This sort of multiple-headlines-in-one-day undermines the argument for bans. In the Alex Jones case in particular it appeared he was being selected for a broader community image rather than actions on specific platforms.
Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak. If we had a magic method for figuring that out it'd have been a feature of politics since at least the Roman Empire. Instead we ended up with things like Robert's Rules of Order where the process is controlled as best as possible to let wildly contradictory opinions get aired.
> Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak.
Of course not, no one is claiming they are the ultimate arbiters of morality.
But they do have the right to decide who can use their platform (as long as they don’t discriminate against protected groups). The broader public can then judge them positively or negatively for these decisions.
The thing is are these companies platforms like a phone company or are they publishers? Social media companies have argued that they cant be held liable for things posted to their platforms in the past and have tried to position themselves at neutral platforms. When they start to become the arbitrators of what is and is not to be posted they are no longer neutral platforms like the phone company. I do not recall a time when a phone company would cut your service because they found it to be distasteful or controversial.
That said I don't really know what these users were actually banned for saying. It could have been pretty bad and although I might not agree with what they said I hope that people are free to express their thoughts and ideas even though I might find them personally offensive.
>Social media companies have argued that they cant be held liable for things posted to their platforms in the past and have tried to position themselves at neutral platforms. When they start to become the arbitrators of what is and is not to be posted they are no longer neutral platforms like the phone company.
Social media companies don't become more liable just because they moderate. They all do that already. There's no sudden legal line between moderation involving messages with spam or bigotry.
I think anyone amplifying messages on a large-scale in a one-to-many manner, between people that aren't equally engaged in a conversation together, should be considered to start accruing responsibilities over the content of what they're participating in amplifying, in a way that a phone companies largely don't have. I think social media companies have been largely shirking that responsibility by phrasing it as a free speech issue and letting anything go.
It is a gray area and social media platforms sit somewhere in-between being a common carrier and a being a publisher. Your right there is no hard legal line but the more they decide what is allowed and what is not allowed the more they move farther away from being a common carrier.
> Social media companies don't become more liable just because they moderate.
It appears that those links describe the conditions before passage of the communications decency act of 1996. That was all overturned by section 230 of the CDA.
My limited understanding is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which is apparently one of the most important laws for this topic), passed in 1996, provides very broad protections to web platforms:
1) They can't be held liable for user-generated content, e.g. Facebook can't be sued for a defamatory statement that I make in a post on their platform.
A newspaper that authors and publishes an article making a similar defamatory statement could be held liable. I believe that Facebook could be held liable if the company itself authored and published the defamatory statement, instead of merely distributing my defamatory statement.
2) They can moderate user-generated content visible on their platform as they see fit, without trying to be "neutral" and without losing their liability protections (item 1 above).
Apparently, before this law, internet companies were worried about being held liable for what users said if they did any moderation (and some companies were sued for this).
This longer video (33 mins) from Legal Eagle is nice as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUWIi-Ppe5k. It's been a few weeks since I watched it so hopefully I didn't miss too many important details.
Section 230 protection should not exist. When this was enacted, nothing like Facebook, YouTube,Twitter, etc. existed, and InfoSeek and AltaVista were the leading search engines...
I love Robert's Rules of Order! I'd love to see someone build video meeting software that implemented it somehow. Or does that exist? A brief search was fruitless.
The last copy I owned had a great introductory essay, describing the principles a rule of order could help realize: e.g. 1) to focus on potential concrete actions rather than some interminable search for agreement on beliefs; 2) to allow even minority/fringe opinions to get some hearing
Alex Jones lent a camera crew to Wolfgang Halbig when he travelled to Newtown, CT to harass the parents of the first graders murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting. Years and years from now those sites you're referring to will still bear the shame of not having banned him earlier.
In my opinion, while a low point even for a high-functioning schizophrenic with a talk show, that is still small potatoes compared to the journalists who repeated the 'WMD's line. And no one is calling for them to be deplatformed.
Publishing official government statements is bad, including when there is no sane way to independently verify them, but slander you've just made up is fine?
They did a bit more than publishing official statements. They were very vocal about denouncing and shaming anyone doubting those statements including my whole country France was attacked, boycotted and more by these people.
