your comments for any "hate speech," of course... then more subreddits get taken down, moderation (of views) will increase, and the hive-minded herd sheep will be more, and more concentrated, untill all the undesirables hate groups are eliminated. You know, for the safety of all people.

I don’t like it, I’ve been in the presence of a real life redditor to know it isn’t my thing. The homepage itself is extremely left just by titles and thumbnails. I’ll pass, stick to basket weaving sites.

I do believe there was an instance where the Europe reddit mods were banning RT sources and doing nothing about American funded news groups and channels. Whole site is just an example of external funding, like the rest of the media.

All you have to do is just believe all large social media companies have a bias. Because it's true. Every time you're on a site and you espouse your views whether left or right, you're being monitored. But, the algorithm changes in a way you don't see right-leaning content. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, all of them. Conservatives aren't being suppressed, they're just being shoved away, quietly, until no-one notices. Honestly, the best anyone can do is use Discord (assuming it doesn't devolve into Oceania anytime soon).

[Purgatio]

This is you just being narrow-minded. If you disagree with how gender-critical feminists define the concept of "women" as an oppressed class, based on biological sex, then debate that, debunk that, rebut that, rather than close-mindedly and parochially censoring them and suppressing their views. That's a rather petty and authoritarian approach to the people you disagree with.

Why would Reddit debate, debunk, or rebut anything? It only exists to make money.

Again, not criticising Reddit here. I'm criticising the intellectually-intolerant and close-minded trans rights activists.

[Purgatio]

The point of subreddits is to build contrary online communities, with internal moderation. Yes, you might not be able to debate directly on r/The_Donald, same as any other subreddit which tends to have their own internal moderation rules (as they are permitted to do), but other, non-right-wing subreddits are free to have their own posts directly engaging with, rebutting, or debunking arguments raised in r/The_Donald, on their own subreddits. People who scroll through Reddit and follow different political subreddits will expose themselves to a litany of differing political views and opinions on a variety of subjects, and are liberated to make up their own minds and come to their own conclusions on those subjects. Ultimately, the subreddits that churn out better, more convincing ideas and arguments, will triumph in that marketplace.

Perhaps in an ideal world ( if we set aside the question of whether it's appropriate to debate someone else's gender).

What was actually happening was that TD, CTH, and others were travelling to other communities to downvote posts they disagreed with and upvote posts they agreed with. Further, they frequently would spam individual inboxes with harassing messages. This isn't a civil discussion about the merits of various Trump administration policies, it's people and bots spamming and brigading to suppress the speech of others. The reddit community is right to not tolerate that behavior and take steps to block the people responsible.

As I said, spamming and brigading is a perfectly reasonable thing for a site to ban, but that's not the issue. These subreddits were banned on the basis of Reddit's 'Remember the Human' policy, the criteria for which is so vague, nebulous, and arbitrary in its current form.

[Greater vakolicci haven]

Surely then the answer, as you say, is to block the people responsible? You know, rather than ban the group where those people and others post.

My understanding was that the moderators of those very subs participated in the rule breaking or at least turned a blind eye to it. At some point the rule breaking became so prevalent and the number of accounts involved became so numerous as to make it impractical to do anything else.

That's just lazy administration. Kind of like the amount of old rps that the mods on this site have ruined by deleting all the posts from a DoS member.

[United Dependencies]

That's just lazy administration. Kind of like the amount of old rps that the mods on this site have ruined by deleting all the posts from a DoS member.

How many posts are you willing to comb through to find instances of rule breaking? 100? 1,000? 100k?

Ideally the admins would just remove the problematic posters, but when the number of people you have to review jumps into the 10s of thousands and each of those has 100s or thousands of posts or more, it starts to become impossible to effectively administer the rules that way.

[Ifreann]

Sorry, the free marketplace of actual money has decided that there isn't enough money to be made from the free marketplace of ideas.

I'm not saying Reddit doesn't have the right to do this as a private company, I'm specifically levelling these accusations at the close-minded and small-minded trans activists who kept pushing for r/GenderCritical to get shut down and kept maliciously reporting them in bad faith, without a real basis for doing so, all because they were getting hurt feelings about the reasonable arguments gender-critical feminists were making about the GRA. We are moving to a very intellectually-intolerant society where people are encouraged to block and censor views they disagree with and get offended or triggered by. Trans activists suppressing r/GenderCritical instead of debating them is just emblematic of that kind of 'snowflake mentality' that is destroying and wrecking rational online discourse.

Trans activists, whatever that's supposed to mean, don't run Reddit. Whoever they are, they didn't censor TERFs on Reddit. They are not the ones standing between you and your fantasy of rational online discourse.

[Purgatio]

I'm not saying Reddit doesn't have the right to do this as a private company, I'm specifically levelling these accusations at the close-minded and small-minded trans activists who kept pushing for r/GenderCritical to get shut down and kept maliciously reporting them in bad faith, without a real basis for doing so, all because they were getting hurt feelings about the reasonable arguments gender-critical feminists were making about the GRA. We are moving to a very intellectually-intolerant society where people are encouraged to block and censor views they disagree with and get offended or triggered by. Trans activists suppressing r/GenderCritical instead of debating them is just emblematic of that kind of 'snowflake mentality' that is destroying and wrecking rational online discourse.

