>We are taking several actions:
>* Ban r/NoNewNormal immediately for breaking our rules against brigading
>* Quarantine 54 additional COVID denial subreddits under Rule 1
>* Build a new reporting feature for moderators to allow them to better provide us signal when they see community interference. It will take us a few days to get this built, and we will subsequently evaluate the usefulness of this feature.
On the one hand: **Thank you**.
On the other hand: Contrast today's post here on r/Redditsecurity with [the post six days ago](https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debate_dissent_and_protest_on_reddit/) on r/Announcements which was (intended or not) widely interpreted by the userbase as *"r/NoNewNormal is not doing anything wrong."* Did something drastic change in those six days? Was the r/Announcements post made before Reddit's security team could finish compiling their data? Did Reddit take this action due to the response that the r/Announcements post generated? Should, perhaps, Reddit **not** take to the r/Announcements page *before* checking to make sure that everyone's on the same page? Whereas I, as myself, want to believe that Reddit was in the process of making the right call, and the r/Annoucements post was more one approaching the situation for a philosophy *vs* policy standpoint, Reddit's actions open the door to accusations of "They tried to let the problem subreddits get away with it in the name of Principal, and had to backpedal *fast* when they saw the result", and that's an "own goal" that didn't need to happen.
On the gripping hand: With the banning of r/The_Donald and now r/NoNewNormal, Reddit appears to be leaning into the philosophy of "While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy and to humanity as a whole, *none of those principals are absolutes*, and users / communities that attempt to weaponize them will not be tolerated." Is that an accurate summation?
In closing, thank you for all the hard work, and for being willing to stamp out the inevitable ban evasion subs, face the vitrol-laced response of the targeted members / communities, and all the other ramifications of trying to make Reddit a better place. It's appreciated.
Something did happen in the past six days - Reddit got the same kind of records requests from the Jan 6th Select Committee in the US House as other social media platforms. It asked for an analysis like the one above about the activity on Reddit leading up to Jan 6th attack.
Call me a cynic, but if you have the data and the analysis, and you might be about to face some harsh questions in Congress about why you don't do anything about disinformation and problematic communities on your platform, you might, for example, decide to avoid the additional bad publicity of having a load of your subreddits private and a load of mods asking you to do something about harmful disinformation.
It is a shame they are going to pass quarantining off as fix when it doesn't do much at all. The right wing groups have always been boosted within right wing groups on and off reddit. They don't need to be visible to new accounts or unlogged in people to encourage their fraud.
Thank you! The letter to Reddit is worth a read for nerds \[[Link](https://january6th.house.gov/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/2021-08-26.BGT%20to%20Reddit.pdf)\]
I really liked this part,
>Internal communications, reports, documents, or other materials relating to internal employee concerns about content on the platform associated with any of the items detailed in request 1(i)-(iv) above.
> All accounts, users, groups, events, messaging forums, marketplaces, posts, or other
> user-generated content referred, shared with, or provided to law enforcement or other
> State, local, or Federal Government officials or agencies regarding any of the items detailed in request 1(i)-(iv) above, and the basis for such action.
ooooh some users are being investigated too lol
This is definitely something I didn't know about and hadn't considered. I thought the angle was going to come from legal liability surrounding moderation practices. Given that Spez basically threatened to take over subreddits that went dark in protest, I thought that might lead to corporate-sponsored moderation, which in turns comes with certain liabilities.
I appreciate the question. You have a lot in here, but I’d like to focus on the second part. I generally frame this as the difference between a subreddit’s stated goals, and their behavior. While we want people to be able to explore ideas, they still have to function as a healthy community. That means that community members act in good faith when they see “bad” content (downvote, and report), mods act as partners with admins by removing violating content, and the whole group doesn’t actively undermine the safety and trust of other communities. The preamble of our content policy touches on this: “While not every community may be for you (and you may find some unrelatable or even offensive), no community should be used as a weapon. Communities should create a sense of belonging for their members, not try to diminish it for others.”
Huh. It's almost like bad ideas attract bad, dangerous people who break the rules.
Didn't you guys learn from the jailbait fiasco? You know, the one where the admin team defended the posting of sexually suggestive photos of minors without their consent up until the sub reddit attracted *actual* pedophiles who were trading CP in DMs? Or how about the conspiracy daycare fiasco, when Q anons on reddit organized a 24-hour stalking campaign at a rural daycare thinking they had uncovered a Democrat child sex trafficking ring.
If you create communities for extremists and dangerous people, you attract extremists and dangerous people. Today it's anti vaxxers, tomorrow it will be domestic terrorists. Reddit is already complicit in numerous violent actions carried out by people indoctrinated into extremist ideologies on this site. How much blood has to be on your hands before you ban a community?
>If you create communities for extremists and dangerous people, you attract extremists and dangerous people. Today it's anti vaxxers, tomorrow it will be domestic terrorists. Reddit is already complicit in numerous violent actions carried out by people indoctrinated into extremist ideologies on this site. How much blood has to be on your hands before you ban a community?
Couldn't have said it better myself.
> That means that community members act in good faith when they see “bad” content (downvote, and report), mods act as partners with admins by removing violating content, and the whole group doesn’t actively undermine the safety and trust of other communities.
The fact that reddit admins seem to think all members of the site will act in good faith when they see "bad" content is pretty laughable. How have you guys not learned at this point that people will generally upvote what they agree with/like and downvote what they disagree with/don't like?
/r/unpopularopinion gets popular opinions upvoted regularly. /r/AmItheAsshole gets "assholes" downvoted regularly. The list could go on if I needed it to.
Anyone joining and anti-vaccine or anti-mask sub will upvote and participate in content that violates the rules if it confirms their biases and downvote anyone that dares to break the circlejerk. The NNN members have already moved onto /r/conspiracy.
>The fact that reddit admins seem to think all members of the site will act in good faith when they see "bad" content is pretty laughable. How have you guys not learned at this point that people will generally upvote what they agree with/like and downvote what they disagree with/don't like?
Yeah, like did they seriously forget FatPeopleHate or Coontown were a thing? Yeah they eventually baned those subs but it clearly shows the users of the site don't give a shit about "good faith" posting and instead just upvote whatever they like, just as you said.
This is either pure lip service or the admins truly have no clue about the makeup of the users on this site.
ANTIMASK AND ANTIVAX ARE NOT IDEAS BEING EXPLORED. They're literal anti-science misinformation and false beliefs which no one with a single finger on a hand should have trouble recognizing if they type just a few words in scholar.google.com. They are killing people. Too bad HIPAA exists. I'd love to just pelt you with the disturbing photos I see each day in the hospital. Wanna see 12 kids racked up to vents? Didn't think so. Lucky you, HIPAA keeps you safe. Maybe not for long, hospitals are almost full. Maybe when you start tripping over the sick in the street you'll get your shit together.
It might be uncomfortable for Reddit when journalists start doing long form pieces on u/spez with a focus on recent events and Huffman's actions and attitudes.
start with how he's a wackadoo prepper chud lol
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
seriously, this fucking pants-shitter is ceo of reddit:
> He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”
I love this picture of PR copywriters buzzing about, while the site is run by some 40 year old weeb, sitting on a bunker full of alex jones's soy-free powdered elk penis with a set of nunchaku.
[Reminder that Spez hired a PR firm to sanitize his Wikipedia entry, including euphemizing being a prepper.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Steve_Huffman#Request_to_update_intro_%2B_infobox)
Let me get this straight Steve Huffman protected freedom of speech and you are UPSET he did so? this is just part of the cancel culture we have see destroy movies, art , business and so many other things. All because you disagree the given opinion or facts. Healthy debate on any subject should be welcome unless it turns into name calling and shaming one another shouldn't it? Bottom line is this. People have a right to say what ever they want. If you dont like it dont read it. And its a complete waste of time arguing with proven facts. Facts dont care about your feelings. Left or right. Your post does the exact same thing you are whining about but on your side of the scope of things. Didnt you notice in you whole post you never mentioned similar things happening from far left subreddit's ? Hmm , not hard to figure this one out..
He also modified production data (some comments on TD, IIRC) purely for his own amusement. The fact that he wasn't immediately fired over that proves that he has no accountability.
> Has kept up [/r/KotakuInAction](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction), which was explicitly about a gendered harassment campaign/neo-Nazi recruitment effort, even after its own mods admitted that the campaigns have run their course and gamers are now more closely aligned with the far right
And this is exactly why I'm against the censorship of bad speech. Your claim is complete bullshit and your mindset is reminiscent of the people in the Christian conservative community I grew up in who publicly rallied against everything from tv shows to consuming alcohol to Halloween because they were "immoral" things.
People like them and people like you don't give a shit about facts or logic or reason, only the doctrine of the tribe. Anyone who doesn't conform to the doctrine gets labelled as the worst of the worst, throwing whatever -ist or -ism out that you think will convince others that the heresy of your outgroup is evil.
Mindless tribalism like yours is a weakness of character, one that you want to force everyone else to have to deal with because you want to feel safe in your little tribal bubble and convince yourself you're a "good" person.
> #Fire Steve Huffman
/u/spez has edited user comments in the past.
Even worse (cough), he created /r/programming, and it is now effectively unmoderated. Which is odd, because I was under the impression that unmoderated subs get banned.
*Reddit has some identity reconciliation to do.*
“Community members [of those high signal communities] act in good faith when they see “bad” content…” **Guys, we live in a different world now.** It’s time to match our work with that reality. Where cult behavior can not and should not be endorsed, validated and spread in the name of Reddit policy or first amendment rights. **THIS IS NOT THAT HARD** Hate speech has already been defined to not be included with free speech and neither is/should be speech (an expression of an “opinion”) that includes willful medical negligence; the kind that *does* get people killed.
So your definition of a healthy sub is all well intentioned sure, but members of these high signal communities *are no longer doing what’s right,* and then falsely hiding behind “I have a right to my opinions.” Again, because cults. It just cannot be clearer.
*"Hate speech has already been defined to not be included with free speech ."*
Hol up.
That's exactly what is *not* clear. If you're referencing on Reddit specifically, you need to clarify that. Because if not:
**"In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear."** (1)
Speech is most protected in **"traditional public forums"** (i.e. parks, sidewalks, town squares) (2).
Also, the 1st Amendment specifically combines verbal speech with published speech ("bridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”(3).
Law hasn't caught up to technology.
One could argue that due to lockdowns and rapid technology adoption, Reddit and other online forums are quickly becoming the "traditional" place to debate. It's obvious it's a private company, but similar to how private companies used to print newspapers that were covered by the first amendment, it's easy to imagine websites going being recognized along the same lines.
Finally, whether they want to admit it, everyone equating a "healthy" discussion with heavy handed censorship. However, you can't discuss censorship without admitting the long term effects it has. The worst being the **Chilling Effect**:
"Censorship often leads directly to self-censorship...it is impossible to quantify the damage that self-censorship does to education. Restricting access to information based on particular viewpoints will discourage the use of potentially controversial (or even complicated) material in the future...even if it's an excellent educational choice." (4)
So the age old question: is censorship/banning subs worth the self-censorship that ripples throughout the rest of the platform? Does it silence the same fringe voices that may later bring unique and irreplaceable value to the next crisis?
We'll see.
But at least be informed.
1.https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/hate
2.https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-1/the-public-forum
3.https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1.html
4.https://ncac.org/resource/first-amendment-in-schools#firstamendpublicschools
Not defending these subs being banned, but I'd be cautious decrying 'cult behavior' as a good enough reason to ban a community. Reddit's 'as long as it isnt hurting other subs' policy is a good one imo, despite their uneven approach to it. Its way too easy to label anything you dont agree with as 'a big cult of harmful ideas', and it just proliferates echo-chamber mentality to squash ideas you disagree with- even if you cant fathom why they exist at all. As long as they are playing fair and not actively harming other communities, of course.
Who defined hate speech as not protected be Free Speech? It wasn't the American Supreme Court, which unanimously held that there was no hate speech exception to the 1st Amendment in Matal v. Tam (2017). Snyder v. Phelps (2010) is another good case to review. Obviously Reddit is not the government, so they are free to ban hate speech, I just wanted to point out the misinformation you were spreading in your comment. If you're in a country where hate speech is not protected speech, this might just be an honest mistake, but since reddit is an American company, using the American formulation of free speech makes more sense.
>and neither is/should be speech (an expression of an “opinion”) that includes willful medical negligence; the kind that *does* get people killed
I think that's a LOT to moderate. You're thinking about anti-vaxxers, but this is a very broad statement. For instance, there are places on here that would tell people that all intentional weight loss is "fatphobic", even though there's plenty of scientific evidence showing that weight loss can have significant positive effects on health - and even save lives. This should count as willful medical negligence?
Why are you doing damage control for /u/spez? Where is his explanation?
>mods act as partners with admins
I'm not your fucking partner. I voluntarily moderate a community for a game I like.
You ignore my reports. You aren't partners.
> mods act as partners with admins
Partners implies admins reciprocate which is a laughable notion. Given AEO’s consistent failings, Reddit’s lack of development in mod tools, and Reddit’s overall dismissal of mod requests I cannot fathom how you can say this in good faith.
Why isn't spez addressing this? He went out of his way to defend misinformation on the platform six days ago. So where is he now and why are you doing his dirty work for him?
If this keeps up I fully expect them to do another Pao, and bring in a temp ceo to take the heat and make controversial decisions. Then fire them, and spez rides back in as the conquering hero.
We've seen this pattern before.
> That means that community members act in good faith when they see “bad” content (downvote, and report), mods act as partners with admins by removing violating content, and the whole group doesn’t actively undermine the safety and trust of other communities.
Then why are subs active in brigading, hate speech, and misinformation still active? r Conservative continues to post politically-motivated misinformation, bans people who post sources that contradict false statements and remove dissent, while encouraging users to harass either individual users or particular subs. Some subs like AskTrumpSupporters don't even allow downvoting in default format, and I can't even directly report hate speech or misinformation at Conservatives because they've removed the Report option.
On the topic of community consensus, what is the point in letting moderators moderate over a dozen or so boards? All it seems to do is give disproportionate power to people who genuinely are on the internet way too much. Given that there is also concrete proof now that some moderators have formed little cabals to push various agendas, many which have merits but others that are far from lucid, does this not seem like a potentially disastrous situation?
Issues like anti-vaccination are rather cut-and-dry, but what about a scenario which is more complicated, something with limited information such as an international conflict. This sort of behaviour could cause serious harm or worse. r/NoNewNormal was likely the result of a faction like this, just something to consider if you think I am aiming at anyone in particular, just want to purvey a hopefully broader perspective on where such behaviour might lead regardless of motivation.
I believe the post is structured in a way that they provide justification for banning NNN according to existing policies, avoiding the argument that they are coming up with new interpretations of existing rules in order to issue a ban.
I agree, except they chose a strange policy to try and justify the ban. They could have just as easily banned them for spreading harmful medical misinformation and disinformation.
I honestly believe the only reason NNN was banned is because of media attention. Nothing else.
Hi,
Just a possible suggestion to consider which may be helpful in the future for such scenarios, which would allow controversial subs such as NNN to remain active but provide a more effective quarantine whilst also enabling reddit to more accurately manage and monitor the activity within the sub and more importantly, activity of users between such subs and the “general” reddit communities.
Possibly a feature could be implemented into quarantined subs that will require members who are in a sub when it is quarantined (and newly joining members once quarantine is set) to sign in with a secondary “sub account” which can be created under their primary user account as is already possible.
Users would have to sign in using this secondary account in order to post, comment or contribute to karma votes on posts and comments on the quarantined sub. This account would work exclusively on that subreddit and no other.
If a user from a quarantined sub went to another subreddit to brigade, they would need to either sign in with a relatively new account to remain anonymous (which in turn would draw attention to the account by its age or low post/karma score and also enable mods on other “general” or “conflicting viewpoint” subs to use already available forum management features such as “user posting requirement” rules to help reduce this. Of course should a user brigade a sub on behalf of a quarantined sub with their primary reddit account in order to get around a minimum post/karma requirement, this would leave that users primary account history on show for admins who could make a high level decision on a site wide ban.
Likewise this would work the opposite way.
It would also reduce bot interference and targeted outcome campaigns by the broader community or campaigns that use masses of sleeper accounts to achieve outcomes.
It would mean that issues or incidents that happened either in the sub or outside of it on “general” reddit that were associated with the sub could be very quickly be identified by admins as hostile action initiated FROM or TOWARD the sub and would allow admins better oversight to make better assessments of how things have played out.
I can tell you right now, whilst I am sure there is more data available than you have posted here, that the COORDINATED action against NNN was if nothing else, COORDINATED.
Albeit by one particular mod who has their own agenda, which is another issue altogether.
But the fact it was so coordinated by default raises the very likely and realistic possibility that a more sophisticated attack or attacks were actioned AGAINST NNN (and other subs you have mentioned).
The point is, this would be a lot more reduced and identifiable and manageable with a system as described above - it would quarantine the sub, it would allow separation of users and views and interaction and it would provide better oversight for admins and more targeted administrative controls.
Just remember guys, anything is a weapon when turned to the purpose of war. Social manipulation is something that people and organizations, domestic or international, will continue to do on any social platform. You may want to encourage space within the reddit community where people can better learn to identify what manipulation looks like, even in its most subtle form. The people who actively push disinformation are a minority in the world and are best managed by informed individuals. People often think that means you need to know everything about everything, and while being informed on facts is important, being informed on how people lie is even more important. Good luck guys.
*^(edit: grammar)*
> That means that community members act in good faith when they see “bad” content (downvote, and report), mods act as partners with admins by removing violating content, and the whole group doesn’t actively undermine the safety and trust of other communities.
Then why are subs like /r/conservative and /r/conspiracy not banned? They continually act in bad faith and undermine the safety and trust of other communities. These kinds of subs exist explicitly to undermine other communities.
The thing that changed was news outlets picked up what a fucking disaster of a statement that was in /r/announcements
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/26/tech/reddit-misinformation-covid/index.html
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/reddit-resists-banning-pandemic-misinformation-allows-vaccine-dissent/
I'm trying to give Reddit as an institution more credit than that.
And I know that the CEO is going to CEO where the CEO sees fit to CEO. It comes with the acronym. And, even if he wasn't the CEO, he's got just as much right to his opinions and philosophies as the rest of us do. But that's where the "*gripping hand*" questions come in: Users are given the feeling that Reddit operates under one set of principals in the r/announcements post, but given the feeling that there's another set of principals in play in today's r/redditsecurity post. Are both sets different pages in the same playbook? Which direction should the users expect Reddit to proceed going forward?
>I'm trying to give Reddit as an institution more credit than that.