Figuring out a widely held opinion is wrong is actually not that easy. As such I have a lot more acceptance for those being wrong while promoting the status quo than those intentionally pushing the overton window. The latter is what should require commitment/conviction, to weed out the bad. And seems to be what is getting axed right now.
Investing into shitty companies will make you loose your investment. Why should this be different with ideas?
Funny, I take the opposite conclusion - figuring out a widely held opinion is wrong is not easy, therefore I think we should be slower to condemn people who get contrarian bets wrong.
To extend your metaphor, if I invest in a bad company, sure, my finances will suffer. But if it were that easy to tell which companies were bad there'd be no reason to invest at all. People who bet against the crowd and are right are generally considered heroes. I agree there should be a cost to trying to be a hero, but I don't think we currently have enough of them and I'm leery of making it harder to be one.
The logic you've provided says nothing about whether we should condemn Alex Jones, so I'm not clear what point you're trying to make. Unless you think we should be slow to condemn people who arrange for the harassment of parents whose children were murdered by a gunman in their elementary school. But that seems like an implausibly villainous thing for anyone on HN to believe.
My point is, he seems to be held to a higher standard than 'mainstream' journalists, despite the fact that these mainstream journalists send signals that they should be taken seriously and he does not. That sticks in my craw.
He's not. Judith Miller was fired from NYT ending her career as a reporter within a couple of years of her original Iraq reporting. Alex Jones continues to make a living being a repugnant human being.
Honestly, you're dignifying this argument. Judith Miller probably believed the story she was selling about Iraqi WMDs, and in the cause itself. She was wrong. Alex Jones deliberately harassed the parents of first graders who had been crowded into a coat closet and shot at close range. This is the moral difference between a negligent doctor and a serial killer.
The distinction is especially material here, because this is the standard-issue message board argument against journalism, or "the mainstream media": that it must be conducted at the highest standards of scrupulous accountability, a standard far higher than any of us hold our own work to (I like to call this "The Djikstra Amnesia Effect"). And if it isn't, its practitioners are no better than Alex Jones.
FWIW, I think that Bush II, Obama and Trump should all be tried for war crimes. Probably Clinton and Bush I, and all the veeps, but I'm not as informed about them.
I'm sure it was done in coordination with the advertisers that pulled their ads. Probably a group coordination between the companies and groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press and Common Sense that spearheaded the original advertising blackout.
I was on ChapoTrapHouse a day before the ban. It was indeed leaked, and the ban happened exactly at the same time that it was leaked. This probably wouldn't have been the case unless it was coordinated.
They did not ban racist subreddits like /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/fragilewhiteredditor.
If you don't know, to post on /r/blackpeopletwitter you have to send a photo of your skin color to the moderators. They are literally racially segregating users.
According to this post [0] only allowing black people to post was a time limited action. As an Aprils fool joke only black people were allowed to post, which resulted in positive feedback from the community, according to the mods. Now everyone can post again, where as black people can get verified and a special flair (a small visual indication next to their username). Some threads [1] are reserved for verified people, but non-black person can also get verified (but might not get a flair).
That special flair thing is amazing. I had no idea. I wonder how long before we see forums using it for other skin colors and genetic types. It's exactly the opposite of the trend of text-oriented interfaces democratizing access.
While this is informative, it leaves out one big thing. Rule number 1 in the sidebar is "Posts from black people only".
> This sub is intended for exceptionally hilarious and insightful social media posts made by black people. To that end, only post social media content from black people.
Your [1] has three standards for three groups of people.
1. black people who can verify and get a flair
2. non-white and non-black people who can verify but don't get a flair
3. white people can ask the moderators for entrance, but it only says they will will "receive further instructions." It's not clear what these further instructions are supposed to be.
This is racist and if a right wing subreddit did it, they would have been banned years ago.
I find it odd people aren't bringing up the obvious motivation for this. Simply calling it racism seems obtuse.
Anywhere race is a topic and anyone can join, but there is no verification of identity, trolls can claim anything. How do you think it feels to be a Black member of a forum and see a White person who is taken in by a White troll pretending to be Black? Conversely, how do you think it feels to be Black and be arguing with someone White who is sure you are a White troll pretending to be Black?