Trans activists, whatever that's supposed to mean, don't run Reddit. Whoever they are, they didn't censor TERFs on Reddit. They are not the ones standing between you and your fantasy of rational online discourse.

They kind of are, since it was the people on r/lgbt, r/trans and r/transgender who went and started mass reporting r/GenderCritical (which has been banned) and r/LGBDropTheT (which has not been banned and is at serious risk of getting banned). If not for that, Reddit wouldn't have banned r/GenderCritical, so the fault absolutely lies on these hysterical and radical trans activists who are such petty authoritarians they can't stand the idea of gender-critical feminists just rationally disagreeing with or departing from the tenets of their gender ideology. Its emblematic of the narrow-minded attitude of the modern regressive Left.

[Kowani]

T_D also used bots to promote their posts, filling the entirety of /r/all at some point. They weren't banned for being conservative, they were banned for breaking the rules over and over again.

Then ban the people briagding and breaking the rules, not the whole subreddit. r/The_Donald was not banned for that, they were banned because their content violated Reddit's nebulous 'Remember the Human' policy which prohibits "promoting hate on the basis of identity and vulnerability", against a group that is "marginalised and vulnerable". Whatever the fuck those vacuous phrases mean in a given case.

…Unless I’m mistaken, the new policy was put in as a response to the sort of content you’d see from r/tge_donald.

[Gravlen]

Trans activists, whatever that's supposed to mean, don't run Reddit. Whoever they are, they didn't censor TERFs on Reddit. They are not the ones standing between you and your fantasy of rational online discourse.

They kind of are, since it was the people on r/lgbt, r/trans and r/transgender who went and started mass reporting r/GenderCritical (which has been banned) and r/LGBDropTheT (which has not been banned and is at serious risk of getting banned). If not for that, Reddit wouldn't have banned r/GenderCritical, so the fault absolutely lies on these hysterical and radical trans activists who are such petty authoritarians they can't stand the idea of gender-critical feminists just rationally disagreeing with or departing from the tenets of their gender ideology. Its emblematic of the narrow-minded attitude of the modern regressive Left.

This sounds like blaming people who report crime for the level of crime.

[Ifreann]

Trans activists, whatever that's supposed to mean, don't run Reddit. Whoever they are, they didn't censor TERFs on Reddit. They are not the ones standing between you and your fantasy of rational online discourse.

They kind of are, since it was the people on r/lgbt, r/trans and r/transgender who went and started mass reporting r/GenderCritical (which has been banned) and r/LGBDropTheT (which has not been banned and is at serious risk of getting banned). If not for that, Reddit wouldn't have banned r/GenderCritical, so the fault absolutely lies on these hysterical and radical trans activists who are such petty authoritarians they can't stand the idea of gender-critical feminists just rationally disagreeing with or departing from the tenets of their gender ideology. Its emblematic of the narrow-minded attitude of the modern regressive Left.

Yeah, no, Reddit didn't ban your TERF subreddit because of how many reports it got. They don't give a shit about that.

[Latvijas Otra Republika]

I don’t like it, I’ve been in the presence of a real life redditor to know it isn’t my thing. The homepage itself is extremely left just by titles and thumbnails. I’ll pass, stick to basket weaving sites.

I do believe there was an instance where the Europe reddit mods were banning RT sources and doing nothing about American funded news groups and channels. Whole site is just an example of external funding, like the rest of the media.

All you have to do is just believe all large social media companies have a bias. Because it's true. Every time you're on a site and you espouse your views whether left or right, you're being monitored. But, the algorithm changes in a way you don't see right-leaning content. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, all of them. Conservatives aren't being suppressed, they're just being shoved away, quietly, until no-one notices. Honestly, the best anyone can do is use Discord (assuming it doesn't devolve into Oceania anytime soon).

Media posts also, you never see actual news anymore. I live a continent and an ocean away from America yet most of the reporting on my feed is some random trivial thing that’s anti-Trump, no actual genuine important information is ever conveyed anywhere. I didn’t know there was an issue in Yemen or that the Gulf war wasn’t a war but an atrocity, I’ve been spoon fed twisted opinions from the news all my life.
It’s not even anti-conservative or right wing, as long as you’re right wing and conform you’ll be tolerated. It’s about thinking and acting the same, being inoffensive and making everyone else think the same way that’s ‘right’ broadens the market. If the entire planet followed the same ‘code’ and socio-cultural values then advertising gets easier, control gets easier.

If your potential enemy is bloated with the intoxication of materialism and modern consuming ease you can sell antidepressants while they continue to not react to your encroachments. Bread and circus.

[Galloism]

They kind of are, since it was the people on r/lgbt, r/trans and r/transgender who went and started mass reporting r/GenderCritical (which has been banned) and r/LGBDropTheT (which has not been banned and is at serious risk of getting banned). If not for that, Reddit wouldn't have banned r/GenderCritical, so the fault absolutely lies on these hysterical and radical trans activists who are such petty authoritarians they can't stand the idea of gender-critical feminists just rationally disagreeing with or departing from the tenets of their gender ideology. Its emblematic of the narrow-minded attitude of the modern regressive Left.