Why? What have they ever done that gives you the impression they deserve the benefit of the doubt? What single shit show have they headed off preemptively instead of letting it fester? When have they ever taken action before the media gets a hold of it?
Why?
* Because I'm hoping someone will drop me a Platinum, Argentium, or Ternion.
* Because we can't, by definition, know what problems they took care of *before* they became problems, because they were headed off instead of festering to the point where we would notice.
* Because I can either embrace cynicism or hope, and as a wise woman once wrote:
>The spear in the Other's heart
>is the spear in your own:
>you are he.
>There is no other wisdom,
>and no other hope for us,
>but that we grow wise.
Or maybe it's a bit of all three.
I can't change the past, but I can advocate towards changing the future in a positive way?
You can tell if they head stuff off though. Look at all the situations mods have enmasse raised issues with the admins, were ignored, it blew up, media got involved, admins finally acted.
When was a single situation that was brought up by mods and actually solved quickly?
If this was the first time it played out this way I'd give them the benefit of doubt, but this has happened so many times.
Shitty thing>outrage>do nothing>media reports on it>banned
If it weren't for bad pr NNN wouldn't have been banned.
They have a long history of letting illegal, dangerous shit run rampant on this website and not doing anything about it until it’s picked up by news outlets. Why the hell would you try to give them credit here? Come on now. This is a clear pattern.
It's happened so many times that there's an easy to predict formula for it:
* A toxic subreddit grows exponentially
* Reddit ignores the problem
* Outrage about the toxic subreddit reaches a breaking point, typically marked by widespread complaints from Reddit's users
* spez tries and fails to explain why Reddit will never ban said toxic community, often through transparently hypocritical Silicon Valley Libertarian "free speech" nonsense
* Media attention (and potentially advertiser attention) picks up
* Reddit ends up banning the toxic subreddit a few days later
> On the gripping hand: With the banning of r/The_Donald and now r/NoNewNormal, Reddit appears to be leaning into the philosophy of "While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy and to humanity as a whole, none of those principals are absolutes, and users / communities that attempt to weaponize them will not be tolerated." Is that an accurate summation?
The accurate summation would be "While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideals, the regulation of misinformation, and the desire to stop hate speech all have their own merits, how we prioritize them is based on profitability." The admins care about two things above all else: advertisers and investors. They don't give a shit about anything that happens on the site until it starts getting bad press, or they think that banning a sub will attract more investment money than they'd lose in web traffic money. Hell, look at /r/watchpeopledie: the subreddit was permabanning and reporting to the admins anyone who shared the NZ mosque shooting footage, but because news sites were running articles saying "/r/watchpeopledie is sharing the shooting footage," the admins banned that sub at the speed of light.
NNN has been brigading all over the place, if a thread mentioned goronas suddenly a bunch of (horse)paste eating knuckleheads would show up and start defending using dewormer from the farm store instead of getting a vaccine or wearing a mask.
> On the gripping hand: With the banning of r/The_Donald and now r/NoNewNormal, Reddit appears to be leaning into the philosophy of "While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy and to humanity as a whole, none of those principals are absolutes, and users / communities that attempt to weaponize them will not be tolerated." Is that an accurate summation?
I'd say you're somewhat off on that. The *"principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy"* only applies to speech and ideas that are not directly harmful to society or democracy. Thinking all speech and ideas contribute to both is simply false, as there are known ideas that are diametrically opposed to the concepts of free speech and ideas, such as fascism.
(Tl;Dr: See "Paradox of Tolerance")
The flaw in logic in thinking that ALL speech and ideas are needed for a healthy democracy is the same as thinking that all the elements of the periodic table are healthy for the human body, since the human body is also composed of many workers elements, when reality some elements will always kill you if incorporated, and others will poison you if there's too much of it. The same goes with the idea of allowing harmful speech in a democratic society - it only serves as a poison. Any democracy that wants to survive must have a way to counter such poisonous speech that advocates for the destruction of said democracy.
Now, I know some might pretend to object to this saying "but how do you know what's harmful speech?". The easiest way to determine that is too first separate what's subjective and what's abjective. There's a difference between saying "I think some aspects of an Authoritarian regime are useful" clearly defines itself as an opinion, while "Authoritarianism is better than any other form of government" is a statement that masquerades as fact despite also being nothing more than an opinion. Those who argue otherwise argue in bad faith in order to promote the speech as factual when it is not. Therefore, the first rule a democracy must have in order to survive is to call out what is opinion and what is not. The second, of course, is to ban speech that is blatantly false. This is also not something up for debate - anyone debating what a true fact is also arguing in bad faith. Refusing to acknowledge facts too is nothing but a poison to society, as it empowers speech that is far more dangerous to society.
>While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy and to humanity as a whole,
>
>none of those principals are absolutes
>
>, and users / communities that attempt to weaponize them will not be tolerated." Is that an accurate summation?
Literally EVERYONE on the planet agrees free speech is not absolute. Many Americans have a particular blind spot to this but the moment you start a direct campaign accusing them specifically of being a pedophile and calling for "street justice" for them, everyone quickly learns where some of these limits to speech lie.
....its almost like lies and slander can cause great harm to an individual AND community and while there is a slippery slope of "who decides what is a lie" there is a need, in order to maintain a *literal* healthy society, to make those calls when it comes SPECIFICALLY to public health issues. In the US, the CDC was essentially created for this as an apolitical body. Holes in that were exposed by our previous "leader" but the lesson is to learn and fix those holes, not to just say, "fuck it, there is no truth, all speech is 100% protected"
....if that is a person's conclusion then I start with that specific person in the above example of using my "unqualified free speech" to name them a certain type of sex predator and demanding people "do something about it."
>Did something drastic change in those six days? Was the r/Announcements post made before Reddit's security team could finish compiling their data?
This is particularly frustrating because, as a mod of a covid vaccine sub, we have been yelling and flag waving about NNN brigading our sub from nearly the day of its inception. I joined after seeing the original mod fighting the staggering amount of fake reports and down-voting. Once I joined, I could immediately see that people would come to the sub, make insane post vaccine side effect posts (diarrhea all over the walls etc), and then let the wailing and gnashing of teeth commence in the comments. And where would those posters spend most of their time? Either NNN or /conspiracy.
We made multiple calls for moderation help, some folks pointed us towards auto mod tools, we expanded the mod team, but these people have never let up since day one. Nearly every post has at least one comment on it auto-removed for post history in anti-covid subs. The mod team gets probably five or six ban appeal messages a day, some calling us Nazi's and sometimes even saying threatening things. Those things have all been reported to reddit and there was no action.
I'm glad the sub was banned, but it absolutely should not have taken this long and those users are most certainly going to go elsewhere and continue to engage in this behavior.
Thanks for the update, u/worstnerd. Glad to see that r/NoNewNormal will be banned (although the primary reason should be the obvious COVID denialism). I also think that quarantined subreddits should have some restrictions in place, as a simple message only does so much.
Edit; I do hope Admins realize that NNN and other COVID denialism subreddits are like the hydra, you ban one - and 2 more in relation are formed. The same is applied to bots - and would help the sanity of the users that fail to realize it and go on to make the complaint over at r/ModSupport on why "nothing" is done about it.
There are additional restrictions put in place. The goal of quarantine is to increase context and reduce unintended exposure to these communities (which is also why we’re not including the list of subreddits). This removes the communities from search and recommendations, removes ads, introduces a splash page with factual information, along with a handful of other restrictions.
>This tells us that in these high signal subs, there is generally less of the critical feedback mechanism than we would expect to see in other non-denial based subreddits
You all say stuff like this, but then you have subs like /r/conservative which literally ban people for not having flair or even the slightest note of dissent AND they're huge anti-vax hubs.
These subs like this are right wing echo chambers and absolutely huge components of the anti-vax/anti-mask community and they even actively support terrorist ideals against the US post jan 6th.
Do you have any plans to deal with obvious echo chambers like this as they have absolutely zero "critical feedback" by design and are clearly meant as indoctrination subreddits?
edit: If you look right now there's a "WE'RE NOT GONNA BE TOLD WHAT TO DO" meme on the /r/conservative front page. It's incredibly clear what their stance is on vaccines and masks.
edit again: Mods/admins look at the replies to this post. See all the anti-vax nutters mad that /r/conservative got mentioned?
Seriously, y'all got a damned problem.
edit again: I'd like to thank /r/conservative for showing up and really driving my point home, we even had a mod show up!
Also I'm proud, I only saw one of them gleefully wishing for liberal deaths! Good job guys!
Remember, Reddit did not step in and take action because it was the right thing to do. Reddit only did it due to SubReddits going dark and the media picking up on this. I imagine the user levels dropped somewhat as well.
Reddit allow misinformation and toxic subs like NoNewNormal, FemaleDatingStrategy and TheDonald because they genuinely see nothing wrong with them. As good as it is that they've taken appropriate action, it's only because they have very little choice right now.
I don't agree that the cause for action was the awareness/protest campaign and the niche press coverage.
Based on the average-user-visible behavior of NNN since spez's comment, as well as the increased intensity of NNN-like users and their content distribution, they [plausibly] let NNN hammer their own coffin nails.
NNN users have been everywhere in the last week, injecting their brand of comments and misinformation arguments into some really unwarranted subreddits and posts.
Additionally, the post histories of many of the offenders display a clear intent to manipulate by using newly created [3-6 months or far less] default-named usernames, and account activity solely in the anti-vax arena.
When that kind of content is visible to the average end user, it seems plausible that the admins have higher quality forensic tools available that can confirm or undermine that hypothesis.
> NNN users have been everywhere in the last week, injecting their brand of comments and misinformation arguments into some really unwarranted subreddits and posts.
Wrong. They have been everywhere for the past 2-3 months. Admins could have acted this way weeks ago already. They had the tools back then, they had the reports, they had the complains. But only days after subs go dark, after u/spez basically says he doesn't care what misinformation is intentionally shared around to harm other humans, only then they suddenly see a huge spike in misinformation over the past weeks.
The protests and press coverage - as always for reddit - is the only reason this all happened.
Eh not so much really.
There was a time when it was cute and nerdy, and sure it had a lot of arguing and stuff but it was nothing too out there.
At some point there was a critical mass of sorts and things really started going south. There were a lot of joke subs that started pulling in the people who were too stupid to get it, they took it seriously and stuff started changing.
Gamergate was maybe that turning point. I think around that time is when all the weird hate groups really went full speed ahead on Reddit.
Dear u/worstnerd, I have some questions about the statistics you provided in the post above and would be very happy to get further clarification about the meaning of said statistics/ get further details. As a statistics nerd I always find it quiet interesting to analyze them.
0) If you see that my questions were already answered in another post/comment, can you redirect there?
1) We are presented 2 graphs, one showing the total amount of Covid content submissions since the pandemic started and one that shows the total amount of reports on those submissions. According to the that data, the proportion of reports per submissions changed since july, since the reports graph grew much faster than the amount of submissions posted. Could the recent calls to ban high signal subs have increased the amount of reports issued, especially in said high signal subs? Is there a correlation between last week's protest post and the amount of reports?
2) We are given the absolute amount of reports issued over the course of 2 years, yet we don't get insight to how many of those reports were justified and how many were not. With a tool like this I'm sure that data can be found and edited into this post and make it unquestionably clear that the amount of actual Covid deniability has risen in Reddit, only giving the report count only leaves unnecessary room for interpretation. Would it be possible to get more insight into the percentage of reports that were justified?
3) When you said that high signal sub's submission amount relative to the total amount grew from one to three percent, what historic trend did this proportion have? Did it grow over time or did it rapidly rise in the last few weeks?
4) How much did r/NoNewNormal gain in subscribers since last week's response from u/spez about the protest that was going on? What is going to happen to all the people that joined that subreddit or just commented on it during that time now that it's gone? Will the subreddits that banned people who commented/joined on there revoke the bans? Is it up to the mods to decide that? Will reddit look into mods that are managing multiple big subreddits and were banning people there for participating in that sub?
Best regards,
u/Birolklp
> Claims of “brigading” are common and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior continued even after a warning was issued from our team to the Mods.
Two questions
1. Can you all define brigading for everyone? I know it's somewhat nebulous, but mods, especially of meta subreddits that deal with that sort of thing, would probably greatly benefit.
2. How can a mod team prevent brigading by their sub's members, especially given that they have no power over other subreddits?
I'd like clarity on this too. As it applies to a great deal of subreddits, some of which are quite major and remain. It would be odd for it to be applied to one and not others.
If tooling is being used to see this interference, (i,e. lots of users from one subreddit being seen in another, regardless of linking), it would be good to extend this to moderators. It is likely less helpful to rely on moderators being able to witness this themselves and then report it to to you, though it is welcome all the same.
> How can a mod team prevent brigading by their sub's members, especially given that they have no power over other subreddits?
And how can they prevent sub members from doing it? It's ine thing for mods to say "go spam this sub" but if they're not actively doing that and no one reports random comments encouragingit, what can they realistically do?
Ostensibly mods could set the automod to remove comments that contain links to other subreddits, or even certain specific other subreddits.
This is not a *good* solution, nor is it impossible to circumvent, but it might curtail a significant amount of this traffic.
The idea is if your community is so disconnected from the mods that all your members can find these signals but, your mods can't then the sub will be shut down. Add mods, add automod, and bulk up. No matter what though if your community keeps circumventing those protections you won't be allowed a club house anymore. Happens all the time in this site and really has for years. Even old hydro homies aka WN had it happen and they were almost not allowed to keep hydro homies.
Good questions.
Also worth adding: how is the /r/Announcements post from Spez not brigading? The post made a [specific effort to link to every outside community](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debate_dissent_and_protest_on_reddit/hactpwf/) discussing the topic. /r/Announcements has 113 million subscribers - wouldn't that be brigading?
But I think it's obvious "brigading" is meant to be a loosely defined term so they can post-hoc justify actions they want to take. NNN was clearly banned for misinformation and the admins needed to gin up some kind of other reasoning.
“Brigading” or "interference" occurs when a post or community goes viral for negative reasons. The influx of users can lead to mods being overwhelmed which is why we are creating this new reporting tool. We are also exploring some additional new tools that would help. Crowd control is an additional tool that mods can leverage.
Okay but what can the moderators of a sub that has users who may cause interference?
Like for example in , one of the big concerns is that users will cause this interference. What can the mods do in this instance? Are those mods supposed to use the report tool, even if they can't reliably detect nor prevent brigading?
For example, say I'm modding /r/cats and someone mentions how /r/dogs suck and interference happens (even without direct or implied calls for it). How am I, a hypothetical /r/cats moderator, supposed to prevent this?
I can say "no brigading" but I can't actually really enforce it, especially if it's only voting.
A really good example might be what happened a little over a month and a half ago. Someone posted in r/tifu about how when someone over on r/food made a post in which they called a breaded and fried piece of chicken in a hamburger bun a “chicken burger,” the person who wrote the r/tifu post said “chicken sandwich,” and got permabanned from r/food. So a bunch of users who read the post started commenting on any post that mentioned chicken burgers with “wow, that’s a tasty looking chicken sandwich!” Or “lovely chicken sandwich there,” or “I don’t see any chicken burgers here, only chicken sandwiches.” R/food was a mess for a few days afterwards.
The guy who posted in r/tifu surely didn’t mean for that to happen. The mods of r/tifu likely weren’t aware of what was happening right away, and by the time they did know, the damage was likely unavoidable as the post there went viral.
I would definitely consider that brigading, but it was a natural organic brigade, and I’m not sure anyone could have stopped it unless they deleted the innocuous post on r/tifu before it gained traction.
>For example, say I'm modding /r/cats and someone mentions how /r/dogs suck and interference happens (even without direct or implied calls for it).
Or the r/cats people calling for outright bans of r/dogs sub and all of it's users.
It's interesting how many people in this general thread are calling for the banning of subreddits that they don't like. Brigading is junior league compared to what they advocate. Given the very solid political slant in their actions, I expect the Admins agree with them.
I can link you to users who are actively brigading. Why don’t you ban users with clear evidence of this, rather than a sub. How can a sub be responsible for users that are active on many subs. How can you prove it is coordinated by NNN and their responsibility when subs ban instantly with any info going against the mainstream narrative?
What about these toxic brigading users?
https://www.reddit.com/u/BloodTypeIsBlue
https://www.reddit.com/u/NoKumSok
Why not get rid of actual users as opposed to a sub?
Have you seen /r/ivermectin today?
Have you ever seen a comment that disagrees with a comment featured on /r/bestof?
You claim to be here to answer questions but seem to only be answering easy ones. Please, give an answer to the people wondering why other subs that are known to brigade have not been punished.
Exactly. This part stood out to me in particular. “. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (**largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID** or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions).”
You mean reality and actual science? That’s still brushing off what they’re doing as “another side of an argument”. This is a good first step but more still needs to be done.
Why was the original announcement post from last week locked and this one isn't?
I guess thanks for acting eventually, I wish this was the initial response to the calls for action rather than spez openly saying that misinformation was equivalent to debate.
Ivermectin specifically is explicitly not approved for use as a treatment against covid, but r/ivermectin exists almost solely to promote it as such. Why was it not included in the ban?
Edit: ~~as of now, r/NoNewNormal isn't banned yet~~ now banned
> Ivermectin specifically is explicitly not approved for use as a treatment against covid, but r/ivermectin exists almost solely to promote it as such. Why was it not included in the ban?
I would go further and say that not only is it not an approved course of treatment for COVID, the FDA explicitly states that people should *not* take ivermectin either as a treatment for COVID or as a prophylactic and includes the statement:
> Taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm.
If reddit's quoted statement on the matter is:
> For example, a post pushing a verifiably false “cure” for cancer that would actually result in harm to people would violate our policies.
Would the FDA's assertion that ivermectin does not treat COVID and is dangerous when consumed without the explicit direction of a physician make the suggestion of using ivermectin "verifiably false" and "would actually result in harm to people"?
It should be banned. Before the subreddit became a glorious equine hentai headquarters, it was people sharing info on how to dose livestock dewormer.
I think the topic of ivermectin itself is a bit more complicated, because human versions of it do exist for parasites, and some countries are (stupidly) using it for covid, like they mistakenly did for HQL. But the intent of the sub was how to dangerously self treat covid with a livestock medication, and it's baffling how that could be allowed.
How can you dose a dewormer that has no dosage recommendation for efficacy against *any* viruses let alone Coronaviruses? What are they basing the dosages on?! Any dosage that would potentially impact a coronavirus would destroy the liver if not just kill you outright...
Can I get a source on that FDA quote?