It's not a trivial problem, and it's inherent anywhere your online identity isn't linked to your real one.
>but there is no verification of identity, trolls can claim anything.
They aren't verifying identity, they are verifying skin color and using the information to then discriminate against their users. A person with verified skin tone and not verified identity can dress themselves in all sorts of lies just as trolls do everywhere on the internet.
>How do you think it feels to be a Black member of a forum and see a White person who is taken in by a White troll pretending to be Black? Conversely, how do you think it feels to be Black and be arguing with someone White who is sure you are a White troll pretending to be Black?
I'm not saying it's a good solution in an absolute sense, nor do I have any idea how well it's working.
I'm just saying I think it's obviously motivated by a real and inescapable issue, and I don't think there is a simple and obviously better solution given the constraint that you want to have an online forum where people can acknowledge and discuss things related to racial identity.
I seem to remember some period in history when people of one race were forced to wear a special flair on them . Yellow six pointed star, on a sleeve, or a chest .
Damn, I never actually heard this being spoken about on reddit.
It's interesting, I'm not from the US and I find it curious that these situations arise. I can understand and empathise with (as a 'person of colour' as it's called over there) the arguments of both sides, but deep down I find this kind of 'positive segregation' morally wrong.
“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
> “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
So according to this rule, a racial minority can call members of a "majority race" sub-human, but not vice-versa. And yet, majority/minority are regional properties. How do you know a redditor's region in order to moderate their comment appropriately? Or are reddit employee regions the only ones that matter?
It's clearly a farce. Majority/minority status is a red herring. It's used only to enable reddit and mods to selectively apply the rules for their own ends. The fact is, it's unethical to call any race sub-human, regardless of whether the majority shares your views.
> According to academia, this is correct: racism only exists in the context of class based oppression.
Which is silly on its face. If two opposing races that hated each other held equal power, they might not be able to get the upper hand on the other, but they still hate each other solely on the basis of race. Is this the "non-racist" utopia they're after?
I don't know how widespread this belief is but I personally know people who believe this and it seems to be only spreading in the current heavily polarized environment. It is truly astonishing to witness
But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice.
So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical? We don't want to be hypocritical, right? So we should never denounce hatred and bigotry! Brilliant!
I am super, super tired of "if you denounce bigots that makes you just as bad as them."
> So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical?
How do you get from "don't hate the haters" to "don't denounce hatred and bigotry"? Seems like you're missing a step like, "denouncing entails hatred". Do you actually believe that's true?
There used to be this notion of condemning the act and not the person. It actually used to be a progressive principle arguing for criminal justice reform geared more towards rehabilitation than punishment. It's sad that this nuance has been lost.
If you can't denounce without getting into dehumanization, you're guilty of exactly the same kind of hate that the most virulent racists in history are guilty of.
No, but you replied to GP in defense of "denouncing hatred and bigotry" (something they didn't even argue against) without directly addressing a pretty important point, i.e. dehumanization (which they did).
Was there another way I should have read your comment with that in mind?
I suppose I am just very weary of a particular style of argument in this debate, which -- in addition to the tactic I called out -- frequently seems to include restating what the other person said as something worse, and then arguing against that restatement. And with all respect, that's what I think is happening here.
The person who wrote "Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives" was responding to someone who wrote "But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice." (That is literally the entirety of their comment.) So at least the way I read this thread, "dehumanization" was introduced as a rhetorical device to equate "prejudice is prejudice" with "dehumanize your opponents."
Given that I'm being downvoted repeatedly, I guess others don't see it that way, but I'm going to be blunt. I just reread the thread and I do not think I'm the one giving things an unfair reading. I don't see a call for "dehumanization" here, and if folks are going to come down on me for failing to address an argument that isn't being made, I don't know what to say. ("Have you stopped beating your wife yet?")
> The person who wrote "Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives" was responding to someone who wrote "But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice." (That is literally the entirety of their comment.) So at least the way I read this thread, "dehumanization" was introduced as a rhetorical device to equate "prejudice is prejudice" with "dehumanize your opponents."
