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ziq wrote

This is more "both sides" bullshit obviously. Spez trying to appear fair and balanced by banning a left sub every time he bans a fash sub.

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UserYSle wrote (edited )

anyone has a link to ze discord or any active replacement?

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107a wrote

I think it's time to begin the great socialist migration to raddle.

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DeerGirl wrote

While very funny, this has eliminated the only remaining non transphobic subreddit, and thus any reason to use reddit

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suma wrote

I unpaywalled it for y'all!

SAN FRANCISCO — Reddit, one of the largest social networking and message board websites, on Monday banned its biggest community devoted to President Trump as part of an overhaul of its hate speech policies.

The community or “subreddit,” called “The_Donald,” is home to more than 790,000 users who post memes, viral videos and supportive messages about Mr. Trump. Reddit executives said the group, which has been highly influential in cultivating and stoking Mr. Trump’s online base, had consistently broken its rules by allowing people to target and harass others with hate speech.

“Reddit is a place for community and belonging, not for attacking people,” Steve Huffman, the company’s chief executive, said in a call with reporters. “‘The_Donald’ has been in violation of that.”

Reddit said it was also banning roughly 2,000 other communities from across the political spectrum, including one devoted to the leftist podcasting group “Chapo Trap House,” which has about 160,000 regular users. The vast majority of the forums that are being banned are inactive.

“The_Donald,” which has been a digital foundation for Mr. Trump’s supporters, is by far the most active and prominent community that Reddit decided to act against. For years, many of the most viral Trump memes that broke through to Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere could be traced back to “The_Donald.” One video, “The Trump Effect,” originated on “The_Donald” in mid-2016 before bubbling up to Mr. Trump, who tweeted it to his 83 million followers.

Social media sites are facing a reckoning over the types of content they host and their responsibilities to moderate and police that content. While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and others originally positioned themselves as neutral sites that simply hosted people’s posts and videos, users are now pushing them to take steps against hateful, abusive and false speech on their platforms.

Some of the sites have recently become more proactive in dealing with these issues. Twitter started adding labels last month to some of Mr. Trump’s tweets to refute their accuracy or call them out for glorifying violence. Snap also recently said it would stop promoting Mr. Trump’s Snapchat account after determining that his public comments off the site could incite violence.

By contrast, Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has said that it refuses to be an arbiter of content. The company said that it would allow all speech from political leaders to remain up on its platform, even if the posts were untruthful or problematic, because such content was newsworthy and in the public’s interest to read.

Facebook has since come under increasing fire for its stance. Over the past few weeks, many large advertisers, including Coca-Cola, Verizon, Levi Strauss and Unilever, have said that they plan to pause advertising on the social network because they were unhappy with its handling of hate speech and misinformation.

Reddit, which was founded 15 years ago and has more than 430 million regular users, has long been one corner of the internet that was willing to host all kinds of communities. No subject — whether it was video games or makeup or power-washing driveways — was too small to discuss. People could simply sign up, browse the site anonymously and participate in any of the 130,000 active subreddits.

Yet that freewheeling position led to many issues of toxic speech and objectionable content across the site, for which Reddit has consistently faced criticism. In the past, the company hosted forums that promoted racism against black people and openly sexualized underage children, all in the name of free speech.

That has haltingly changed over time. In 2015, Reddit introduced anti-harassment policies. Later that year, it banned several subreddits that targeted black or obese people. In 2016, it rolled out additional anti-harassment measures and tools. It also took down forums dedicated to openly buying and selling drugs.

But the company’s executives have struggled in particular with how to handle “The_Donald” and its noxious content. Reddit said people in “The_Donald” consistently posted racist and vulgar messages that incited harassment and targeted people of different religious and ethnic groups on and off its site.

“The_Donald” has also heavily trafficked in conspiracy theories, including spreading the debunked “PizzaGate” conspiracy, in which Hillary Clinton and top Democrats were falsely accused of running a child sex trafficking ring from a pizza parlor in Washington.

Reddit said that as of Monday, it was introducing eight rules that laid out the terms people must abide by to use the site. Those include prohibiting targeted harassment, revealing the identities of others, posting sexually exploitative content related to underage children, or trafficking in illegal substances or other illicit transactions.

While the site had already banned many of these behaviors, the latest changes take a harder line on speech that “promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability.”

Mr. Huffman said users on “The_Donald” had frequently violated its first updated rule: “Remember the human.” He said he and others at Reddit repeatedly attempted to reason with moderators of “The_Donald,” who run the subreddit on a volunteer basis, to no avail. Banning the forum was a last-ditch effort to contain harassment, he said.

“We’ve given them many opportunities to be successful,” Mr. Huffman said. “The message is clear that they have no intention of working with us.”

Many Republican lawmakers have accused social media companies of censoring conservative viewpoints on their sites. Mr. Huffman said that banning “The_Donald” was not an attempt to specifically target conservatives.

“Absolutely not, full stop,” he said.

The new bans follow the resignation this month of Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit’s co-founders, from the company’s board of directors. Mr. Ohanian, who said he had been moved by the protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis who was killed in police custody last month, asked to be replaced on Reddit’s board with a black candidate.