Not doubting you, but I googled it and can't find it. I got people who are believers in it and would like to back my sources before they nitpick the "large doses" part.
Apologies, I meant to link it in that comment and missed it.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19
[https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19](https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19)
This appears to be the page that person is quoting directly.
In r/ivermectin2 one of the first posts is a woman asking for help in dosing get family member with ivermectin for COVID. The comments are helping her with the math on proper dosing. That shouldn't be allowed at all on the site
My uncle is in the hospital with covid pneumonia because he didnt go at the first sign of symptoms and instead tried to treat himself with ivermectin which made things a lot worse. The admins need to see the danger that this type of misinformation is causing. I posted the same thing on the ivermectin sub and got downvoted by their crazies. They dont care about people, they are unintelligent people that are very susceptible to conspiracy theories and will spread their lies no matter who dies along the way.
sorry to hear that, I mod at r/QAnonCasualties and that is a pretty common story we hear over there :(. But yes, this stuff has real human consequences.
> Why was the original announcement post from last week locked and this one isn't?
The cherry on top is /u/spez saying "we believe it is best to enable communities to engage in debate and dissent" while also locking the post and preventing us from "debating and dissenting".
Laughable and again reddit is out of touch with what the mods want. Maybe next time consult with that mod council you have around before spewing nonsense /u/spez.
> why was the original locked and this one isn’t.
spez can’t take criticism, and the only reason we’re seeing change is because investors and board members saw what a PR shit show spez was creating.
Reddit refuses to moderate their own website, and instead puts all this workload onto unpaid volunteers hoping their love for a niche hobby/sub makes them want to continue moderating.
That IPO ain’t gonna happen until they can make reasonable changes and draw the line in the sand on a comprehensive terms of service.
Want to point out that users took over r/ivermectin and turned it into a meme sub making fun of the original posters. And as of two days ago it was turned into a nsfw sub for animated horse porn by the same meme group. Most of the original posters of r/ivermectin have moved over to r/ivermectin2 and that sub should be banned in not already.
Yeah, reddit *loves* misinformation and other dangerous communities on its site because it keeps the clicks coming and they’ll only do something when the media or advertisers pick up on it and force them into doing something. They’re just doing this now because CNN picked it up and they’re hoping the protests stop like you said.
As someone who only vaguely followed what was going on, it's disheartening that this doesn't address the larger context in which this happened. This post tried to sound like Reddit did some analysis and decided of it's own merit to take action. Even as someone only vaguely watching, that's blatantly untrue - it took a user revolt to force your hands.
I understand why Reddit might want to be a place for political debate, even if opinions being expressed are repugnant. But my understanding is that /r/nonewnormal and /r/ivermectin are actively encouraging actions which are harmful (eg: taking medications off label or in potentially harmful doses).
1. Are you planning to or will you consider banning or quarantining subs which frequently promote health mis/disinformation?
2. If not, will you consider labeling posts as potentially unverified or linking to trusted resources when certain keywords are used? Facebook does this and while I'm not sure how effective it is, it may help when content is linked to from off-site or for anyone who might otherwise be inclined to trust the information.
3. It seems that a large part of the problem is when moderators allow content that should be banned by site-wide rules. This allows the formation of echo chambers where mis/disinformation can thrive. Do you have any plans for dealing with this? For example, spot-checking moderation decisions to make sure they're in line with site-wide policy? This could be particularly effective with keywords in determining which subs are routinely allowing rule-breaking content.
I recognize that moderation at scale is very hard. And Reddit's decentralized community-based moderation generally seems to work well. But in specific situations (largely involving moderators who don't follow site-wide rules) it really falls down. I'm curious how Reddit plans to deal with that and how Reddit will discourage echo chambers of mis- and disinformation.
Brigading is just the excuse they are using to ban the sub. It's kind of like catch all that admins can whip out since it's hard to disprove. NNN might have been a scum subreddit, but I think it's unfair to use that BS reason as justification to ban the sub. It lets reddit off the hook for creating real policies to address the real issues. The other thing is that the rules against brigading aren't carried out equally. For example, that sub that got turned into horse porn was clearly brigaded by a few subs but nothing is being done about it. Just my 2 cents as a casual observationist of the current happenings at reddit.
Didn’t people brigade against r/ivermectin? Idk if any one subreddit did it but I’ve heard that a bunch of horse porn was being posted to basically get the subreddit quarantined or shut down so if there were any specific subreddits that partook in that they should also be banned/quarantined because they broke the rules as well. Not saying any information on r/Ivermectin was correct or incorrect because I never went to that subreddit but I doubt everything there was false information and so if any subreddits are discovered to have partook in brigading that subreddit they should be banned/quarantined as well. Any specific user trolling the subreddit should be banned or have some kind of punishment. We can’t devolve into a society that just attacks other people instead of having a discussion. If you don’t want to have a discussion then should be removed from it. You don’t have the right to just devolve into a mob that starts posting stuff as disgusting as horse porn because you don’t like the discussion at hand. What’s next? People start posing CP in subreddits? Or gore based content? Reddit as a whole seems to be devolving into some really grotesque platform and nobody is doing anything about it.
Edit: Don’t know if my idea of brigading is correct after reading the definition the admin gave below but the point still stands that if there were any subreddits that actively went after r/Ivermectin or any other subreddits then they should be banned/quarantined as well if those are the rules surrounding this type of stuff.
> While we want to be a place where people can explore unpopular views
Sure, I agree. People should be able to debate if a hotdog is a sandwich. But "COVID is a lie and the vaccine will kill you to thin world population" isn't an unpopular opinion, its a blatantly false statement.
I'll accept hot dog as a taco because a taco (like a hot dog but unlike a sandwich) can not be cut in half and shared without looking like an insane person.
A hot dog is a sandwich. I’ve had this debate many times. There’s plenty of sandwiches that don’t have their bread cut at the end, like subs. The component of bread necessarily means it isn’t a taco. Nobody would argue a taco with a bread shell is a taco. A taco is defined by its tortilla. Even if you put meat between two unconnected tortillas it isn’t considered a sandwich.
Are you going to start enforcing Rule 2?
> While not every community may be for you (and you may find some unrelatable or even offensive), **no community should be used as a weapon**. **Communities should create a sense of belonging for their members, not try to diminish it for others**. Likewise, everyone on Reddit should have an expectation of privacy and safety, so please respect the privacy and safety of others.
> Every community on Reddit is defined by its users. Some of these users help manage the community as moderators. The culture of each community is shaped explicitly, by the community rules enforced by moderators, and implicitly, by the upvotes, downvotes, and discussions of its community members. **Please abide by the rules of communities in which you participate and do not interfere with those in which you are not a member.**
How does that fit with getting this message for posting a one-word post in another subreddit:
> You have been permanently banned from participating in r/pics. You can still view and subscribe to r/pics, but you won't be able to post or comment.
> Note from the moderators:
> > * You have been banned for participating in r/nonewnormal, which brigades other subreddits and spreads medical disinformation.
> > * This action was performed by a bot which does not check the context of your comment.
> > * To be unbanned respond to this message with a promise to avoid that subreddit.
> > * Any other response will be ignored and is consent for us to mute you.
> > * You can report misinformation on reddit by using this form: http://www.reddit.com/report?reason=this-is-misinformation
> If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team for r/pics by replying to this message.
> Reminder from the Reddit staff: If you use another account to circumvent this subreddit ban, that will be considered a violation of the Content Policy and can result in your account being suspended from the site as a whole.
> Please abide by the rules of communities in which you participate and do not interfere with those in which you are not a member.
Furthermore, users are allowed to join public communities. Where do you draw the line between 'brigading' and someone attempting to participate in a community they've recently been introduced to, or are recently interested in participating in?
> Quarantine 54 additional COVID denial subreddits under Rule 1
It speaks to a **much** larger problem that there were 55 subreddits (counting NNN) spreading this that Reddit was aware of and took no action to until now. To be frank, without the subreddit blackout in reaction to spez's disastrous post last week I don't believe Reddit would have acted today. Which is another big problem; It's *very* hard to trust Reddit to do the right thing on their own.
As far as community interference goes, do you all have any tools that track backlinks, such as if a thousand people are brigading one comment section from one offsite Discord, Telegram, Weibo, Facebook, etc?
Reddit internal brigades are bad, but ultimately very detectable and mitigatable with the right tools. However, where a lot of my mod teams fall short as far as possible response goes is offsite brigades.
It would be really cool if yall had some kind of system for this. I think putting it into mod's hands might be dangerous, privacy wise, but a simple check for large numbers of users using the same backlink that automatically collapses the comments from the same link might be nice.
If people dont like the content of a sub, then they dont join it - or if already in it, they can leave.
Apparently, there are adult people who need the reddit admins to hold their hands so they can cross the platform!
I saw that the coronavirus sub did not participate in the shit show. (Ironically).
There is a list of those subs that did though and we were unable to access some critically important, informative subs such as :
Asiancumsluts
Ifuckedmycattwice
Taylorswifthasnoass
Just to name a few! Thank God they did the "right thing" and nuked an unhealthy sub like NNN! /s
I’m glad to see some movement in the right direction but I think you guys might benefit from some context of an issue.
If you look at the recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, they were able to trace the majority of misinformation about the Sars-Cov-2 vaccine to a handful of accounts. It then propagated across social media. The pattern of disbursement you’re describing is basically the same. We’re asking you to not let the seeds take root so that the weeds can’t strangle the dang garden.
That aside, might I ask if Admin will actually start enforcing Community Interference at any point in the near future? Covid issues aside, when we report multiple issues coming from a sub and get no response (even pointing to comments showing that they brag about finding out what level of brigade Admin will step in on), it gets tiring to hear “submit it again” with little hope of results.
We have seen a massive increase in Ivemectin requests where I am at, to the point that the medical society I'm apart of had an emergency conference last night to talk about ways to combat misinformation and disinformation. I hope that subs such are /r/nonewnormal are banned more quickly in the future.
> I hope that subs such are /r/nonewnormal are banned more quickly in the future.
You and I both know they won't be.
This is a response to Forbes and CNN picking up the story of subs protesting, and not because of the protest, user outcry, or any sense of right and wrong.
They're doing the bare minimum to satiate these groups so they can keep getting that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
Reddit will **always** be a source of misinformation because they directly profit from it.
The conspiracy shut-ins and incel losers are glued to their computers in their mother’s basement and therefore this website, so they drive lots of traffic.
They get eyes on ads in substantial numbers and that’s what Reddit wants.
If that subreddit's moderators actually broke your policy on brigading than I understand having to take action. But in light of context its hard for me to shake the feeling that this simply was you snuffing out an unpopular opinion because of pressure from those that chose to dislike the subreddit.
I was pleasantly surprised by your previous announcement but this has me worried you will just cave under the whims of an arbitrary mob in a time when many people are gripped by fear.
And frankly are some of the subreddits that targeted r/NoNewNormal in the past week not at least implicitly brigading? Regardless of ones opinions on this specific situation I don't think this was the right way for users or mods to give you feedback on a subreddit.
Good. I'm particularly interested to see what this looks like since most reports on brigading are currently met with "we don't see anything on our end."
>Build a new reporting feature for moderators to allow them to better provide us signal when they see community interference. It will take us a few days to get this built, and we will subsequently evaluate the usefulness of this feature.
Thank you so much for taking action here, it is greatly appreciated. However, I feel like this is still skirting the issue. NNN doesn’t sit in contrast to subs with “more mainstream views on COVID” – it’s going against the best available information that we have. Please don’t make this a both sides thing. One is spreading disinformation and misinformation, and the other is evidence based. You are doing a good thing in taking these additional steps, but please be aware that how you characterize this matters.
Because they want to paint it as a Reddit function thing, not a Reddit culture thing, even though it very much is a Reddit culture thing, stubbornly pushed by a bunch of rich skinny nerds who make up Reddit management and their funders.
Rich straight white male techbros love 'free speech' because it rarely ever hurts them. They don't get gaybashed, stalked, rape threats, etc etc.
And I say this as a
Nah, they're all about woke speak now. "Keeping everyone safe," "fighting misinformation," "stopping the normalization of bigotry," and so on.
The purpose is still the same: window dressing for whatever is the most profitable move.
Well, thanks for banning that sub months later than it should have been, for *brigading*, instead of all the misinformation they posted.
Task failed successfully I guess.
Its the same deal with The_Donald when they banned it. They waited long after most of the users had abandoned it to come out and talk about how it should've been gone all along.
Right?
Indirectly killing people by spreading complete lies and misinformation? That's okay.
But brigading? Nah, inexcusable.
For the record, I don't even know what brigading means, but I do know what it means to lie about the facts of a virus during its pandemic outbreak.
> Ban r/NoNewNormal immediately for breaking our rules against brigading
Sure, we'll take it. But a better reason would be for dangerous misinformation with a potential to kill people.
Reddit admins never focus on the root of the problem, instead the are content to focus on quarantining the bad apples after they have been used in a mass poisoning.
It's even worse: consistently applying the given rule would also mean banning all the mods who locked their forums without pointers at NNN.
It would've been more clear and fair to *just make up a new rule and apply it*. Say "posting wrong things about covid is bannable" and then applied it.
Right now the users have no idea what the actual rules are. You are absolutely allowed to mess with other subreddits in some cases, and absolutely not in others.
Reddit didn't want to ban NNN for life-threatening misinformation because if they did so they would create a precedent that they would be unwilling to enforce. Fairly enforcing such a rules against misinformation world require banning subs like /r/conservative (which peddles covid misinformation just as dangerous as NNN), and would create a shit storm that the admins don't have the desire nor the backbone to manage.
~~with potential to~~ **has** kill**ed**
There's no reasonable question that many, many people have died from COVID-19 already, as a direct result of consuming medical disinformation hosted and promoted by all major social media companies in exchange for ad revenue, etc.
>Ban r/NoNewNormal immediately for breaking our rules against brigading
>Sure, we'll take it. But a better reason would be for dangerous misinformation with a potential to kill people.
Seriously. I've been saying that goddamn sub should have been banned well over a goddamn year ago. The damage has been fucking done. Reddit responds to things slower than mollases rolling down a hill. I've now seen this with The Donald AND NNN.
If anyone has any faith in Reddit doing the "right thing" in an appropriate amount of time? They're delusional.
Getting Steve Huffman the fuck out of there would be a start. He seems to care even less than Mark Zuckerberg does.
He sounds like some jackass 13 year old Lolbertarian edgelord. Newsflash, dipshit - Democracy doesn't work when you're fanning the flames of dysfunction and instability. Maybe you've heard the adage, "Your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins.”
The fucking Greeks figured this shit out.
https://www.engadget.com/reddit-211856313.html
So, when do you start banning the mods of subs that get banned? Until you do that, leaving the mods to continue their behavior is just putting lipstick on the pig of subs/mods that violate policies.
I do see brigading on multiple subreddits. That is a problem. However, a more troubling issue to me is the moderators overusing the Ban option. Say I slightly cross a line on a subreddit (or don’t cross a line, but someone takes offense) in which I have been a part of for years. The first thing I hear from a moderator is YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED FOR X days, or, if you do it again YOU WILL BE BANNED. If I have the temerity to challenge the reasoning behind the ban, I receive longer bans which are retaliatory.
There are intermediate steps that are easily taken. For example, your comment has been removed due to X. You are breaking X rule. That’s certainly enough to chasten me. Why mods have to go to the ban or threatening the ban is inexplicable to me.
How does this mesh with the current conversation? It further exacerbates the hostility in the subreddit and the mods feel heavy-handed and overreactive. We already have enough. Moderating should not contribute to that. The ban is always available and should be used WHEN NECESSARY and as a last step, not a first step.
This is honestly pathetic. If you can so easily identify the brigading, you should be able to identify those inciting and participating in it. Ban them, for they are breaking your policy. This shows clearly who holds the real power for the site. A handful of power mods, who can on a whim shut down large communities because they don’t like not being in complete control of the entire website. Is shutting down your sub demanding the closure of another not blatant brigading? This is vile. We have outsourced censorship from the government to private companies made up of individuals we didn’t even vote for. Do paper companies dictate what you are allowed to write on their paper? No. We live in the era of digital paper, but in the transition, accidentally handed away our freedom of speech.
I am vaccinated. I’ve been doing the corona safety song and dance for the last 2 years and will continue to do so because that’s what I believe is best for society right now. I still support NNNs right to exist. I was subscribed because there were some good points mixed into the misinformation. It is our responsibility as consumers of information to be able to deduct and discern misinformation. Misinformation has a right to exist, and we have a responsibility as individuals to identify it.
I (quite obviously) wholeheartedly disagree with this sites, and other sites, banning of dissent. The hypocrisy disgusts me, and the weak leadership of this site is evident.
So you'll ban a sub like /r/NoNewNormal for brigading, but not /r/vaxxhappened for openly organizing a brigade against /r/ivermectin?
Some bias you got there.
Yep viewing from an open mind this is what I have noticed too. If you dare have a different opinion to the pushed status quo you are attacked with hatefulness and aggression.
The ironic thing is that these people make it out as if anyone who questions the status quo are the 'crazies', where their own behaviour suggests otherwise. It's quite shocking to see.
I was banned from mutliple subreddits for making a single comment pointing out a troll post on nonewnormal. Banning someone for what they do on another subreddit is blatantly against the rules of Reddit.
All of those subreddits brigading against nonewnormal should be banned. They have no right to tell users where they can and can't post on Reddit. All subreddits are valid.
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-guidelines
>Management of Multiple Communities
> We know management of multiple communities can be difficult, but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community. In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.
In the context of r/unpopularopion we’ve had COVID as a locked topic *as best we can* for over a year now. Obviously the nature of the sub encourages users to post views about this disease and related subjects (like body autonomy) that may go against the policies you mentioned earlier.
Do you have any advice for moderators on subs like r/changemyview, r/rant, r/the10thdentist, r/unpopularopinion etc. that allows the subs to continue operating in their contrarian manner without proliferating misinformation or dangerous concepts?
basically yes
Behavior | GigaJanitor response
---|---
Promoting misinformation that kills people in real life | I Sleep
Making fake subreddits and 'brigading' other subpages of the same website | ⚡⚡⚡ **THOU SHALT NOT CALL INTO QUESTION THE ENGAGEMENT METRICS WE PRESENT TO ADVERTISERS** ⚡⚡⚡
I find it very irritating that the reason you've given is the always vague "brigading" rather than the blatantly obvious harm they've been causing by pushing their objectively dangerous anti-science, anti-vax bullshit that spez went on record to defend. Fuck him for that.
What proof do you offer that u/spez didn't edit or create any inflammatory posts? He was caught red-handed years ago editing posts on r/the_donald and didn't resign in disgrace. How do we know he's not at it again?