With respect, that's not at all what's happening. I started this sub-thread with this comment [1] criticizing the wording of the policy which emphatically does not focus on just "hate is hate", and "prejudice is prejudice", but is worded specifically towards protecting "marginalized groups".
And it's quite clear on reddit that it's not applied even-handedly to both minority and majority groups. If you think otherwise, go try defending Trump supporters as an experiment and see what happens.
So my comment here [2] to which you objected was not "restating what the other person said as something worse", but was raising the additional point that, despite the policy, hating on the majority is accepted as perfectly fine on reddit, and plenty of other places (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
These redefinitions probably grew out of "critical theory" which is taught in social studies. The initial protests citing this line of argument seem to have started on college campuses, so there might be some merit to saying it grew out of academia.
Well, when people are arguing over the meaning of words - in this case "racism" - it is sometimes useful to reference what the "experts" think. There are entire fields of study within academia dedicated to this topic (often but not always including the word "critical").
Of course, whether or not said people have anything meaningful to say on the topic is not broadly agreed upon.
> “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
The majority where? I can't find any specifics on what the majority qualifier is applied to (ex: the community in which the speech occurs, the geographic community of the user, etc).
It's even worse than that. People can honestly disagree about whether the term "racism" accurately describes something or whatever, but that's a far cry from actively condoning ("..this rule does not protect...") the whipping up of hate towards a majority of the population. The internet is full of nihilists and misanthropes who genuinely hate everyone and everything - I'm sure they can't wait to abuse this weakness in every way they can possibly think of. All for teh lulz, of course.
It's just racism dude. Not even white, just tired of the mental gymnastics people go through to justify their actions against white people based sole on their skin color and what they've committed against their people. You're doing the same thing. In the end it's just the tribal, racialist bullshit I'm freaking tired of. It never ends, because we keep justifying evildoing whenever it benefits our side at the given time. If we keep doing this, we have no right to complain when some other group does it to us at some other point in the future.
No. If someone says or does something to me based only on my race, they are a piece of shit racist. I don't care how many years his people has been oppressed by some other group of people.
In promoting racial discrimination against white people, you’re also displaying a bigoted and reductive view of Africa. The African peoples are more than the slave trade, more than colonialism. Africa is a remarkably diverse and populous continent with a history that exist beyond the impact of whiteness. It saddens me that your reducing to victimhood the whole of African identity is what passes for anti racism.
>In promoting racial discrimination against white people
Not promoting anything of the sort. These are factual observations of history, any student of history feel free to chime in so we can focus on facts over feelings.
>The African peoples are more than the slave trade, more than colonialism.
I agree African history is much more than slavery, but the European invention/export of racist theories/science and the dehumanization of Africans started during the same period (The Renaissance, ~15th-17th century continuing into the 21st century) Africans were enslaved and robbed. This period cannot be ignored in any discussions of the history of racism.
"Scientific racism was common during the period from 1600s to the end of World War II. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete and discredited, yet historically has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races."
"For Africans to be considered reverse racists, they would have to rob Europeans to the point of poverty/death, enslave them for 400+ years, attempt multiple genocides and mass executions of the European people, deprive Europeans of education and economic equity for centuries based on skin color, engage in state assisted terrorism, THEN continue to promote hatred and acts of violence against them on Reddit."
Nothing promoting discrimination against white people in that quote, just replaced the word black/African with European in a summary of history. Not sure how you missed this simple role reversal exercise.
This thread started in response to a hate speech rule that allowed hate speech towards the [white] “majority” population. This is explicitly racial discrimination. I read everything you wrote as a response to that initial topic. If you merely meant to discuss your preferred definition of racism, I think a different thread would have better conveyed that.
I don't understand this. For all of my life I thought racism = discrimination against someone due to their race. In the same way that sexist = discrimination against someone due to their sex. Ageist = discrimination against someone due to their age. Is this not the clear cut definition anymore? At what point did it diverge?
An '-ism' is an ideology which is used for organizing the world. The big difference is whether it's an individual ideology or a systemic ideology.
1 person renting out property = a rentier. Private ownership of land = capitalism.
1 person not hiring women = a misogynist. Companies not offering parental leave and assuming the primary caregiver is the mother = sexism.