This sounds like blaming people who report crime for the level of crime.

I mean, we do frequently do that when we talk about reporting crime from minorities/minority areas.

Like you, I think that's putting the fault in the wrong place.

[Toshavo III]

Anyways, who in their right-mind would use Reddit nowadays as a way for people talk about their viewpoints? In this digital landscape where Big Brother reigns supreme, Reddit is the worst possible place to have views. Remember, the site, is a collective. Thinking about something in a different fashion will get you downvoted to oblivion. Saying something controversial will get your post removed. Specific news sources will not be tolerated. The herd community mindset is especially prevalent in r/ unpopularopinions (ironic, isn't isn't) "Unpopular opinions" which are actually popular will get you thousands of upvotes; but actually having an unpopular opinion will get you crucified. This is how the hive-mind works, the mainstream thought will get amplified more and more. They will keep other subreddits such as r/conservative, r/shitpoliticssay r/cringeanarchy (which will soon get vaporized by the Ministry of Love moderation team) to show that the sight is "balanced." But a key aspect is that these subreddits, will never make it to the front page, and will continue to get more and more shoved away from attention, and eventually booted, as the hive continues to grow. It is a toxic place, it is the foremost example of Orwellian thought control.

[Purgatio]

Then ban the people briagding and breaking the rules, not the whole subreddit. r/The_Donald was not banned for that, they were banned because their content violated Reddit's nebulous 'Remember the Human' policy which prohibits "promoting hate on the basis of identity and vulnerability", against a group that is "marginalised and vulnerable". Whatever the fuck those vacuous phrases mean in a given case.

…Unless I’m mistaken, the new policy was put in as a response to the sort of content you’d see from r/tge_donald.

Doesn't excuse how badly and vaguely worded it is, and r/GenderCritical (which was also banned along with r/The_Donald) is not some far-right, alt-right, racist or neo-Nazi hate group. They are feminist movement advocating for the liberation of natal women and girls in wider society, and people are talking about them like they're some kind of bigoted hate movement and equating them to literal far-right subreddits, which is ridiculous.

[Purgatio]

They kind of are, since it was the people on r/lgbt, r/trans and r/transgender who went and started mass reporting r/GenderCritical (which has been banned) and r/LGBDropTheT (which has not been banned and is at serious risk of getting banned). If not for that, Reddit wouldn't have banned r/GenderCritical, so the fault absolutely lies on these hysterical and radical trans activists who are such petty authoritarians they can't stand the idea of gender-critical feminists just rationally disagreeing with or departing from the tenets of their gender ideology. Its emblematic of the narrow-minded attitude of the modern regressive Left.

This sounds like blaming people who report crime for the level of crime.

What crime? Literally, what crime? Radical feminism is apparently a thought-crime now?

[Gravlen]

This sounds like blaming people who report crime for the level of crime.

I mean, we do frequently do that when we talk about reporting crime from minorities/minority areas.

Like you, I think that's putting the fault in the wrong place.

Not sure I follow... Are people normally complaining about hysterical and radical crime activists, who report observing potential rulebreaking?

[United Dependencies]

This sounds like blaming people who report crime for the level of crime.

What crime? Literally, what crime? Radical feminism is apparently a thought-crime now?

It's a simile.

[Purgatio]

They kind of are, since it was the people on r/lgbt, r/trans and r/transgender who went and started mass reporting r/GenderCritical (which has been banned) and r/LGBDropTheT (which has not been banned and is at serious risk of getting banned). If not for that, Reddit wouldn't have banned r/GenderCritical, so the fault absolutely lies on these hysterical and radical trans activists who are such petty authoritarians they can't stand the idea of gender-critical feminists just rationally disagreeing with or departing from the tenets of their gender ideology. Its emblematic of the narrow-minded attitude of the modern regressive Left.

Yeah, no, Reddit didn't ban your TERF subreddit because of how many reports it got. They don't give a shit about that.

Given how authoritarian the radical trans activists and gender ideologues can be in 'cancelling' people who say things that offend and trigger them (see the drama with J. K. Rowling and Graham Lineham), its easy to see why Reddit caved into their bullying and intimidation tactics. No one's right to speak their mind is safe and secure until the petty authoritarianism of these radical trans activists is finally stopped for good.

[Galloism]

I mean, we do frequently do that when we talk about reporting crime from minorities/minority areas.

Like you, I think that's putting the fault in the wrong place.

Not sure I follow... Are people normally complaining about hysterical and radical crime activists, who report observing potential rulebreaking?

I dunno about "hysterical and radical crime activists", but we've had a lot of (tbh, kinda of unhinged) complaints about calling police on minorities for literally any reason - even when the individual in question is committing a crime in plain sight.

[Purgatio]

What crime? Literally, what crime? Radical feminism is apparently a thought-crime now?

It's a simile.

I know its a simile, doesn't answer the question as to what it is that r/GenderCritical did that was apparently so awful and terrible it morally-justified evicting them out of an online platform altogether. What exactly did they do that was so egregious and reprehensible? Feminism?