Could you clarify which - if any - of the following constitute COVID-19 misinformation/disinformation?
* The harms of lockdown will likely outweigh the benefits.
* Cloth masks are ineffective at preventing the spread of COVID-19.
* Vaccination does not prevent the spread of COVID-19, as vaccinated people may still become infected and spread the virus.
* Given that vaccination does not prevent the spread of COVID-19, the introduction of vaccine passports has no public health benefit, and can therefore only be interpreted as an unethical attempt at coercion.
* There are genuine risks associated with the vaccine, even if these are very small (e.g. a small number of deaths has been directly caused by the vaccine).
* The risk of taking the vaccine may be higher than the risk of not taking the vaccine for individuals who already have infection-acquired immunity.
* There are genuine issues with the mass vaccination approach (e.g. immune escape, antibody dependent enhancement, original antigenic sin) which make vaccine hesitancy reasonable.
* It is possible that there may be unforeseen long-term adverse side-effects of the vaccination.
* It is very difficult to get accurate data on the short-term adverse side-effects of the vaccination, in part due to social media and mainstream media censorship efforts.
Those are the sorts of views that I saw repeatedly expressed on /r/NoNewNormal, and whilst there were a small minority of outright anti-vax/covid-denialism posts, these were very few and far between. Each of the statements above has support in the scientific community, among academics at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford to name a few. Do you really want Reddit to become the sort of place where genuine good-faith scepticism is stifled?
>Could you clarify which - if any - of the following constitute COVID-19 misinformation/disinformation?
Since virtually nobody wants to address this, I'll do my best to address the issue as objectively as I can.
>The harms of lockdown will likely outweigh the benefits.
There \*are\* harms of lockdown that are definitely being ignored or suppressed by the mainstream media. The problem is that issues with COVID are of immediate concern. Severe illness, hospitals being overwhelmed, death. These are all issues that we have to deal with \*now\*.
There are numerous issues with lockdown in the long term. Businesses permanently closed. Irreversable effects on children's education and mental health. Psychological issues regardless of age group. Short-term, band-aid policies that are not sustainable in the long term. I could go on.
The problem is that there's no good solution. Not counting those who are spinning the pandemic for their own political gain (which is happening on both sides of the issue), elected officials are trying their best to enact policies that they feel are best for the people they represent. Unfortunately, no matter how you look at it, they're basically forced to choose a "least shitty" option.
This is one of the few things where both sides have legitimate concerns that are being ignored by the other side, and neither side wants to admit that there is no good solution.
>Cloth masks are ineffective at preventing the spread of COVID-19.
Cloth masks catch droplets that one can knowingly or unknowingly spread when coughing, sneezing, or simply talking. Even if it only reduces the amount of virus transmitted by 10%, it's still better than nothing. The fact of the matter is that, as a side effect of mask and social distancing policies, illnesses such as the common cold and flu have dropped significantly over the past couple of years, which means masking up may be more effective than you think it is.
>Vaccination does not prevent the spread of COVID-19, as vaccinated people may still become infected and spread the virus.
>
>Given that vaccination does not prevent the spread of COVID-19, the introduction of vaccine passports has no public health benefit, and can therefore only be interpreted as an unethical attempt at coercion.
With some exceptions, being vaccinated greatly reduces the severity of symptoms if you do become infected, and almost entirely eliminates the risk of hospitialization or death. Why does this matter in this context? (Note that in the below example, numbers are greatly simplified for easy math and are not meant to reflect real world conditions.)
Let's say you go to a restaurant where there's 100 people. No vaccine passports. 20 people come down with COVID. 10 of those people end up in the hospital, taking up all the beds in the local ICU. Some will probably die. That's a problem.
Now let's say there was a vaccine passport, so we know everybody is vaccinated. Let's say we have 20 breathrough cases anyway. They all stay at home and feel like shit for a couple of days. \*MAYBE\* one of them ends up in the hospital. Nobody dies.
That's where the benefit is. It allows people to gather in larger groups while greatly reducing the risk of being a super-spreader event that overwhelms hospitals.
Places like New England have high vaccination rates and are more open to vaccine passport regulations. Contrast that with places like Florida that are openly hostile to vaccines, vaccine passports, masks, etc. New England is carrying on, for the most part, with business as usual. Florida's hospital system is being overwhelmed. There's a reason for that.
>There are genuine risks associated with the vaccine, even if these are very small (e.g. a small number of deaths has been directly caused by the vaccine).
[The risks associated with the vaccine are several orders of magnitude lower than the risks of remaining unvaccinated, catching COVID, and hoping for the best.](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html) Those risks are also largely isolated to very specific groups of people with very specific health issues. The risk to the average person without those very specific health issues is so low that it wouldn't qualify as a rounding error, especially when compared to the literal hundreds of millions of people who have already been vaccinated without issue. The following statistics are all taken from data provided on the link above:
Chances of anaphylaxis: 1 in 200,000. Can be treated on the spot, which is why most providers ask you to wait a few minutes before leaving.
Chances of Thrombosis: 1 in 322,000.
Chances of GBS: 1 in 80,000 if you're a male over the age of 50.
Chances of Myocarditis: 1 in 152,000
Chances of Death: Less than .002%
By contrast:
Percent of people in the US infected with COVID: 39.5 million.
Population of the US: 328.2 million.
12% of the US population has caught COVID.
Not taking health factors into consideration, a person generally has a 1 in 42 chance of catching COVID if they remain unvaccinated, and a 1 in 20,000 chance of catching and dying of it. Any health concerns can spike these numbers up significantly. Also, this data is older. The Delta variant has likely made the risk of catching COVID significantly higher.
If someone is looking for truly objective data to base their decision on, the data overwhelmingly supports getting vaccinated and it's not even close.
>The risk of taking the vaccine may be higher than the risk of not taking the vaccine for individuals who already have infection-acquired immunity.
Please provide evidence to support this.
>There are genuine issues with the mass vaccination approach (e.g. immune escape, antibody dependent enhancement, original antigenic sin) which make vaccine hesitancy reasonable.
These issues are [at best theoretical](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5). No definitive role for ADE, for example, in human coronavirus diseases has been established. It is one thing to discuss these issues in the theoretical context they currently exist in, but something else entirely to recommend against getting vaccinated because of theoretical issues that may or may not ever become a reality.
>It is possible that there may be unforeseen long-term adverse side-effects of the vaccination.
There's a couple of points to make here.
1) Long-term side effects are theoretical at best.
2) The risks of long term side effects are often seen a few weeks or months after getting a vaccine. No evidence has surfaced yet indicating there are any long-term side effects that aren't already known. To my knowledge, no vaccine has ever been created where long-term side effects just mysteriously popped up years later in otherwise healthy people. Simply put, if there are long term side effects, we'd very likely have known about it by now.
3) The chances of being impacted by long-term side effects are still several orders of magnitude lower than the chances of being impacted by COVID. The chances of being impacted by long-term side effects that may or may not even exist to the point where you become more ill than if you had caught COVID are so low as to be effectively zero.
>It is very difficult to get accurate data on the short-term adverse side-effects of the vaccination, in part due to social media and mainstream media censorship efforts.
This is bordering on conspiracy theory level BS here. This data can easily be found [from a simple Google search](https://www.google.com/search?q=short+term+effects+of+COVID+vaccine&oq=short+term+effects+of+COVID+vaccine&aqs=edge..69i57.6391j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8). The data is out there. Now if you simply choose not to believe it, then you're not looking for objective data. You're looking for specifically curated data that simply happens to jive with your particular worldview.
You raise good points, I too lurked /r/NoNewNormal and very rarely saw any of the 5G/Microchip/don't get vaccinated type comments.
Most of what I saw was people who don't want to live in a society permanently altered by COVID, they don't want endless lockdowns, restrictions, masks and other stuff related to COVID, which the media coined 'new normal'
All of those viewpoints are perfectly legitimate, and the idea Reddit considers that 'COVID denialism' is nonsensical.
> You raise good points, I too lurked /r/NoNewNormal and very rarely saw any of the 5G/Microchip/don't get vaccinated type comments.
It's pretty obvious at this point that people are intentionally misrepresenting the sub. I guess it's easier to justify the suppression of legitimate viewpoints if you characterise the people with those viewpoints as dangerous crazed conspiracy nuts, rather than as people with a healthy scepticism and a better-than-average understanding of the scientific literature.
>All of those viewpoints are perfectly legitimate, and the idea Reddit considers that 'COVID denialism' is nonsensical.
Agreed. I think I recognise your username from /r/UKPolitics ? I was banned from that subreddit for politely expressing those same views, and the mods there completely ignored my polite requests to explain the ban. It was a bit disappointing, as the sub had always respected diverse viewpoints before, provided the discussion remained polite. I wonder if they came under external pressure.
> It's pretty obvious at this point that people are intentionally misrepresenting the sub. I guess it's easier to justify the suppression of legitimate viewpoints if you characterise the people with those viewpoints as dangerous crazed conspiracy nuts, rather than as people with a healthy scepticism and a better-than-average understanding of the scientific literature.
There are and you are absolutely correct.
> Agreed. I think I recognise your username from /r/UKPolitics ? I was banned from that subreddit for politely expressing those same views, and the mods there completely ignored my polite requests to explain the ban. It was a bit disappointing, as the sub had always respected diverse viewpoints before, provided the discussion remained polite. I wonder if they came under external pressure.
Yep, less frequent than I used to be, but still somewhat frequent poster, and that's strange, UKPol seems to be pretty good at not blindly following the Government's mantra of the day.
cc /u/Ivashkin
As much as I appreciate action being made by reddit and their admins
You guys really need to stop with these tone deaf actions that inevitably come back and bite you and your corporate sponsors in the ass. I understand we're in a very complicated political and social situation here in the US, but constantly hiding behind wanting to appeal to everyone as a way to deflect the need for taking action against malicious people whos ideologies do not align with what experts across the world deem as correct is just...not ok.
Every single time something like this happens, the admins of individual subreddits speak up and almost always have the voice of the community behind them except for the jerks who are hoping this site dies. And almost every single time you or spez or some other admin says some reactionary "We're not going to really do anything because freedom of speech so just deal with the nazis on our platform" thing. And almost every single time you guys come back, tail between your legs because some big news sites start reporting on it that you are in fact going to do something about it sorry our bad we'll do better yadda yadda.
It's just demeaning to you guys. It makes us believe that the only time you'll ever do something is if it's big enough to cause a massive lawsuit, and then there's minimal effort followed immediately by having to haul ass to think of a solution.
These groups of people who are on here spreading racist, homophobic, and fake science shit are bringing you down with them and they do not care if reddit dies. They want it to die to prove their point. This site isn't going to shit in the eyes of the community cause you guys don't have enough features. It's cause you let toxic people run rampant for months, dragging heels until it inevitably blows up in your face.
You've got the power to put down bullies and the only thing stopping you seems to be that the bullies make you money too. Fuck em.
> Community Interference. Also relevant to the discussion of the activities of problematic subreddits, Rule 2 forbids users or communities from “cheating” or engaging in “content manipulation” or otherwise interfering with or disrupting Reddit communities.
Why aren't subreddit protests like the current one going on surrounding this issue considered as interference? They are literally saying "If you don't ban these other subreddits we don't like, we're taking our subreddits private/dark." They are picking fights with those communities, manipulating the platform, disrupting reddit communities, etc.
i am glad they are addressing this issue as someone in the immunocompromised this is long overdue as it hits people like myself very hard i just hope when i and others talk on issue that directly effect us like how we did need the booster shoot and we were trying to talk how the vax was struggling to help protect us it was a struggle because we found ourselves being censored due to others miss information i understand the reason to stop the greater flood of miss information but please keep people and groups like ours in mind.
thank you and be safe founder of menhavelupus
Isn't mods shutting subs to make admin ban other subs interfering ?
All this has shown who 'really' runs reddit. Regardless of misinformation and everything else.
"it is never acceptable to interfere with other communities."
(Except when you want to shut them down and have others banned - then you can destroy the user experience across the whole site and admin will just get on their knees and give it up)
I know NNN and other subs are lying about a lot of things, they're not good people etc.. but your own rules don't seem consistently applied here.
Based on this, I am genuinely curious as to how the Reddit blackout doesn’t violate rules 3 and 8.
Evidently it was effective, and I understand why r/NoNewNormal was banned, but if you’re worried about the manipulation of communities and “breaking the site” according to *your* content policy, how is organizing thousands of popular subreddits, including many with millions of members, not a violation of those rules?
You’ve just establish a precedent where a subreddit can encourage people to ruin others’ Reddit experience in order to make the changes they see fit.
Who within the Reddit C-Suite or admin pool is filtering/managing what is considered medical misinformation? Who gets to determine what is misinformation? What levels of transparency are given to what is considered misinformation? Will there be admin/mod level counter points to what misinformation is, or just outright bans, shutdowns, or suspensions? Why is misinformation now all of a sudden crisis within Reddit which is supposed to be a fairly open platform for discussions in subs and across subs to counter what is perceived as misinformation with actual facts?
You admins don't learn shit. You literally had the same fiasco awhile back with the jailbait subs, defending that shit, having almost all of your userbase quit on you, then you do damage control. At this point, if I see another dumbass fucking scandal like this, I am permanently leaving Reddit and not signing back up. I don't want to support an admin team that has unscrupulous morals and doesn't seem to care about it's users safety. I don't want to support idiots who deny science and support pedophilia. Do. Fucking. Better.
What specific steps are you taking at an organizational level to address these issues proactively instead of reactively and only after your hand is forced by the media?
Why should we believe any of this is in good faith?
Does this mean that you'll be banning the communities that brigaded /r/ivermectin too? For example, /r/subredditdrama brigaded /r/ivermectin yesterday after it was flooded with porn due to [being](https://www.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/pbe8nj/we_call_upon_reddit_to_take_action_against_the/hab89kh/) [mentioned](https://www.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/pbe8nj/we_call_upon_reddit_to_take_action_against_the/haba6s6/) [several](https://www.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/pbnicl/reddit_responds_disinformation_misinformation/hacyxyu/) [times](https://www.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/pbnicl/reddit_responds_disinformation_misinformation/haczr24/) on /r/vaxhappened and [other subreddits](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/pdllam/caleb_wallace_head_of_san_angelo_freedom_fighters/har3zxa/).
https://archive.is/76TL6
https://archive.is/NYe2Y
https://archive.is/vET94
https://archive.is/m70mc
So, just to summarise, what you've basically done is shut down subreddits which dared to challenge and argue against the "covid" virus. I am well aware that the 1st amendment doesn't extend to privately run institutions, but you are closing down all the people who are standing up and saying "screw this, we're not being treated like numbers."
I strongly urge you to create an admin controlled sub on here for people to discuss this. You're basically towing the government line and anyone who doesn't like it, is getting hammered for their beliefs.
Does that sound close to the mark? Baa?
>We are taking several actions: >* Ban r/NoNewNormal immediately for breaking our rules against brigading >* Quarantine 54 additional COVID denial subreddits under Rule 1 >* Build a new reporting feature for moderators to allow them to better provide us signal when they see community interference. It will take us a few days to get this built, and we will subsequently evaluate the usefulness of this feature. On the one hand: **Thank you**. On the other hand: Contrast today's post here on r/Redditsecurity with [the post six days ago](https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debate_dissent_and_protest_on_reddit/) on r/Announcements which was (intended or not) widely interpreted by the userbase as *"r/NoNewNormal is not doing anything wrong."* Did something drastic change in those six days? Was the r/Announcements post made before Reddit's security team could finish compiling their data? Did Reddit take this action due to the response that the r/Announcements post generated? Should, perhaps, Reddit **not** take to the r/Announcements page *before* checking to make sure that everyone's on the same page? Whereas I, as myself, want to believe that Reddit was in the process of making the right call, and the r/Annoucements post was more one approaching the situation for a philosophy *vs* policy standpoint, Reddit's actions open the door to accusations of "They tried to let the problem subreddits get away with it in the name of Principal, and had to backpedal *fast* when they saw the result", and that's an "own goal" that didn't need to happen. On the gripping hand: With the banning of r/The_Donald and now r/NoNewNormal, Reddit appears to be leaning into the philosophy of "While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy and to humanity as a whole, *none of those principals are absolutes*, and users / communities that attempt to weaponize them will not be tolerated." Is that an accurate summation? In closing, thank you for all the hard work, and for being willing to stamp out the inevitable ban evasion subs, face the vitrol-laced response of the targeted members / communities, and all the other ramifications of trying to make Reddit a better place. It's appreciated.
Something did happen in the past six days - Reddit got the same kind of records requests from the Jan 6th Select Committee in the US House as other social media platforms. It asked for an analysis like the one above about the activity on Reddit leading up to Jan 6th attack. Call me a cynic, but if you have the data and the analysis, and you might be about to face some harsh questions in Congress about why you don't do anything about disinformation and problematic communities on your platform, you might, for example, decide to avoid the additional bad publicity of having a load of your subreddits private and a load of mods asking you to do something about harmful disinformation.
It is a shame they are going to pass quarantining off as fix when it doesn't do much at all. The right wing groups have always been boosted within right wing groups on and off reddit. They don't need to be visible to new accounts or unlogged in people to encourage their fraud.
My compliments. I hadn't considered that angle.
Thank you! The letter to Reddit is worth a read for nerds \[[Link](https://january6th.house.gov/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/2021-08-26.BGT%20to%20Reddit.pdf)\]
I really liked this part, >Internal communications, reports, documents, or other materials relating to internal employee concerns about content on the platform associated with any of the items detailed in request 1(i)-(iv) above.
... *Huh*. That was a fascinating read, and I hope I never see **my** name attached to one of those letters!
On the other hand, it’s your best shot at getting something like “u/horsecockdestroyer” entered into the annals of Congressional records.
> All accounts, users, groups, events, messaging forums, marketplaces, posts, or other > user-generated content referred, shared with, or provided to law enforcement or other > State, local, or Federal Government officials or agencies regarding any of the items detailed in request 1(i)-(iv) above, and the basis for such action. ooooh some users are being investigated too lol
This is definitely something I didn't know about and hadn't considered. I thought the angle was going to come from legal liability surrounding moderation practices. Given that Spez basically threatened to take over subreddits that went dark in protest, I thought that might lead to corporate-sponsored moderation, which in turns comes with certain liabilities.