Zuckerberg saying "young people are just smarter" = a bigot. Focusing on algorithms in software interviews which new-grads will have an easier time solving = ageism.
It's very common to call a prejudiced or discriminatory individual a "-ist" because the individual is subscribing to an ideology. But, that's emphasizing the individual rather than the society. If you only look at individual people as racist, they feel like isolated cases which don't have good solutions. Furthermore, you're absolving people who aren't explicitly discriminatory but who are still supporting systemic discrimination.
- This company will hire anyone who's qualified, but they're full of ivy-league graduates because they rely heavily on campus recruiters. Even though they aren't prejudiced when hiring, they are classist because they cater to high-class people.
- This bank will offer a mortgage to anyone with a steady paycheck and a safe-investment property. However, due to red-lining and racial covenants, Black people weren't able to purchase safe-investment homes so they didn't get good mortgages.
Granted, it's an uphill etymological battle because the individual usage is so common. When people argue for the systemic definition, they're arguing that we should focus on processes rather than individuals.
If you haven't noticed, we've spiraled down to the point where group think determines what is real, not facts or logic. If you can convince thousands people to scream that something is racist, then it "becomes" racist, no matter whether it meets any factual concrete definition of what racism is. Once this behavior started, it was then used as justification to change the definition of racism to something it never used to be.
Reddit's definition seems more contextual, it weighs the dynamics of current economic, cultural, institutional, etc... racism
Here is the Oxford dictionary definition:
"The inability or refusal to recognize the rights, needs, dignity, or value of people of particular races or geographical origins. More widely, the devaluation of various traits of character or intelligence as ‘typical’ of particular peoples. The category of race may itself be challenged, as implying an inference from trivial superficial differences of appearance to allegedly significant underlying differences of nature; increasingly evolutionary evidence suggests that the dispersal of one original people into different geographical locations is a relatively recent and genetically insignificant matter."
> If you don't know, to post on /r/blackpeopletwitter you have to send a photo of your skin color to the moderators.
I think there's a good reason for doing that, given that such a sub can almost trivially become a hate sub for mocking people on Twitter, much like fatpeoplehate. "We want our community to be largely black" seems like a reasonable founding principle.
"White" is a catch-all term for light-skinned ethnic groups with "defaultness" in American society. There is no such thing as "white history," "white heritage," or "white culture," except in opposition to "non-default" ethnic groups.
If you change the founding principle to "we want our community to be largely Russian," that would be totally fine by me.
Additionally, opposition to the "largely black" founding principle implies opposition to women-only spaces and other community groupings that are largely accepted in society.
What do generic "Europeans" have in common with each other? As a Russian, I feel like my culture overlaps relatively little with French, German, or English. Moreover, which parts of "Europe" are actually included in this taxonomy? Are Romani considered white? What about Southern Italians? Black people in France? It all boils down to "people of European heritage with white skin (whose ancestors wrote books and stuff that I like)," which is wishy-washy and tautological.
Not sure about whites and blacks in the US, but as far as genetics are concerned, (black) Africans have far more genetic diversity than (white) Europeans.
Africans enslaved in America effectively had their original cultures denied and destroyed. That's why it's appropriate to capitalize Black but not white when referring to American subcultures. (Whiteness isn't genetic. E.g. in South Africa under apartheid Chinese people were legally black but Japanese people were legally white.)
That doesn't make sense. There is no one "White" culture, so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK et. al., not to mainstream American culture, which developed in waves of lots of different cultures (not all of which are European-derived.) E.g. the Irish. Treated like shit when they first got here, now we have St. Patrick's Day parades. And so we have Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and so on. They kept their cultures.
Now when we talk about African-Americans you gotta remember that Africa is a huge continent, not a single nation or culture. The people who were kidnapped, beaten, chained, subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage, then treated like subhumans for hundreds of years, they came from many different cultures, they were forcibly prevented from carrying those with them, and so they have formed a new culture, native to the soil of this continent. That's why it's appropriate to capitalize the word "Black" when referring to Black American culture: it's a proper noun.
When you speak of "white people" in America, you're generally referring to the whole American mainstream culture, which is neither genetically nor culturally Caucasian exclusively. The word "White" capitalized as a proper noun refers to a specific complex of "White supremacist" culture.
In sum:
Black - African American
white - Mainstream American (includes everybody: The fictional character Steven Quincy Urkel could be called "white" in this sense.)
>That doesn't make sense. There is no one "White" culture,
There is no one "Black" culture either.
>so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK et. al., not to mainstream American culture
And yet if you capitalize Black it doesn't mean black supremacists?
Why do you hold different standards to white and black?
>which developed in waves of lots of different cultures (not all of which are European-derived.) E.g. the Irish. Treated like shit when they first got here, now we have St. Patrick's Day parades.
St. Patrick's Day is not specifically an Irish holiday. It is a Christian holiday which is popular amongst Irish.
>And so we have Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and so on. They kept their cultures.
There are many blacks who kept their cultures as well. Not all blacks were slaves. Many voluntarily migrated to the US.
>Now when we talk about African-Americans you gotta remember that Africa is a huge continent, not a single nation or culture.
You are contradicting yourself. You said "There is no one "White" culture, so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK" and yet you also admit there is no single "Black" culture.
>The people who were kidnapped, beaten, chained, subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage, then treated like subhumans for hundreds of years, they came from many different cultures, they were forcibly prevented from carrying those with them, and so they have formed a new culture, native to the soil of this continent.
Not all blacks living in the US were slaves.
>That's why it's appropriate to capitalize the word "Black" when referring to Black American culture: it's a proper noun.
But there is no single black culture. You yourself said that white should not be capitalized because there isn't a single culture.
>When you speak of "white people" in America, you're generally referring to the whole American mainstream culture, which is neither genetically nor culturally Caucasian exclusively.
When I say white people I mean white people. I don't mean anything else. I don't mean culture. If I meant culture I would say culture.
I have never seen anybody saying anything different than I said. Please provide examples of mainstream people using the the phrase differently.
>The word "White" capitalized as a proper noun refers to a specific complex of "White supremacist" culture.
I feel like I was really clear. We don't agree, obviously, but I don't want to argue about it with you any more, so I'm going to go ahead and let you have the last word.
I agree it's a bit wishy-washy. But that's what it means. Everyone (in the U.S.) when they say whites, they pretty much always mean anyone with white skin who have European heritage.
Yup, so even if some poor Croatian guy just got off the boat, as long as he looked white enough for Americans, some of them would say he benefited from American slavery of blacks and must renounce his white privilege.
Regardless of your origin or connection to American history, I think it's healthy and socially responsible to face your "default privilege." The point isn't to feel guilty, but to become fully aware of the social structures underpinning your country, and to develop a sense of empathy for those who are forced to consider their skin color every day of the year when you can go weeks without even thinking about it. (And I say this as a first-generation immigrant.)
In any case, this has little to do with the original topic of establishing a black-focused community.
Spend his whole life being taught about white privilege and is never allowed to say that he understands so he has to get re-educated all the time. If he says he has already heard it before and understands then he is obviously a racist Nazi Trump supporter and must violently be re-educated about his white privilege.
""We want our community to be largely black" seems like a reasonable founding principle."
Freedom of association is a thing. Now, would you agree with the statement, ""We want our community to be largely white" seems like a reasonable founding principle." ?
Just because someone claims something is anti-racist doesn't make it so. Almost all organized evil is done in the name of something good. Look at how laws like the The Patriot Act are named.
The people behind these bans are leftist extremists going after their rightist extremist enemies. Their "good intentions" are paving our path towards hell.
The former literally segregates users by requiring them to send in a picture with their skin color visible. The latter expresses a racial prejudice in the name.
For example, Reddit previously banned the "fat people hate" subreddit, where they sat around and made fun of fat people, while these subreddits, where all they do is sit around and make fun of people based on the color of their skin are allowed to prosper.
If anything, a subreddit dedicated to making fun of people based on the color of their skin is a lot more bannable than making fun of people based on their weight ..