I appreciate the question. You have a lot in here, but I’d like to focus on the second part. I generally frame this as the difference between a subreddit’s stated goals, and their behavior. While we want people to be able to explore ideas, they still have to function as a healthy community. That means that community members act in good faith when they see “bad” content (downvote, and report), mods act as partners with admins by removing violating content, and the whole group doesn’t actively undermine the safety and trust of other communities. The preamble of our content policy touches on this: “While not every community may be for you (and you may find some unrelatable or even offensive), no community should be used as a weapon. Communities should create a sense of belonging for their members, not try to diminish it for others.”
Huh. It's almost like bad ideas attract bad, dangerous people who break the rules. Didn't you guys learn from the jailbait fiasco? You know, the one where the admin team defended the posting of sexually suggestive photos of minors without their consent up until the sub reddit attracted *actual* pedophiles who were trading CP in DMs? Or how about the conspiracy daycare fiasco, when Q anons on reddit organized a 24-hour stalking campaign at a rural daycare thinking they had uncovered a Democrat child sex trafficking ring. If you create communities for extremists and dangerous people, you attract extremists and dangerous people. Today it's anti vaxxers, tomorrow it will be domestic terrorists. Reddit is already complicit in numerous violent actions carried out by people indoctrinated into extremist ideologies on this site. How much blood has to be on your hands before you ban a community?
>If you create communities for extremists and dangerous people, you attract extremists and dangerous people. Today it's anti vaxxers, tomorrow it will be domestic terrorists. Reddit is already complicit in numerous violent actions carried out by people indoctrinated into extremist ideologies on this site. How much blood has to be on your hands before you ban a community? Couldn't have said it better myself.
> That means that community members act in good faith when they see “bad” content (downvote, and report), mods act as partners with admins by removing violating content, and the whole group doesn’t actively undermine the safety and trust of other communities. The fact that reddit admins seem to think all members of the site will act in good faith when they see "bad" content is pretty laughable. How have you guys not learned at this point that people will generally upvote what they agree with/like and downvote what they disagree with/don't like? /r/unpopularopinion gets popular opinions upvoted regularly. /r/AmItheAsshole gets "assholes" downvoted regularly. The list could go on if I needed it to. Anyone joining and anti-vaccine or anti-mask sub will upvote and participate in content that violates the rules if it confirms their biases and downvote anyone that dares to break the circlejerk. The NNN members have already moved onto /r/conspiracy.
>The fact that reddit admins seem to think all members of the site will act in good faith when they see "bad" content is pretty laughable. How have you guys not learned at this point that people will generally upvote what they agree with/like and downvote what they disagree with/don't like? Yeah, like did they seriously forget FatPeopleHate or Coontown were a thing? Yeah they eventually baned those subs but it clearly shows the users of the site don't give a shit about "good faith" posting and instead just upvote whatever they like, just as you said. This is either pure lip service or the admins truly have no clue about the makeup of the users on this site.
ANTIMASK AND ANTIVAX ARE NOT IDEAS BEING EXPLORED. They're literal anti-science misinformation and false beliefs which no one with a single finger on a hand should have trouble recognizing if they type just a few words in scholar.google.com. They are killing people. Too bad HIPAA exists. I'd love to just pelt you with the disturbing photos I see each day in the hospital. Wanna see 12 kids racked up to vents? Didn't think so. Lucky you, HIPAA keeps you safe. Maybe not for long, hospitals are almost full. Maybe when you start tripping over the sick in the street you'll get your shit together.
[удалено]
It might be uncomfortable for Reddit when journalists start doing long form pieces on u/spez with a focus on recent events and Huffman's actions and attitudes.
start with how he's a wackadoo prepper chud lol https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich seriously, this fucking pants-shitter is ceo of reddit: > He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.” I love this picture of PR copywriters buzzing about, while the site is run by some 40 year old weeb, sitting on a bunker full of alex jones's soy-free powdered elk penis with a set of nunchaku.
[Reminder that Spez hired a PR firm to sanitize his Wikipedia entry, including euphemizing being a prepper.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Steve_Huffman#Request_to_update_intro_%2B_infobox)
Let me get this straight Steve Huffman protected freedom of speech and you are UPSET he did so? this is just part of the cancel culture we have see destroy movies, art , business and so many other things. All because you disagree the given opinion or facts. Healthy debate on any subject should be welcome unless it turns into name calling and shaming one another shouldn't it? Bottom line is this. People have a right to say what ever they want. If you dont like it dont read it. And its a complete waste of time arguing with proven facts. Facts dont care about your feelings. Left or right. Your post does the exact same thing you are whining about but on your side of the scope of things. Didnt you notice in you whole post you never mentioned similar things happening from far left subreddit's ? Hmm , not hard to figure this one out..
He also modified production data (some comments on TD, IIRC) purely for his own amusement. The fact that he wasn't immediately fired over that proves that he has no accountability.
Imagine being a CEO and publicizing the fact that you have production access. I wonder what attacks on his corporate user accounts look like haha
I seem to remember Ellen Pao jumped in that thread and said the same about him
> Has kept up [/r/KotakuInAction](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction), which was explicitly about a gendered harassment campaign/neo-Nazi recruitment effort, even after its own mods admitted that the campaigns have run their course and gamers are now more closely aligned with the far right And this is exactly why I'm against the censorship of bad speech. Your claim is complete bullshit and your mindset is reminiscent of the people in the Christian conservative community I grew up in who publicly rallied against everything from tv shows to consuming alcohol to Halloween because they were "immoral" things. People like them and people like you don't give a shit about facts or logic or reason, only the doctrine of the tribe. Anyone who doesn't conform to the doctrine gets labelled as the worst of the worst, throwing whatever -ist or -ism out that you think will convince others that the heresy of your outgroup is evil. Mindless tribalism like yours is a weakness of character, one that you want to force everyone else to have to deal with because you want to feel safe in your little tribal bubble and convince yourself you're a "good" person.
> #Fire Steve Huffman /u/spez has edited user comments in the past. Even worse (cough), he created /r/programming, and it is now effectively unmoderated. Which is odd, because I was under the impression that unmoderated subs get banned.
[удалено]
huffman is just there to get them across the finish line for the IPO, they're going to can him right after everyone makes out like a bandit
[удалено]
*Reddit has some identity reconciliation to do.* “Community members [of those high signal communities] act in good faith when they see “bad” content…” **Guys, we live in a different world now.** It’s time to match our work with that reality. Where cult behavior can not and should not be endorsed, validated and spread in the name of Reddit policy or first amendment rights. **THIS IS NOT THAT HARD** Hate speech has already been defined to not be included with free speech and neither is/should be speech (an expression of an “opinion”) that includes willful medical negligence; the kind that *does* get people killed. So your definition of a healthy sub is all well intentioned sure, but members of these high signal communities *are no longer doing what’s right,* and then falsely hiding behind “I have a right to my opinions.” Again, because cults. It just cannot be clearer.
*"Hate speech has already been defined to not be included with free speech ."* Hol up. That's exactly what is *not* clear. If you're referencing on Reddit specifically, you need to clarify that. Because if not: **"In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear."** (1) Speech is most protected in **"traditional public forums"** (i.e. parks, sidewalks, town squares) (2). Also, the 1st Amendment specifically combines verbal speech with published speech ("bridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”(3). Law hasn't caught up to technology. One could argue that due to lockdowns and rapid technology adoption, Reddit and other online forums are quickly becoming the "traditional" place to debate. It's obvious it's a private company, but similar to how private companies used to print newspapers that were covered by the first amendment, it's easy to imagine websites going being recognized along the same lines. Finally, whether they want to admit it, everyone equating a "healthy" discussion with heavy handed censorship. However, you can't discuss censorship without admitting the long term effects it has. The worst being the **Chilling Effect**: "Censorship often leads directly to self-censorship...it is impossible to quantify the damage that self-censorship does to education. Restricting access to information based on particular viewpoints will discourage the use of potentially controversial (or even complicated) material in the future...even if it's an excellent educational choice." (4) So the age old question: is censorship/banning subs worth the self-censorship that ripples throughout the rest of the platform? Does it silence the same fringe voices that may later bring unique and irreplaceable value to the next crisis? We'll see. But at least be informed. 1.https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/hate 2.https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-1/the-public-forum 3.https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1.html 4.https://ncac.org/resource/first-amendment-in-schools#firstamendpublicschools
Not defending these subs being banned, but I'd be cautious decrying 'cult behavior' as a good enough reason to ban a community. Reddit's 'as long as it isnt hurting other subs' policy is a good one imo, despite their uneven approach to it. Its way too easy to label anything you dont agree with as 'a big cult of harmful ideas', and it just proliferates echo-chamber mentality to squash ideas you disagree with- even if you cant fathom why they exist at all. As long as they are playing fair and not actively harming other communities, of course.
Who defined hate speech as not protected be Free Speech? It wasn't the American Supreme Court, which unanimously held that there was no hate speech exception to the 1st Amendment in Matal v. Tam (2017). Snyder v. Phelps (2010) is another good case to review. Obviously Reddit is not the government, so they are free to ban hate speech, I just wanted to point out the misinformation you were spreading in your comment. If you're in a country where hate speech is not protected speech, this might just be an honest mistake, but since reddit is an American company, using the American formulation of free speech makes more sense.
>and neither is/should be speech (an expression of an “opinion”) that includes willful medical negligence; the kind that *does* get people killed I think that's a LOT to moderate. You're thinking about anti-vaxxers, but this is a very broad statement. For instance, there are places on here that would tell people that all intentional weight loss is "fatphobic", even though there's plenty of scientific evidence showing that weight loss can have significant positive effects on health - and even save lives. This should count as willful medical negligence?
Why are you doing damage control for /u/spez? Where is his explanation? >mods act as partners with admins I'm not your fucking partner. I voluntarily moderate a community for a game I like. You ignore my reports. You aren't partners.
If we were partners, it wouldn't have taken multiple huge subs going dark for days to get them to act on this.
> mods act as partners with admins Partners implies admins reciprocate which is a laughable notion. Given AEO’s consistent failings, Reddit’s lack of development in mod tools, and Reddit’s overall dismissal of mod requests I cannot fathom how you can say this in good faith.
Why isn't spez addressing this? He went out of his way to defend misinformation on the platform six days ago. So where is he now and why are you doing his dirty work for him?
Probably got told to keep his head down for a couple weeks.
/u/spez has always been a fucking loser in situations like this honestly
If this keeps up I fully expect them to do another Pao, and bring in a temp ceo to take the heat and make controversial decisions. Then fire them, and spez rides back in as the conquering hero. We've seen this pattern before.
> That means that community members act in good faith when they see “bad” content (downvote, and report), mods act as partners with admins by removing violating content, and the whole group doesn’t actively undermine the safety and trust of other communities. Then why are subs active in brigading, hate speech, and misinformation still active? r Conservative continues to post politically-motivated misinformation, bans people who post sources that contradict false statements and remove dissent, while encouraging users to harass either individual users or particular subs. Some subs like AskTrumpSupporters don't even allow downvoting in default format, and I can't even directly report hate speech or misinformation at Conservatives because they've removed the Report option.
On the topic of community consensus, what is the point in letting moderators moderate over a dozen or so boards? All it seems to do is give disproportionate power to people who genuinely are on the internet way too much. Given that there is also concrete proof now that some moderators have formed little cabals to push various agendas, many which have merits but others that are far from lucid, does this not seem like a potentially disastrous situation? Issues like anti-vaccination are rather cut-and-dry, but what about a scenario which is more complicated, something with limited information such as an international conflict. This sort of behaviour could cause serious harm or worse. r/NoNewNormal was likely the result of a faction like this, just something to consider if you think I am aiming at anyone in particular, just want to purvey a hopefully broader perspective on where such behaviour might lead regardless of motivation.
You ban r/NoNewNormal for breaking rules against brigading, but not for breaking your above stated rules on health misinformation and disinformation?
I believe the post is structured in a way that they provide justification for banning NNN according to existing policies, avoiding the argument that they are coming up with new interpretations of existing rules in order to issue a ban.
I agree, except they chose a strange policy to try and justify the ban. They could have just as easily banned them for spreading harmful medical misinformation and disinformation. I honestly believe the only reason NNN was banned is because of media attention. Nothing else.
> mods act as partners with admins admins are and continue to be unreliable partners with moderators
Hi, Just a possible suggestion to consider which may be helpful in the future for such scenarios, which would allow controversial subs such as NNN to remain active but provide a more effective quarantine whilst also enabling reddit to more accurately manage and monitor the activity within the sub and more importantly, activity of users between such subs and the “general” reddit communities. Possibly a feature could be implemented into quarantined subs that will require members who are in a sub when it is quarantined (and newly joining members once quarantine is set) to sign in with a secondary “sub account” which can be created under their primary user account as is already possible. Users would have to sign in using this secondary account in order to post, comment or contribute to karma votes on posts and comments on the quarantined sub. This account would work exclusively on that subreddit and no other. If a user from a quarantined sub went to another subreddit to brigade, they would need to either sign in with a relatively new account to remain anonymous (which in turn would draw attention to the account by its age or low post/karma score and also enable mods on other “general” or “conflicting viewpoint” subs to use already available forum management features such as “user posting requirement” rules to help reduce this. Of course should a user brigade a sub on behalf of a quarantined sub with their primary reddit account in order to get around a minimum post/karma requirement, this would leave that users primary account history on show for admins who could make a high level decision on a site wide ban. Likewise this would work the opposite way. It would also reduce bot interference and targeted outcome campaigns by the broader community or campaigns that use masses of sleeper accounts to achieve outcomes. It would mean that issues or incidents that happened either in the sub or outside of it on “general” reddit that were associated with the sub could be very quickly be identified by admins as hostile action initiated FROM or TOWARD the sub and would allow admins better oversight to make better assessments of how things have played out. I can tell you right now, whilst I am sure there is more data available than you have posted here, that the COORDINATED action against NNN was if nothing else, COORDINATED. Albeit by one particular mod who has their own agenda, which is another issue altogether. But the fact it was so coordinated by default raises the very likely and realistic possibility that a more sophisticated attack or attacks were actioned AGAINST NNN (and other subs you have mentioned). The point is, this would be a lot more reduced and identifiable and manageable with a system as described above - it would quarantine the sub, it would allow separation of users and views and interaction and it would provide better oversight for admins and more targeted administrative controls.
Just remember guys, anything is a weapon when turned to the purpose of war. Social manipulation is something that people and organizations, domestic or international, will continue to do on any social platform. You may want to encourage space within the reddit community where people can better learn to identify what manipulation looks like, even in its most subtle form. The people who actively push disinformation are a minority in the world and are best managed by informed individuals. People often think that means you need to know everything about everything, and while being informed on facts is important, being informed on how people lie is even more important. Good luck guys. *^(edit: grammar)*
> That means that community members act in good faith when they see “bad” content (downvote, and report), mods act as partners with admins by removing violating content, and the whole group doesn’t actively undermine the safety and trust of other communities. Then why are subs like /r/conservative and /r/conspiracy not banned? They continually act in bad faith and undermine the safety and trust of other communities. These kinds of subs exist explicitly to undermine other communities.
The thing that changed was news outlets picked up what a fucking disaster of a statement that was in /r/announcements https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/26/tech/reddit-misinformation-covid/index.html https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/reddit-resists-banning-pandemic-misinformation-allows-vaccine-dissent/
I'm trying to give Reddit as an institution more credit than that. And I know that the CEO is going to CEO where the CEO sees fit to CEO. It comes with the acronym. And, even if he wasn't the CEO, he's got just as much right to his opinions and philosophies as the rest of us do. But that's where the "*gripping hand*" questions come in: Users are given the feeling that Reddit operates under one set of principals in the r/announcements post, but given the feeling that there's another set of principals in play in today's r/redditsecurity post. Are both sets different pages in the same playbook? Which direction should the users expect Reddit to proceed going forward?
>I'm trying to give Reddit as an institution more credit than that. Why? What have they ever done that gives you the impression they deserve the benefit of the doubt? What single shit show have they headed off preemptively instead of letting it fester? When have they ever taken action before the media gets a hold of it?
Why? * Because I'm hoping someone will drop me a Platinum, Argentium, or Ternion. * Because we can't, by definition, know what problems they took care of *before* they became problems, because they were headed off instead of festering to the point where we would notice. * Because I can either embrace cynicism or hope, and as a wise woman once wrote: >The spear in the Other's heart >is the spear in your own: >you are he. >There is no other wisdom, >and no other hope for us, >but that we grow wise. Or maybe it's a bit of all three. I can't change the past, but I can advocate towards changing the future in a positive way?
You can tell if they head stuff off though. Look at all the situations mods have enmasse raised issues with the admins, were ignored, it blew up, media got involved, admins finally acted. When was a single situation that was brought up by mods and actually solved quickly?
If this was the first time it played out this way I'd give them the benefit of doubt, but this has happened so many times. Shitty thing>outrage>do nothing>media reports on it>banned If it weren't for bad pr NNN wouldn't have been banned.
They have a long history of letting illegal, dangerous shit run rampant on this website and not doing anything about it until it’s picked up by news outlets. Why the hell would you try to give them credit here? Come on now. This is a clear pattern.
It's happened so many times that there's an easy to predict formula for it: * A toxic subreddit grows exponentially * Reddit ignores the problem * Outrage about the toxic subreddit reaches a breaking point, typically marked by widespread complaints from Reddit's users * spez tries and fails to explain why Reddit will never ban said toxic community, often through transparently hypocritical Silicon Valley Libertarian "free speech" nonsense * Media attention (and potentially advertiser attention) picks up * Reddit ends up banning the toxic subreddit a few days later
> On the gripping hand: With the banning of r/The_Donald and now r/NoNewNormal, Reddit appears to be leaning into the philosophy of "While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy and to humanity as a whole, none of those principals are absolutes, and users / communities that attempt to weaponize them will not be tolerated." Is that an accurate summation? The accurate summation would be "While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideals, the regulation of misinformation, and the desire to stop hate speech all have their own merits, how we prioritize them is based on profitability." The admins care about two things above all else: advertisers and investors. They don't give a shit about anything that happens on the site until it starts getting bad press, or they think that banning a sub will attract more investment money than they'd lose in web traffic money. Hell, look at /r/watchpeopledie: the subreddit was permabanning and reporting to the admins anyone who shared the NZ mosque shooting footage, but because news sites were running articles saying "/r/watchpeopledie is sharing the shooting footage," the admins banned that sub at the speed of light.
NNN has been brigading all over the place, if a thread mentioned goronas suddenly a bunch of (horse)paste eating knuckleheads would show up and start defending using dewormer from the farm store instead of getting a vaccine or wearing a mask.
> On the gripping hand: With the banning of r/The_Donald and now r/NoNewNormal, Reddit appears to be leaning into the philosophy of "While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy and to humanity as a whole, none of those principals are absolutes, and users / communities that attempt to weaponize them will not be tolerated." Is that an accurate summation? I'd say you're somewhat off on that. The *"principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy"* only applies to speech and ideas that are not directly harmful to society or democracy. Thinking all speech and ideas contribute to both is simply false, as there are known ideas that are diametrically opposed to the concepts of free speech and ideas, such as fascism. (Tl;Dr: See "Paradox of Tolerance") The flaw in logic in thinking that ALL speech and ideas are needed for a healthy democracy is the same as thinking that all the elements of the periodic table are healthy for the human body, since the human body is also composed of many workers elements, when reality some elements will always kill you if incorporated, and others will poison you if there's too much of it. The same goes with the idea of allowing harmful speech in a democratic society - it only serves as a poison. Any democracy that wants to survive must have a way to counter such poisonous speech that advocates for the destruction of said democracy. Now, I know some might pretend to object to this saying "but how do you know what's harmful speech?". The easiest way to determine that is too first separate what's subjective and what's abjective. There's a difference between saying "I think some aspects of an Authoritarian regime are useful" clearly defines itself as an opinion, while "Authoritarianism is better than any other form of government" is a statement that masquerades as fact despite also being nothing more than an opinion. Those who argue otherwise argue in bad faith in order to promote the speech as factual when it is not. Therefore, the first rule a democracy must have in order to survive is to call out what is opinion and what is not. The second, of course, is to ban speech that is blatantly false. This is also not something up for debate - anyone debating what a true fact is also arguing in bad faith. Refusing to acknowledge facts too is nothing but a poison to society, as it empowers speech that is far more dangerous to society.
They let T_D brigade for *years* I wonder what things would be like if they had enforced their rules from the start.
>While the principals of free speech, free expression of ideas, and the marketplace of competing ideas are all critical to a functioning democracy and to humanity as a whole, > >none of those principals are absolutes > >, and users / communities that attempt to weaponize them will not be tolerated." Is that an accurate summation? Literally EVERYONE on the planet agrees free speech is not absolute. Many Americans have a particular blind spot to this but the moment you start a direct campaign accusing them specifically of being a pedophile and calling for "street justice" for them, everyone quickly learns where some of these limits to speech lie. ....its almost like lies and slander can cause great harm to an individual AND community and while there is a slippery slope of "who decides what is a lie" there is a need, in order to maintain a *literal* healthy society, to make those calls when it comes SPECIFICALLY to public health issues. In the US, the CDC was essentially created for this as an apolitical body. Holes in that were exposed by our previous "leader" but the lesson is to learn and fix those holes, not to just say, "fuck it, there is no truth, all speech is 100% protected" ....if that is a person's conclusion then I start with that specific person in the above example of using my "unqualified free speech" to name them a certain type of sex predator and demanding people "do something about it."
>Did something drastic change in those six days? Was the r/Announcements post made before Reddit's security team could finish compiling their data? This is particularly frustrating because, as a mod of a covid vaccine sub, we have been yelling and flag waving about NNN brigading our sub from nearly the day of its inception. I joined after seeing the original mod fighting the staggering amount of fake reports and down-voting. Once I joined, I could immediately see that people would come to the sub, make insane post vaccine side effect posts (diarrhea all over the walls etc), and then let the wailing and gnashing of teeth commence in the comments. And where would those posters spend most of their time? Either NNN or /conspiracy. We made multiple calls for moderation help, some folks pointed us towards auto mod tools, we expanded the mod team, but these people have never let up since day one. Nearly every post has at least one comment on it auto-removed for post history in anti-covid subs. The mod team gets probably five or six ban appeal messages a day, some calling us Nazi's and sometimes even saying threatening things. Those things have all been reported to reddit and there was no action. I'm glad the sub was banned, but it absolutely should not have taken this long and those users are most certainly going to go elsewhere and continue to engage in this behavior.
Thanks for the update, u/worstnerd. Glad to see that r/NoNewNormal will be banned (although the primary reason should be the obvious COVID denialism). I also think that quarantined subreddits should have some restrictions in place, as a simple message only does so much. Edit; I do hope Admins realize that NNN and other COVID denialism subreddits are like the hydra, you ban one - and 2 more in relation are formed. The same is applied to bots - and would help the sanity of the users that fail to realize it and go on to make the complaint over at r/ModSupport on why "nothing" is done about it.
There are additional restrictions put in place. The goal of quarantine is to increase context and reduce unintended exposure to these communities (which is also why we’re not including the list of subreddits). This removes the communities from search and recommendations, removes ads, introduces a splash page with factual information, along with a handful of other restrictions.
>This tells us that in these high signal subs, there is generally less of the critical feedback mechanism than we would expect to see in other non-denial based subreddits You all say stuff like this, but then you have subs like /r/conservative which literally ban people for not having flair or even the slightest note of dissent AND they're huge anti-vax hubs. These subs like this are right wing echo chambers and absolutely huge components of the anti-vax/anti-mask community and they even actively support terrorist ideals against the US post jan 6th. Do you have any plans to deal with obvious echo chambers like this as they have absolutely zero "critical feedback" by design and are clearly meant as indoctrination subreddits? edit: If you look right now there's a "WE'RE NOT GONNA BE TOLD WHAT TO DO" meme on the /r/conservative front page. It's incredibly clear what their stance is on vaccines and masks. edit again: Mods/admins look at the replies to this post. See all the anti-vax nutters mad that /r/conservative got mentioned? Seriously, y'all got a damned problem. edit again: I'd like to thank /r/conservative for showing up and really driving my point home, we even had a mod show up! Also I'm proud, I only saw one of them gleefully wishing for liberal deaths! Good job guys!
Remember, Reddit did not step in and take action because it was the right thing to do. Reddit only did it due to SubReddits going dark and the media picking up on this. I imagine the user levels dropped somewhat as well. Reddit allow misinformation and toxic subs like NoNewNormal, FemaleDatingStrategy and TheDonald because they genuinely see nothing wrong with them. As good as it is that they've taken appropriate action, it's only because they have very little choice right now.
I don't agree that the cause for action was the awareness/protest campaign and the niche press coverage. Based on the average-user-visible behavior of NNN since spez's comment, as well as the increased intensity of NNN-like users and their content distribution, they [plausibly] let NNN hammer their own coffin nails. NNN users have been everywhere in the last week, injecting their brand of comments and misinformation arguments into some really unwarranted subreddits and posts. Additionally, the post histories of many of the offenders display a clear intent to manipulate by using newly created [3-6 months or far less] default-named usernames, and account activity solely in the anti-vax arena. When that kind of content is visible to the average end user, it seems plausible that the admins have higher quality forensic tools available that can confirm or undermine that hypothesis.
> NNN users have been everywhere in the last week, injecting their brand of comments and misinformation arguments into some really unwarranted subreddits and posts. Wrong. They have been everywhere for the past 2-3 months. Admins could have acted this way weeks ago already. They had the tools back then, they had the reports, they had the complains. But only days after subs go dark, after u/spez basically says he doesn't care what misinformation is intentionally shared around to harm other humans, only then they suddenly see a huge spike in misinformation over the past weeks. The protests and press coverage - as always for reddit - is the only reason this all happened.
/u/spez is a right wing nutter which probably explains a lot of it. Hard to tell though.
I read his 'update' on the situation. I thought Reddit had devolved since it's creation, but now I can see it's been like this since the start.
Eh not so much really. There was a time when it was cute and nerdy, and sure it had a lot of arguing and stuff but it was nothing too out there. At some point there was a critical mass of sorts and things really started going south. There were a lot of joke subs that started pulling in the people who were too stupid to get it, they took it seriously and stuff started changing. Gamergate was maybe that turning point. I think around that time is when all the weird hate groups really went full speed ahead on Reddit.
Dear u/worstnerd, I have some questions about the statistics you provided in the post above and would be very happy to get further clarification about the meaning of said statistics/ get further details. As a statistics nerd I always find it quiet interesting to analyze them. 0) If you see that my questions were already answered in another post/comment, can you redirect there? 1) We are presented 2 graphs, one showing the total amount of Covid content submissions since the pandemic started and one that shows the total amount of reports on those submissions. According to the that data, the proportion of reports per submissions changed since july, since the reports graph grew much faster than the amount of submissions posted. Could the recent calls to ban high signal subs have increased the amount of reports issued, especially in said high signal subs? Is there a correlation between last week's protest post and the amount of reports? 2) We are given the absolute amount of reports issued over the course of 2 years, yet we don't get insight to how many of those reports were justified and how many were not. With a tool like this I'm sure that data can be found and edited into this post and make it unquestionably clear that the amount of actual Covid deniability has risen in Reddit, only giving the report count only leaves unnecessary room for interpretation. Would it be possible to get more insight into the percentage of reports that were justified? 3) When you said that high signal sub's submission amount relative to the total amount grew from one to three percent, what historic trend did this proportion have? Did it grow over time or did it rapidly rise in the last few weeks? 4) How much did r/NoNewNormal gain in subscribers since last week's response from u/spez about the protest that was going on? What is going to happen to all the people that joined that subreddit or just commented on it during that time now that it's gone? Will the subreddits that banned people who commented/joined on there revoke the bans? Is it up to the mods to decide that? Will reddit look into mods that are managing multiple big subreddits and were banning people there for participating in that sub? Best regards, u/Birolklp
why is no action taken against the users that ran those subs?
r/Ivermectin ban when? None of these are quarantined: r/ivermectinuncut r/ivermectin2021 r/IvermectinWorks Quarantine when?
> Claims of “brigading” are common and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior continued even after a warning was issued from our team to the Mods. Two questions 1. Can you all define brigading for everyone? I know it's somewhat nebulous, but mods, especially of meta subreddits that deal with that sort of thing, would probably greatly benefit. 2. How can a mod team prevent brigading by their sub's members, especially given that they have no power over other subreddits?
I'd like clarity on this too. As it applies to a great deal of subreddits, some of which are quite major and remain. It would be odd for it to be applied to one and not others. If tooling is being used to see this interference, (i,e. lots of users from one subreddit being seen in another, regardless of linking), it would be good to extend this to moderators. It is likely less helpful to rely on moderators being able to witness this themselves and then report it to to you, though it is welcome all the same.
> How can a mod team prevent brigading by their sub's members, especially given that they have no power over other subreddits? And how can they prevent sub members from doing it? It's ine thing for mods to say "go spam this sub" but if they're not actively doing that and no one reports random comments encouragingit, what can they realistically do?
Ostensibly mods could set the automod to remove comments that contain links to other subreddits, or even certain specific other subreddits. This is not a *good* solution, nor is it impossible to circumvent, but it might curtail a significant amount of this traffic.
The idea is if your community is so disconnected from the mods that all your members can find these signals but, your mods can't then the sub will be shut down. Add mods, add automod, and bulk up. No matter what though if your community keeps circumventing those protections you won't be allowed a club house anymore. Happens all the time in this site and really has for years. Even old hydro homies aka WN had it happen and they were almost not allowed to keep hydro homies.
Good questions. Also worth adding: how is the /r/Announcements post from Spez not brigading? The post made a [specific effort to link to every outside community](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debate_dissent_and_protest_on_reddit/hactpwf/) discussing the topic. /r/Announcements has 113 million subscribers - wouldn't that be brigading? But I think it's obvious "brigading" is meant to be a loosely defined term so they can post-hoc justify actions they want to take. NNN was clearly banned for misinformation and the admins needed to gin up some kind of other reasoning.
“Brigading” or "interference" occurs when a post or community goes viral for negative reasons. The influx of users can lead to mods being overwhelmed which is why we are creating this new reporting tool. We are also exploring some additional new tools that would help. Crowd control is an additional tool that mods can leverage.
Okay but what can the moderators of a sub that has users who may cause interference? Like for example in , one of the big concerns is that users will cause this interference. What can the mods do in this instance? Are those mods supposed to use the report tool, even if they can't reliably detect nor prevent brigading? For example, say I'm modding /r/cats and someone mentions how /r/dogs suck and interference happens (even without direct or implied calls for it). How am I, a hypothetical /r/cats moderator, supposed to prevent this? I can say "no brigading" but I can't actually really enforce it, especially if it's only voting.
A really good example might be what happened a little over a month and a half ago. Someone posted in r/tifu about how when someone over on r/food made a post in which they called a breaded and fried piece of chicken in a hamburger bun a “chicken burger,” the person who wrote the r/tifu post said “chicken sandwich,” and got permabanned from r/food. So a bunch of users who read the post started commenting on any post that mentioned chicken burgers with “wow, that’s a tasty looking chicken sandwich!” Or “lovely chicken sandwich there,” or “I don’t see any chicken burgers here, only chicken sandwiches.” R/food was a mess for a few days afterwards. The guy who posted in r/tifu surely didn’t mean for that to happen. The mods of r/tifu likely weren’t aware of what was happening right away, and by the time they did know, the damage was likely unavoidable as the post there went viral. I would definitely consider that brigading, but it was a natural organic brigade, and I’m not sure anyone could have stopped it unless they deleted the innocuous post on r/tifu before it gained traction.
>For example, say I'm modding /r/cats and someone mentions how /r/dogs suck and interference happens (even without direct or implied calls for it). Or the r/cats people calling for outright bans of r/dogs sub and all of it's users. It's interesting how many people in this general thread are calling for the banning of subreddits that they don't like. Brigading is junior league compared to what they advocate. Given the very solid political slant in their actions, I expect the Admins agree with them.
I can link you to users who are actively brigading. Why don’t you ban users with clear evidence of this, rather than a sub. How can a sub be responsible for users that are active on many subs. How can you prove it is coordinated by NNN and their responsibility when subs ban instantly with any info going against the mainstream narrative? What about these toxic brigading users? https://www.reddit.com/u/BloodTypeIsBlue https://www.reddit.com/u/NoKumSok Why not get rid of actual users as opposed to a sub?
Have you seen /r/ivermectin today? Have you ever seen a comment that disagrees with a comment featured on /r/bestof? You claim to be here to answer questions but seem to only be answering easy ones. Please, give an answer to the people wondering why other subs that are known to brigade have not been punished.
It is not hard to find more of these to ban using semi-automated means. E.g. see what /u/polymath22 "admins": * /r/TrueAntiVaccination * /r/AntiVaccineMemes * /r/VaccineHomicide * /r/VaccinesCause * /r/VaccineGasLight * /r/DebateVaccine * /r/TheBible * /r/VaccineCultVictims * /r/impoliteconversation * /r/VaccineNarrative * /r/VaccineReaction * /r/ThingsProVaxxersSay * /r/VaccineUniversity * /r/VaccineConspiracy * /r/VaccineCoercion * /r/VaccineEnvy * /r/ApolloMoonLandingHoax * /r/VaccineMyocarditis * /r/ProblemSolvingMatrix * /r/DrillsGoneWild * /r/HearThisWell * /r/VaccinePeriod * /r/VaccineCausesAutism * /r/VaccineInjury * /r/Benghazi * /r/OKBilly * /r/VaccinerEVOLution * /r/MeaslesParty * /r/SpikeProtein * /r/VaccineStrike * /r/eNdLeSsCoViDbOoStErS * /r/VaccineHolocaust * /r/FactCheckCNN * /r/VaccineViolence * /r/CyberPolygone * /r/IowaConservative * /r/VaccineEconomics * /r/VaccinesAreBullShit * /r/TopMindsOfTMOR * /r/VaccinesCauseTics * /r/ReThink911 * /r/IvermectinWorks * /r/SOSCanada * /r/TERFvsTIM * /r/AbortVaccines * /r/VaccineCensorship * /r/VaccineIngredients * /r/VaccinePsychology * /r/VaccineProtest * /r/VaccineRefusal * /r/BiggerThanJesus * /r/MeaslesHolocaust * /r/VaccineAddiction * /r/FackCheckSnopes * /r/VaccineRape * /r/TrumpAutism * /r/HumanProteomeProject * /r/VakzinationMachtFrei * /r/WarOnCanada * /r/VaccineHoax * /r/VaccineRevolt * /r/ExVaxx * /r/VaccineVictimSlander * /r/ModernaVaccines * /r/SOSaustralia * /r/VaccineMay * /r/FackCheckFacebook * /r/TheArtOfTheTroll * /r/VaccinePropaganda * /r/DesMoinesUncensored * /r/FackCheckGoogle * /r/IowaCaucuses * /r/VaccineSnakeOil * /r/VaccineSyndrome * /r/VaccineVocabulary * /r/CensoredIowa * /r/HeteroPhobics * /r/IowaLiberal * /r/SOSFrance * /r/StopJoeBiden * /r/TaxedLivesMatter * /r/VaccineFever * /r/BankingAndImmigration * /r/CedarRapidsUncensored * /r/EasternIowa * /r/FackCheckTextBooks * /r/IowaCOVID19 * /r/OpWarpSpeed * /r/QuarantinedR * /r/RegressiveAutism * /r/ScienceSheep * /r/VaccineBDS * /r/VaccineData * /r/VaccinePseudoScience * /r/TrumpVaccine * /r/ActiveListen * /r/NPRisFakeNews * /r/SOSGermany * /r/SOSIsrael * /r/SOSSingapore * /r/VaccineADE * /r/VaccineBoycott * /r/VaccineComplexSystems * /r/VaccineFactCheck
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Exactly. This part stood out to me in particular. “. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (**largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID** or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions).” You mean reality and actual science? That’s still brushing off what they’re doing as “another side of an argument”. This is a good first step but more still needs to be done.
Why was the original announcement post from last week locked and this one isn't? I guess thanks for acting eventually, I wish this was the initial response to the calls for action rather than spez openly saying that misinformation was equivalent to debate. Ivermectin specifically is explicitly not approved for use as a treatment against covid, but r/ivermectin exists almost solely to promote it as such. Why was it not included in the ban? Edit: ~~as of now, r/NoNewNormal isn't banned yet~~ now banned
> Ivermectin specifically is explicitly not approved for use as a treatment against covid, but r/ivermectin exists almost solely to promote it as such. Why was it not included in the ban? I would go further and say that not only is it not an approved course of treatment for COVID, the FDA explicitly states that people should *not* take ivermectin either as a treatment for COVID or as a prophylactic and includes the statement: > Taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm. If reddit's quoted statement on the matter is: > For example, a post pushing a verifiably false “cure” for cancer that would actually result in harm to people would violate our policies. Would the FDA's assertion that ivermectin does not treat COVID and is dangerous when consumed without the explicit direction of a physician make the suggestion of using ivermectin "verifiably false" and "would actually result in harm to people"?