/r/fragilewhiteredditor is not racism. Being a "White redditor" is not a race. The sub is not about hating redditors for being white, but for talking about and possibly getting angry at people who are very blind to their prejudice or priviledges
Honest to goodness, it’s a marketing and advertising initiative. I do think some of the subreddits that are being banned deserve it for violating Reddit site wide rules and refusing to stop, among other things. However, Reddit took on the identity of being free speech oriented early on and gradually eroded it over time, and every time they ban a few bad big subs that are indefensible, they usually coincide bans to a large number of other smaller subreddits that are almost ostensibly somehow adjacent but are not really violating any rules in the same fashion. I think this is intentional, because most of the people who would be annoyed by the collateral damage are celebrating because of the headlining bans. This creates quite a conundrum. Maybe this ban wave is truly different, but it would take me by surprise if so. (I didn’t look into exactly what subs were banned yet.)
At this point it feels like Reddit saves the big important bans specifically so they can be announced in ban waves, because by the time they happen the response is always, “how in the world did this take over a year to be done?”
edit: to my point it looks like they banned over 2000 subs this time. I doubt that list hadn’t been growing over time. I checked out one that was apparently for a podcast and the little bit I could view on Wayback Machine looked pretty damn ordinary, with only mildly edgy jokes. Not immediately casting doubt that there is good reason but it sure feels like every other ban wave I’ve seen from Reddit.
Socialist subreddits being banned for glorifying John Brown (who caused an insurrection against slavery in the South) was not an anti-racism initiative. It was probably a PR move calculated to look good to the mainstream media and co., while being able to "both-sides" conservative media.
Is there any evidence of this besides the announcements just happening on the same day? It could be companies waiting to announce these moves on Monday morning after days of seeing Facebook embroiled in controversy for not doing this. Or maybe one company decided to make this move and other companies fast tracked anything they had planned on this so they wouldn't be viewed as ignoring this issue.
We have no indication one way or another whether this is coordinated. We shouldn't just assume it is coordinated because it is happening on the same day.
Coordination doesn’t mean collusion, there are plenty of reasons why to coordinate such as to avoid platform hopping and not having to deal with a bunch of angry people flocking to your platform and to share the news cycle.
The likelihood of high profile bans like these not being coordinated is slim.
I'm pretty sure social media platforms all have the same problematic groups set up for one click deletion. If one pulls the trigger it's trivial for the rest to do it too.
It's the same coordination you see in penguins jumping off an ice flow. They'll all bunch up looking for sea lions they know are lurking. Eventually one jumps in or gets pushed and they all jump in right after.
Ban waves aren’t that simple they take time to prepare the legal, PR, community relations and tech support etc required.
While it probably isn’t as spontaneous as the penguins I also don’t see it as some smokey or well these days vapey dark room where they sit around the table with a bunch of dossiers laid out in front of them taking a vote.
Collusion has an obvious negative connotation, but any coordination that happens in secret is inherently collusion.
Either way, my request still stands. Is there any evidence to suggest these companies are working together instead of us all just assuming that is the case?
Define evidence, companies share information all the time including their legal departments.
We have had multiple simultaneous ban waves this is not a new occurrence, at this point one would ask for evidence to show its not the case since the fact that this happening is self evident.
Do you care to point to something that backs up that claim? I can't find any mention on that subreddit about anything relating to Youtube or Twitch bans.
You're right. I was more pointing out that "people knew" before hand that a ban was coming, which means other platforms/groups knew about it and so could have prepared for it. If anything that's less of an argument that it's coordinated and more an argument that they're piling on after seeing one platform do it.
Thanks, but in my first comment I described exactly that possible scenario of companies rushing these announcements once they realized a competitor was acting on the issue. Once again, I don't know why so many people are assuming this is coordinated.
Context matters. You analogy isn't applicable because it removes the context for these response. The boycott of Facebook didn't hit critical mass until the end of last week. These companies are taking preemptive action so they don't receive a similar boycott. That is an explanation that doesn't require coordination.
> That is an explanation that doesn't require coordination.
Yes, and it's a huge stretch. That's good for Yoga, but bad for explanations, and it works just as well for 9/11. The simplest, most plausible explanation: they coordinated. Further weight for that explanation? They've coordinated on similar issues before.
The reddit bans wave was leaked in advance. The more actors involved in a coordinated action the harder it is to keep a secret.
Original leak: https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hh1pjd/redd...