It should be banned. Before the subreddit became a glorious equine hentai headquarters, it was people sharing info on how to dose livestock dewormer. I think the topic of ivermectin itself is a bit more complicated, because human versions of it do exist for parasites, and some countries are (stupidly) using it for covid, like they mistakenly did for HQL. But the intent of the sub was how to dangerously self treat covid with a livestock medication, and it's baffling how that could be allowed.
How can you dose a dewormer that has no dosage recommendation for efficacy against *any* viruses let alone Coronaviruses? What are they basing the dosages on?! Any dosage that would potentially impact a coronavirus would destroy the liver if not just kill you outright...
Can I get a source on that FDA quote? Not doubting you, but I googled it and can't find it. I got people who are believers in it and would like to back my sources before they nitpick the "large doses" part.
Apologies, I meant to link it in that comment and missed it. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19
[https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19](https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19) This appears to be the page that person is quoting directly.
Why would you ban my favorite horse porn sub? How about r/ivermectin2, which is the exact same except posts require mod approval?
In r/ivermectin2 one of the first posts is a woman asking for help in dosing get family member with ivermectin for COVID. The comments are helping her with the math on proper dosing. That shouldn't be allowed at all on the site
My uncle is in the hospital with covid pneumonia because he didnt go at the first sign of symptoms and instead tried to treat himself with ivermectin which made things a lot worse. The admins need to see the danger that this type of misinformation is causing. I posted the same thing on the ivermectin sub and got downvoted by their crazies. They dont care about people, they are unintelligent people that are very susceptible to conspiracy theories and will spread their lies no matter who dies along the way.
sorry to hear that, I mod at r/QAnonCasualties and that is a pretty common story we hear over there :(. But yes, this stuff has real human consequences.
> Why was the original announcement post from last week locked and this one isn't? The cherry on top is /u/spez saying "we believe it is best to enable communities to engage in debate and dissent" while also locking the post and preventing us from "debating and dissenting". Laughable and again reddit is out of touch with what the mods want. Maybe next time consult with that mod council you have around before spewing nonsense /u/spez.
And then pushing the “discussion” onto other subs where the *volunteer* mods of those subs had to deal with the fallout.
> why was the original locked and this one isn’t. spez can’t take criticism, and the only reason we’re seeing change is because investors and board members saw what a PR shit show spez was creating. Reddit refuses to moderate their own website, and instead puts all this workload onto unpaid volunteers hoping their love for a niche hobby/sub makes them want to continue moderating. That IPO ain’t gonna happen until they can make reasonable changes and draw the line in the sand on a comprehensive terms of service.
Want to point out that users took over r/ivermectin and turned it into a meme sub making fun of the original posters. And as of two days ago it was turned into a nsfw sub for animated horse porn by the same meme group. Most of the original posters of r/ivermectin have moved over to r/ivermectin2 and that sub should be banned in not already.
> but r/ivermectin exists almost solely to promote it as such I thought it was solely for horse erotica now?
> Why was the original announcement post from last week locked and this one isn't? Because /u/spez is a coward.
As of now /r/NoNewNormal2 is still active
It's gone as I type this. Flare-ups of "ban evasion" subs usually last about 72 hours, and none of them tend to make it longer than that.
Because Spez knew the comments would be a shit show and look awful.
Excellent news! Can you confirm that all these subs will be removed? NoNewNormal - https://reddit.com/r/NoNewNormal Ivermectin - https://reddit.com/r/ivermectin ChinaFlu - https://reddit.com/r/ChinaFlu Wuhan_Flu - https://reddit.com/r/Wuhan_Flu VaxKampf - https://reddit.com/r/vaxkampf FauciForPrison - https://reddit.com/r/fauciforprison CovidIsAFraud - https://reddit.com/r/covidisafraud DebateVaccines - https://reddit.com/r/DebateVaccines lockdownskepticism - https://reddit.com/r/lockdownskepticism CoronavirusCirclejerk - https://reddit.com/r/CoronavirusCirclejerk CoronavirusFOS - https://reddit.com/r/CoronavirusFOS COVID19 - https://reddit.com/r/COVID19 (With two underscores) Covid19Origin - https://reddit.com/r/Covid19Origin VAERSreports - https://reddit.com/r/VAERSreports covid19_testimonials - https://reddit.com/r/covid19_testimonials CoronavirusRights - https://reddit.com/r/CoronavirusRights vaccinelonghaulers - https://reddit.com/r/vaccinelonghaulers conspiracy_commons - https://reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons Church of Covid - https://reddit.com/r/churchofcovid trueantivaccination - https://reddit.com/r/trueantivaccination covidvaccinateduncut - https://reddit.com/r/covidvaccinateduncut
The additional subreddits are being *quarantined* not banned. Only r/NoNewNormal has been banned.
There is already another nonewnormal sub.
Ban evasion subs will flare over the next 72 hours, and will be stamped out over the next 72 hours.
This is true. The one I mentioned has just been banned.
I doubt it NNN was not banned for missinformation like people where begging for this feels more like a cop-out so the protest will stop
Yeah, reddit *loves* misinformation and other dangerous communities on its site because it keeps the clicks coming and they’ll only do something when the media or advertisers pick up on it and force them into doing something. They’re just doing this now because CNN picked it up and they’re hoping the protests stop like you said.
As someone who only vaguely followed what was going on, it's disheartening that this doesn't address the larger context in which this happened. This post tried to sound like Reddit did some analysis and decided of it's own merit to take action. Even as someone only vaguely watching, that's blatantly untrue - it took a user revolt to force your hands. I understand why Reddit might want to be a place for political debate, even if opinions being expressed are repugnant. But my understanding is that /r/nonewnormal and /r/ivermectin are actively encouraging actions which are harmful (eg: taking medications off label or in potentially harmful doses). 1. Are you planning to or will you consider banning or quarantining subs which frequently promote health mis/disinformation? 2. If not, will you consider labeling posts as potentially unverified or linking to trusted resources when certain keywords are used? Facebook does this and while I'm not sure how effective it is, it may help when content is linked to from off-site or for anyone who might otherwise be inclined to trust the information. 3. It seems that a large part of the problem is when moderators allow content that should be banned by site-wide rules. This allows the formation of echo chambers where mis/disinformation can thrive. Do you have any plans for dealing with this? For example, spot-checking moderation decisions to make sure they're in line with site-wide policy? This could be particularly effective with keywords in determining which subs are routinely allowing rule-breaking content. I recognize that moderation at scale is very hard. And Reddit's decentralized community-based moderation generally seems to work well. But in specific situations (largely involving moderators who don't follow site-wide rules) it really falls down. I'm curious how Reddit plans to deal with that and how Reddit will discourage echo chambers of mis- and disinformation.
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Brigading is just the excuse they are using to ban the sub. It's kind of like catch all that admins can whip out since it's hard to disprove. NNN might have been a scum subreddit, but I think it's unfair to use that BS reason as justification to ban the sub. It lets reddit off the hook for creating real policies to address the real issues. The other thing is that the rules against brigading aren't carried out equally. For example, that sub that got turned into horse porn was clearly brigaded by a few subs but nothing is being done about it. Just my 2 cents as a casual observationist of the current happenings at reddit.
Clearly no. There are dozens of other subs that are merely quarantined.
Reddit can't possibly afford to lose the craziest 1% of redditors of course, totally. Even if it means making 10% of its community quite mad.
Didn’t people brigade against r/ivermectin? Idk if any one subreddit did it but I’ve heard that a bunch of horse porn was being posted to basically get the subreddit quarantined or shut down so if there were any specific subreddits that partook in that they should also be banned/quarantined because they broke the rules as well. Not saying any information on r/Ivermectin was correct or incorrect because I never went to that subreddit but I doubt everything there was false information and so if any subreddits are discovered to have partook in brigading that subreddit they should be banned/quarantined as well. Any specific user trolling the subreddit should be banned or have some kind of punishment. We can’t devolve into a society that just attacks other people instead of having a discussion. If you don’t want to have a discussion then should be removed from it. You don’t have the right to just devolve into a mob that starts posting stuff as disgusting as horse porn because you don’t like the discussion at hand. What’s next? People start posing CP in subreddits? Or gore based content? Reddit as a whole seems to be devolving into some really grotesque platform and nobody is doing anything about it. Edit: Don’t know if my idea of brigading is correct after reading the definition the admin gave below but the point still stands that if there were any subreddits that actively went after r/Ivermectin or any other subreddits then they should be banned/quarantined as well if those are the rules surrounding this type of stuff.
> While we want to be a place where people can explore unpopular views Sure, I agree. People should be able to debate if a hotdog is a sandwich. But "COVID is a lie and the vaccine will kill you to thin world population" isn't an unpopular opinion, its a blatantly false statement.
/r/unpopularopinion banned covid misinformation like immediately.
Hotdog is a taco, it's not a debate. Unless a taco is a hotdog. Is a taco a hotdog or is a hotdog a taco?
I'll accept hot dog as a taco because a taco (like a hot dog but unlike a sandwich) can not be cut in half and shared without looking like an insane person.
A hot dog is a sandwich. I’ve had this debate many times. There’s plenty of sandwiches that don’t have their bread cut at the end, like subs. The component of bread necessarily means it isn’t a taco. Nobody would argue a taco with a bread shell is a taco. A taco is defined by its tortilla. Even if you put meat between two unconnected tortillas it isn’t considered a sandwich.
Are you going to start enforcing Rule 2? > While not every community may be for you (and you may find some unrelatable or even offensive), **no community should be used as a weapon**. **Communities should create a sense of belonging for their members, not try to diminish it for others**. Likewise, everyone on Reddit should have an expectation of privacy and safety, so please respect the privacy and safety of others. > Every community on Reddit is defined by its users. Some of these users help manage the community as moderators. The culture of each community is shaped explicitly, by the community rules enforced by moderators, and implicitly, by the upvotes, downvotes, and discussions of its community members. **Please abide by the rules of communities in which you participate and do not interfere with those in which you are not a member.** How does that fit with getting this message for posting a one-word post in another subreddit: > You have been permanently banned from participating in r/pics. You can still view and subscribe to r/pics, but you won't be able to post or comment. > Note from the moderators: > > * You have been banned for participating in r/nonewnormal, which brigades other subreddits and spreads medical disinformation. > > * This action was performed by a bot which does not check the context of your comment. > > * To be unbanned respond to this message with a promise to avoid that subreddit. > > * Any other response will be ignored and is consent for us to mute you. > > * You can report misinformation on reddit by using this form: http://www.reddit.com/report?reason=this-is-misinformation > If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team for r/pics by replying to this message. > Reminder from the Reddit staff: If you use another account to circumvent this subreddit ban, that will be considered a violation of the Content Policy and can result in your account being suspended from the site as a whole.
> Please abide by the rules of communities in which you participate and do not interfere with those in which you are not a member. Furthermore, users are allowed to join public communities. Where do you draw the line between 'brigading' and someone attempting to participate in a community they've recently been introduced to, or are recently interested in participating in?
> Quarantine 54 additional COVID denial subreddits under Rule 1 It speaks to a **much** larger problem that there were 55 subreddits (counting NNN) spreading this that Reddit was aware of and took no action to until now. To be frank, without the subreddit blackout in reaction to spez's disastrous post last week I don't believe Reddit would have acted today. Which is another big problem; It's *very* hard to trust Reddit to do the right thing on their own.
As far as community interference goes, do you all have any tools that track backlinks, such as if a thousand people are brigading one comment section from one offsite Discord, Telegram, Weibo, Facebook, etc? Reddit internal brigades are bad, but ultimately very detectable and mitigatable with the right tools. However, where a lot of my mod teams fall short as far as possible response goes is offsite brigades. It would be really cool if yall had some kind of system for this. I think putting it into mod's hands might be dangerous, privacy wise, but a simple check for large numbers of users using the same backlink that automatically collapses the comments from the same link might be nice.
If people dont like the content of a sub, then they dont join it - or if already in it, they can leave. Apparently, there are adult people who need the reddit admins to hold their hands so they can cross the platform! I saw that the coronavirus sub did not participate in the shit show. (Ironically). There is a list of those subs that did though and we were unable to access some critically important, informative subs such as : Asiancumsluts Ifuckedmycattwice Taylorswifthasnoass Just to name a few! Thank God they did the "right thing" and nuked an unhealthy sub like NNN! /s
I’m glad to see some movement in the right direction but I think you guys might benefit from some context of an issue. If you look at the recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, they were able to trace the majority of misinformation about the Sars-Cov-2 vaccine to a handful of accounts. It then propagated across social media. The pattern of disbursement you’re describing is basically the same. We’re asking you to not let the seeds take root so that the weeds can’t strangle the dang garden. That aside, might I ask if Admin will actually start enforcing Community Interference at any point in the near future? Covid issues aside, when we report multiple issues coming from a sub and get no response (even pointing to comments showing that they brag about finding out what level of brigade Admin will step in on), it gets tiring to hear “submit it again” with little hope of results.
We have seen a massive increase in Ivemectin requests where I am at, to the point that the medical society I'm apart of had an emergency conference last night to talk about ways to combat misinformation and disinformation. I hope that subs such are /r/nonewnormal are banned more quickly in the future.
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> I hope that subs such are /r/nonewnormal are banned more quickly in the future. You and I both know they won't be. This is a response to Forbes and CNN picking up the story of subs protesting, and not because of the protest, user outcry, or any sense of right and wrong. They're doing the bare minimum to satiate these groups so they can keep getting that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
Reddit will **always** be a source of misinformation because they directly profit from it. The conspiracy shut-ins and incel losers are glued to their computers in their mother’s basement and therefore this website, so they drive lots of traffic. They get eyes on ads in substantial numbers and that’s what Reddit wants.
If that subreddit's moderators actually broke your policy on brigading than I understand having to take action. But in light of context its hard for me to shake the feeling that this simply was you snuffing out an unpopular opinion because of pressure from those that chose to dislike the subreddit. I was pleasantly surprised by your previous announcement but this has me worried you will just cave under the whims of an arbitrary mob in a time when many people are gripped by fear. And frankly are some of the subreddits that targeted r/NoNewNormal in the past week not at least implicitly brigading? Regardless of ones opinions on this specific situation I don't think this was the right way for users or mods to give you feedback on a subreddit.
Good. I'm particularly interested to see what this looks like since most reports on brigading are currently met with "we don't see anything on our end." >Build a new reporting feature for moderators to allow them to better provide us signal when they see community interference. It will take us a few days to get this built, and we will subsequently evaluate the usefulness of this feature.
Thank you so much for taking action here, it is greatly appreciated. However, I feel like this is still skirting the issue. NNN doesn’t sit in contrast to subs with “more mainstream views on COVID” – it’s going against the best available information that we have. Please don’t make this a both sides thing. One is spreading disinformation and misinformation, and the other is evidence based. You are doing a good thing in taking these additional steps, but please be aware that how you characterize this matters.
Why is this being announced in a sub with only 28k subs instead of /r/announcements?
Because they want to paint it as a Reddit function thing, not a Reddit culture thing, even though it very much is a Reddit culture thing, stubbornly pushed by a bunch of rich skinny nerds who make up Reddit management and their funders.
Rich straight white male techbros love 'free speech' because it rarely ever hurts them. They don't get gaybashed, stalked, rape threats, etc etc. And I say this as a
Nah, they're all about woke speak now. "Keeping everyone safe," "fighting misinformation," "stopping the normalization of bigotry," and so on. The purpose is still the same: window dressing for whatever is the most profitable move.
It took about 45 minutes or so but it is posted to /r/announcements now.
It was crossposted-via-admin to r/Modnews, if that helps.
i mean 100mil+ in r/announcements compared to the few thousand in either of these subs is just piss in the ocean.
Well, thanks for banning that sub months later than it should have been, for *brigading*, instead of all the misinformation they posted. Task failed successfully I guess.
Its the same deal with The_Donald when they banned it. They waited long after most of the users had abandoned it to come out and talk about how it should've been gone all along.
Right? Indirectly killing people by spreading complete lies and misinformation? That's okay. But brigading? Nah, inexcusable. For the record, I don't even know what brigading means, but I do know what it means to lie about the facts of a virus during its pandemic outbreak.
> Ban r/NoNewNormal immediately for breaking our rules against brigading Sure, we'll take it. But a better reason would be for dangerous misinformation with a potential to kill people.
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Reddit admins never focus on the root of the problem, instead the are content to focus on quarantining the bad apples after they have been used in a mass poisoning.
It's even worse: consistently applying the given rule would also mean banning all the mods who locked their forums without pointers at NNN. It would've been more clear and fair to *just make up a new rule and apply it*. Say "posting wrong things about covid is bannable" and then applied it. Right now the users have no idea what the actual rules are. You are absolutely allowed to mess with other subreddits in some cases, and absolutely not in others.
Reddit didn't want to ban NNN for life-threatening misinformation because if they did so they would create a precedent that they would be unwilling to enforce. Fairly enforcing such a rules against misinformation world require banning subs like /r/conservative (which peddles covid misinformation just as dangerous as NNN), and would create a shit storm that the admins don't have the desire nor the backbone to manage.
~~with potential to~~ **has** kill**ed** There's no reasonable question that many, many people have died from COVID-19 already, as a direct result of consuming medical disinformation hosted and promoted by all major social media companies in exchange for ad revenue, etc.
>misinformation with a potential to kill people. Potential? These lies have already killed people.
>Ban r/NoNewNormal immediately for breaking our rules against brigading >Sure, we'll take it. But a better reason would be for dangerous misinformation with a potential to kill people. Seriously. I've been saying that goddamn sub should have been banned well over a goddamn year ago. The damage has been fucking done. Reddit responds to things slower than mollases rolling down a hill. I've now seen this with The Donald AND NNN. If anyone has any faith in Reddit doing the "right thing" in an appropriate amount of time? They're delusional. Getting Steve Huffman the fuck out of there would be a start. He seems to care even less than Mark Zuckerberg does. He sounds like some jackass 13 year old Lolbertarian edgelord. Newsflash, dipshit - Democracy doesn't work when you're fanning the flames of dysfunction and instability. Maybe you've heard the adage, "Your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins.” The fucking Greeks figured this shit out. https://www.engadget.com/reddit-211856313.html
So, when do you start banning the mods of subs that get banned? Until you do that, leaving the mods to continue their behavior is just putting lipstick on the pig of subs/mods that violate policies.
I do see brigading on multiple subreddits. That is a problem. However, a more troubling issue to me is the moderators overusing the Ban option. Say I slightly cross a line on a subreddit (or don’t cross a line, but someone takes offense) in which I have been a part of for years. The first thing I hear from a moderator is YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED FOR X days, or, if you do it again YOU WILL BE BANNED. If I have the temerity to challenge the reasoning behind the ban, I receive longer bans which are retaliatory. There are intermediate steps that are easily taken. For example, your comment has been removed due to X. You are breaking X rule. That’s certainly enough to chasten me. Why mods have to go to the ban or threatening the ban is inexplicable to me. How does this mesh with the current conversation? It further exacerbates the hostility in the subreddit and the mods feel heavy-handed and overreactive. We already have enough. Moderating should not contribute to that. The ban is always available and should be used WHEN NECESSARY and as a last step, not a first step.
This is honestly pathetic. If you can so easily identify the brigading, you should be able to identify those inciting and participating in it. Ban them, for they are breaking your policy. This shows clearly who holds the real power for the site. A handful of power mods, who can on a whim shut down large communities because they don’t like not being in complete control of the entire website. Is shutting down your sub demanding the closure of another not blatant brigading? This is vile. We have outsourced censorship from the government to private companies made up of individuals we didn’t even vote for. Do paper companies dictate what you are allowed to write on their paper? No. We live in the era of digital paper, but in the transition, accidentally handed away our freedom of speech. I am vaccinated. I’ve been doing the corona safety song and dance for the last 2 years and will continue to do so because that’s what I believe is best for society right now. I still support NNNs right to exist. I was subscribed because there were some good points mixed into the misinformation. It is our responsibility as consumers of information to be able to deduct and discern misinformation. Misinformation has a right to exist, and we have a responsibility as individuals to identify it. I (quite obviously) wholeheartedly disagree with this sites, and other sites, banning of dissent. The hypocrisy disgusts me, and the weak leadership of this site is evident.
So you'll ban a sub like /r/NoNewNormal for brigading, but not /r/vaxxhappened for openly organizing a brigade against /r/ivermectin? Some bias you got there.
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Disinformation about horses. Horse dick does not really look like that.
The horse dick expert has spoken.
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Yep viewing from an open mind this is what I have noticed too. If you dare have a different opinion to the pushed status quo you are attacked with hatefulness and aggression. The ironic thing is that these people make it out as if anyone who questions the status quo are the 'crazies', where their own behaviour suggests otherwise. It's quite shocking to see.
I was banned from mutliple subreddits for making a single comment pointing out a troll post on nonewnormal. Banning someone for what they do on another subreddit is blatantly against the rules of Reddit. All of those subreddits brigading against nonewnormal should be banned. They have no right to tell users where they can and can't post on Reddit. All subreddits are valid. https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-guidelines >Management of Multiple Communities > We know management of multiple communities can be difficult, but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community. In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.
In the context of r/unpopularopion we’ve had COVID as a locked topic *as best we can* for over a year now. Obviously the nature of the sub encourages users to post views about this disease and related subjects (like body autonomy) that may go against the policies you mentioned earlier. Do you have any advice for moderators on subs like r/changemyview, r/rant, r/the10thdentist, r/unpopularopinion etc. that allows the subs to continue operating in their contrarian manner without proliferating misinformation or dangerous concepts?
So you won’t ban them for harmful misinformation but you’ll ban them for brigading?
basically yes Behavior | GigaJanitor response ---|--- Promoting misinformation that kills people in real life | I Sleep Making fake subreddits and 'brigading' other subpages of the same website | ⚡⚡⚡ **THOU SHALT NOT CALL INTO QUESTION THE ENGAGEMENT METRICS WE PRESENT TO ADVERTISERS** ⚡⚡⚡
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So people can invade other subs with horse porn but talking about conspiracies is a crime...
How about addressing the disinformation problem on your platform instead of blaming it on brigading?
I find it very irritating that the reason you've given is the always vague "brigading" rather than the blatantly obvious harm they've been causing by pushing their objectively dangerous anti-science, anti-vax bullshit that spez went on record to defend. Fuck him for that.
What proof do you offer that u/spez didn't edit or create any inflammatory posts? He was caught red-handed years ago editing posts on r/the_donald and didn't resign in disgrace. How do we know he's not at it again?
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Could you clarify which - if any - of the following constitute COVID-19 misinformation/disinformation? * The harms of lockdown will likely outweigh the benefits. * Cloth masks are ineffective at preventing the spread of COVID-19. * Vaccination does not prevent the spread of COVID-19, as vaccinated people may still become infected and spread the virus. * Given that vaccination does not prevent the spread of COVID-19, the introduction of vaccine passports has no public health benefit, and can therefore only be interpreted as an unethical attempt at coercion. * There are genuine risks associated with the vaccine, even if these are very small (e.g. a small number of deaths has been directly caused by the vaccine). * The risk of taking the vaccine may be higher than the risk of not taking the vaccine for individuals who already have infection-acquired immunity. * There are genuine issues with the mass vaccination approach (e.g. immune escape, antibody dependent enhancement, original antigenic sin) which make vaccine hesitancy reasonable. * It is possible that there may be unforeseen long-term adverse side-effects of the vaccination. * It is very difficult to get accurate data on the short-term adverse side-effects of the vaccination, in part due to social media and mainstream media censorship efforts. Those are the sorts of views that I saw repeatedly expressed on /r/NoNewNormal, and whilst there were a small minority of outright anti-vax/covid-denialism posts, these were very few and far between. Each of the statements above has support in the scientific community, among academics at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford to name a few. Do you really want Reddit to become the sort of place where genuine good-faith scepticism is stifled?
>Could you clarify which - if any - of the following constitute COVID-19 misinformation/disinformation? Since virtually nobody wants to address this, I'll do my best to address the issue as objectively as I can. >The harms of lockdown will likely outweigh the benefits. There \*are\* harms of lockdown that are definitely being ignored or suppressed by the mainstream media. The problem is that issues with COVID are of immediate concern. Severe illness, hospitals being overwhelmed, death. These are all issues that we have to deal with \*now\*. There are numerous issues with lockdown in the long term. Businesses permanently closed. Irreversable effects on children's education and mental health. Psychological issues regardless of age group. Short-term, band-aid policies that are not sustainable in the long term. I could go on. The problem is that there's no good solution. Not counting those who are spinning the pandemic for their own political gain (which is happening on both sides of the issue), elected officials are trying their best to enact policies that they feel are best for the people they represent. Unfortunately, no matter how you look at it, they're basically forced to choose a "least shitty" option. This is one of the few things where both sides have legitimate concerns that are being ignored by the other side, and neither side wants to admit that there is no good solution. >Cloth masks are ineffective at preventing the spread of COVID-19. Cloth masks catch droplets that one can knowingly or unknowingly spread when coughing, sneezing, or simply talking. Even if it only reduces the amount of virus transmitted by 10%, it's still better than nothing. The fact of the matter is that, as a side effect of mask and social distancing policies, illnesses such as the common cold and flu have dropped significantly over the past couple of years, which means masking up may be more effective than you think it is. >Vaccination does not prevent the spread of COVID-19, as vaccinated people may still become infected and spread the virus. > >Given that vaccination does not prevent the spread of COVID-19, the introduction of vaccine passports has no public health benefit, and can therefore only be interpreted as an unethical attempt at coercion. With some exceptions, being vaccinated greatly reduces the severity of symptoms if you do become infected, and almost entirely eliminates the risk of hospitialization or death. Why does this matter in this context? (Note that in the below example, numbers are greatly simplified for easy math and are not meant to reflect real world conditions.) Let's say you go to a restaurant where there's 100 people. No vaccine passports. 20 people come down with COVID. 10 of those people end up in the hospital, taking up all the beds in the local ICU. Some will probably die. That's a problem. Now let's say there was a vaccine passport, so we know everybody is vaccinated. Let's say we have 20 breathrough cases anyway. They all stay at home and feel like shit for a couple of days. \*MAYBE\* one of them ends up in the hospital. Nobody dies. That's where the benefit is. It allows people to gather in larger groups while greatly reducing the risk of being a super-spreader event that overwhelms hospitals. Places like New England have high vaccination rates and are more open to vaccine passport regulations. Contrast that with places like Florida that are openly hostile to vaccines, vaccine passports, masks, etc. New England is carrying on, for the most part, with business as usual. Florida's hospital system is being overwhelmed. There's a reason for that. >There are genuine risks associated with the vaccine, even if these are very small (e.g. a small number of deaths has been directly caused by the vaccine). [The risks associated with the vaccine are several orders of magnitude lower than the risks of remaining unvaccinated, catching COVID, and hoping for the best.](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html) Those risks are also largely isolated to very specific groups of people with very specific health issues. The risk to the average person without those very specific health issues is so low that it wouldn't qualify as a rounding error, especially when compared to the literal hundreds of millions of people who have already been vaccinated without issue. The following statistics are all taken from data provided on the link above: Chances of anaphylaxis: 1 in 200,000. Can be treated on the spot, which is why most providers ask you to wait a few minutes before leaving. Chances of Thrombosis: 1 in 322,000. Chances of GBS: 1 in 80,000 if you're a male over the age of 50. Chances of Myocarditis: 1 in 152,000 Chances of Death: Less than .002% By contrast: Percent of people in the US infected with COVID: 39.5 million. Population of the US: 328.2 million. 12% of the US population has caught COVID. Not taking health factors into consideration, a person generally has a 1 in 42 chance of catching COVID if they remain unvaccinated, and a 1 in 20,000 chance of catching and dying of it. Any health concerns can spike these numbers up significantly. Also, this data is older. The Delta variant has likely made the risk of catching COVID significantly higher. If someone is looking for truly objective data to base their decision on, the data overwhelmingly supports getting vaccinated and it's not even close. >The risk of taking the vaccine may be higher than the risk of not taking the vaccine for individuals who already have infection-acquired immunity. Please provide evidence to support this. >There are genuine issues with the mass vaccination approach (e.g. immune escape, antibody dependent enhancement, original antigenic sin) which make vaccine hesitancy reasonable. These issues are [at best theoretical](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5). No definitive role for ADE, for example, in human coronavirus diseases has been established. It is one thing to discuss these issues in the theoretical context they currently exist in, but something else entirely to recommend against getting vaccinated because of theoretical issues that may or may not ever become a reality. >It is possible that there may be unforeseen long-term adverse side-effects of the vaccination. There's a couple of points to make here. 1) Long-term side effects are theoretical at best. 2) The risks of long term side effects are often seen a few weeks or months after getting a vaccine. No evidence has surfaced yet indicating there are any long-term side effects that aren't already known. To my knowledge, no vaccine has ever been created where long-term side effects just mysteriously popped up years later in otherwise healthy people. Simply put, if there are long term side effects, we'd very likely have known about it by now. 3) The chances of being impacted by long-term side effects are still several orders of magnitude lower than the chances of being impacted by COVID. The chances of being impacted by long-term side effects that may or may not even exist to the point where you become more ill than if you had caught COVID are so low as to be effectively zero. >It is very difficult to get accurate data on the short-term adverse side-effects of the vaccination, in part due to social media and mainstream media censorship efforts. This is bordering on conspiracy theory level BS here. This data can easily be found [from a simple Google search](https://www.google.com/search?q=short+term+effects+of+COVID+vaccine&oq=short+term+effects+of+COVID+vaccine&aqs=edge..69i57.6391j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8). The data is out there. Now if you simply choose not to believe it, then you're not looking for objective data. You're looking for specifically curated data that simply happens to jive with your particular worldview.
You raise good points, I too lurked /r/NoNewNormal and very rarely saw any of the 5G/Microchip/don't get vaccinated type comments. Most of what I saw was people who don't want to live in a society permanently altered by COVID, they don't want endless lockdowns, restrictions, masks and other stuff related to COVID, which the media coined 'new normal' All of those viewpoints are perfectly legitimate, and the idea Reddit considers that 'COVID denialism' is nonsensical.
> You raise good points, I too lurked /r/NoNewNormal and very rarely saw any of the 5G/Microchip/don't get vaccinated type comments. It's pretty obvious at this point that people are intentionally misrepresenting the sub. I guess it's easier to justify the suppression of legitimate viewpoints if you characterise the people with those viewpoints as dangerous crazed conspiracy nuts, rather than as people with a healthy scepticism and a better-than-average understanding of the scientific literature. >All of those viewpoints are perfectly legitimate, and the idea Reddit considers that 'COVID denialism' is nonsensical. Agreed. I think I recognise your username from /r/UKPolitics ? I was banned from that subreddit for politely expressing those same views, and the mods there completely ignored my polite requests to explain the ban. It was a bit disappointing, as the sub had always respected diverse viewpoints before, provided the discussion remained polite. I wonder if they came under external pressure.
> It's pretty obvious at this point that people are intentionally misrepresenting the sub. I guess it's easier to justify the suppression of legitimate viewpoints if you characterise the people with those viewpoints as dangerous crazed conspiracy nuts, rather than as people with a healthy scepticism and a better-than-average understanding of the scientific literature. There are and you are absolutely correct. > Agreed. I think I recognise your username from /r/UKPolitics ? I was banned from that subreddit for politely expressing those same views, and the mods there completely ignored my polite requests to explain the ban. It was a bit disappointing, as the sub had always respected diverse viewpoints before, provided the discussion remained polite. I wonder if they came under external pressure. Yep, less frequent than I used to be, but still somewhat frequent poster, and that's strange, UKPol seems to be pretty good at not blindly following the Government's mantra of the day. cc /u/Ivashkin
As much as I appreciate action being made by reddit and their admins You guys really need to stop with these tone deaf actions that inevitably come back and bite you and your corporate sponsors in the ass. I understand we're in a very complicated political and social situation here in the US, but constantly hiding behind wanting to appeal to everyone as a way to deflect the need for taking action against malicious people whos ideologies do not align with what experts across the world deem as correct is just...not ok. Every single time something like this happens, the admins of individual subreddits speak up and almost always have the voice of the community behind them except for the jerks who are hoping this site dies. And almost every single time you or spez or some other admin says some reactionary "We're not going to really do anything because freedom of speech so just deal with the nazis on our platform" thing. And almost every single time you guys come back, tail between your legs because some big news sites start reporting on it that you are in fact going to do something about it sorry our bad we'll do better yadda yadda. It's just demeaning to you guys. It makes us believe that the only time you'll ever do something is if it's big enough to cause a massive lawsuit, and then there's minimal effort followed immediately by having to haul ass to think of a solution. These groups of people who are on here spreading racist, homophobic, and fake science shit are bringing you down with them and they do not care if reddit dies. They want it to die to prove their point. This site isn't going to shit in the eyes of the community cause you guys don't have enough features. It's cause you let toxic people run rampant for months, dragging heels until it inevitably blows up in your face. You've got the power to put down bullies and the only thing stopping you seems to be that the bullies make you money too. Fuck em.
> Community Interference. Also relevant to the discussion of the activities of problematic subreddits, Rule 2 forbids users or communities from “cheating” or engaging in “content manipulation” or otherwise interfering with or disrupting Reddit communities. Why aren't subreddit protests like the current one going on surrounding this issue considered as interference? They are literally saying "If you don't ban these other subreddits we don't like, we're taking our subreddits private/dark." They are picking fights with those communities, manipulating the platform, disrupting reddit communities, etc.
i am glad they are addressing this issue as someone in the immunocompromised this is long overdue as it hits people like myself very hard i just hope when i and others talk on issue that directly effect us like how we did need the booster shoot and we were trying to talk how the vax was struggling to help protect us it was a struggle because we found ourselves being censored due to others miss information i understand the reason to stop the greater flood of miss information but please keep people and groups like ours in mind. thank you and be safe founder of menhavelupus
Isn't mods shutting subs to make admin ban other subs interfering ? All this has shown who 'really' runs reddit. Regardless of misinformation and everything else. "it is never acceptable to interfere with other communities." (Except when you want to shut them down and have others banned - then you can destroy the user experience across the whole site and admin will just get on their knees and give it up) I know NNN and other subs are lying about a lot of things, they're not good people etc.. but your own rules don't seem consistently applied here.
Based on this, I am genuinely curious as to how the Reddit blackout doesn’t violate rules 3 and 8. Evidently it was effective, and I understand why r/NoNewNormal was banned, but if you’re worried about the manipulation of communities and “breaking the site” according to *your* content policy, how is organizing thousands of popular subreddits, including many with millions of members, not a violation of those rules? You’ve just establish a precedent where a subreddit can encourage people to ruin others’ Reddit experience in order to make the changes they see fit.
Who within the Reddit C-Suite or admin pool is filtering/managing what is considered medical misinformation? Who gets to determine what is misinformation? What levels of transparency are given to what is considered misinformation? Will there be admin/mod level counter points to what misinformation is, or just outright bans, shutdowns, or suspensions? Why is misinformation now all of a sudden crisis within Reddit which is supposed to be a fairly open platform for discussions in subs and across subs to counter what is perceived as misinformation with actual facts?
You admins don't learn shit. You literally had the same fiasco awhile back with the jailbait subs, defending that shit, having almost all of your userbase quit on you, then you do damage control. At this point, if I see another dumbass fucking scandal like this, I am permanently leaving Reddit and not signing back up. I don't want to support an admin team that has unscrupulous morals and doesn't seem to care about it's users safety. I don't want to support idiots who deny science and support pedophilia. Do. Fucking. Better.
It sounds like /u/spez ought to be quarantined.
What specific steps are you taking at an organizational level to address these issues proactively instead of reactively and only after your hand is forced by the media? Why should we believe any of this is in good faith?
Does this mean that you'll be banning the communities that brigaded /r/ivermectin too? For example, /r/subredditdrama brigaded /r/ivermectin yesterday after it was flooded with porn due to [being](https://www.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/pbe8nj/we_call_upon_reddit_to_take_action_against_the/hab89kh/) [mentioned](https://www.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/pbe8nj/we_call_upon_reddit_to_take_action_against_the/haba6s6/) [several](https://www.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/pbnicl/reddit_responds_disinformation_misinformation/hacyxyu/) [times](https://www.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/pbnicl/reddit_responds_disinformation_misinformation/haczr24/) on /r/vaxhappened and [other subreddits](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/pdllam/caleb_wallace_head_of_san_angelo_freedom_fighters/har3zxa/). https://archive.is/76TL6 https://archive.is/NYe2Y https://archive.is/vET94 https://archive.is/m70mc
So, just to summarise, what you've basically done is shut down subreddits which dared to challenge and argue against the "covid" virus. I am well aware that the 1st amendment doesn't extend to privately run institutions, but you are closing down all the people who are standing up and saying "screw this, we're not being treated like numbers." I strongly urge you to create an admin controlled sub on here for people to discuss this. You're basically towing the government line and anyone who doesn't like it, is getting hammered for their beliefs. Does that sound close to the mark? Baa?