“I’m writing this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks: ‘What did you do?’” Mr. Ohanian, who is married to the tennis star Serena Williams, said in a blog post at the time. “To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: Do not stop.”

Michael Seibel, the chief executive of the Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator and an African-American, has replaced Mr. Ohanian on Reddit’s board.

Reddit executives said the site remains a place that they hope can be a forum for civil political discourse in the future, as long as users play by its rules.

“There’s a home on Reddit for conservatives, there’s a home on Reddit for liberals,” said Benjamin Lee, Reddit’s general counsel. “There’s a home on Reddit for Donald Trump.”

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asdfjkl wrote (edited )

Personally, I think we/they should go to Lemmy. It's the first "Reddit alternative" to be federated.

EDIT: No, I am not a tankie.

EDIT 2: I don't know what I expected when I went to one website just to tell everybody to go to another website lol

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ziq wrote

We tried to use lemmy and he banned all of us for being critical of xi jinping. It's owned by a literal Dengist who thinks modern china is the holy grail of communism.

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suma wrote

I think chapo2 might have said "minorities don't deserve to be murdered" one too many times. Reddit really frowns on that kind of rhetoric.

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ziq wrote (edited )

Translation: "our advertisers would rather we not promote socialism, so we're using the banning of the_fascist to quietly dispose of our biggest left-sub before it turns even more people against our fellow billionaires."

Time to update this old wiki:

w/what_is_wrong_with_reddit

Huffman is terrified of the poor uprising against him. He even has an underground survival bunker and is forever preparing to defend himself from us in a revolution. No joke:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

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anthm17 wrote

chapo had 42k DAU, the donald had <8k.

This isn't even both sides BS, it's just another attack on the left.

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anthm17 wrote

nah, but he thinks in a post-apocalyptic scenario his brains and leadership ability would make him the leader.

If there is a an apocalypse we should make him act like a dog at all times.

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LibSocPunkFan wrote

r/gendercritical: "Trans people should be stripped of their rights!" r/The_Donald: "Kill Muslims! Kill LGBT+ People! etc." r/CTH "Slavery is bad" Reddit: "I can't tell the difference between any of these!"

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riccardo wrote

I have to say r/gangweed and r/gamingcirclejerk are pretty nice, though the second one gets sporadically invaded by some gamers and, well, we all know what kind of opinion the gamers community holds

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riccardo wrote

Was it really a replacement sub? I think cth2 is simply some people from the original sub who parted ways because cth1 was "too liberal". chapo2 was quite more marxist-leninist and less anarchist (and with probably no liberals) than the original chapo

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CircleA wrote

Pretty shortsighted to try and start a site from scratch when this one is already sitting here and is well established. Idk what it is about leftists and splitting.

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riccardo wrote

Well, Lemmy is opensource and federated - as far as I know Raddle isn't opensource, and for sure doesn't support federation. Which in my opinion are two really big advantages lemmy has, because everyone can host their own instance, there's no central authority, and communities can federate between instances. Similarly to how Mastodon and all the Fediverse ecosystem works, which is kinda dope

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Ampelio wrote

Lmfao, can we take a second to appreciate that CocaCola(TM) has the audacity to get up in arms about facebook hosting questionable material on its website, but, simultaneously being responsible for murdering union organizers in Columbia? Makes fucking sense right?

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riccardo wrote (edited )

That is great, thank you for the link. I said "as far as I know" because I kinda suspected it was but I didn't find a direct link in the site wiki and I only now figured out there's a "technical resources useful for learning how Raddle is built" entry which links to the sourcecode. Does it federate? I see no mention about federation in the docs/gitlab repo. Hope I didn't miss that one too

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makfuck wrote

these fucking clowns think they can survive climate change with their fucking bunkers oh my god ecological collapse isn't something you can fucking wait out for a few weeks or months

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ziq wrote

people with money are 100% certain their money can buy anything, they prob plan to live underground in climate controlled bunker cities and nuke the surface so none of us can get to them

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Cowsmoomoo wrote

Violence against slave owners is LITERALLY nazism

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MediumDickEnergy wrote (edited )

r/CTH was unironically one of the largest, most successful and accepting left spaces on the internet. And while lots of people to the left of us hated us (mostly young dorks who read a bunch of theory and have like 1 friend), it also consistently had funny memes and good struggle sessions. There is absolutely only one reason it got banned, it was successfully driving people to the left. It was cleaning their brains of the years of systematic programming to keep people locked in the capitalist, exceptionalist fantasy.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

yeah all the problems with reddit community aside, it was targeted not for any of those critiquable elements but for the simple fact of appearing "fair and balanced" while banning right wing subs, as well as making reddit more marketer friendly. utterly gutless admins

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masquerademinutes wrote

If one knows about the concept of symbolic violence, "both sides" and "free speech" can never be an argument for hate. This shit isn't separated from reality. Reddit has been a bureaucracy forever, but it's consolidated -- whilst the normal user thinks it's China's fault because "China invests in reddit".

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makfuck wrote

they'll go crazy. do you know how much astronauts train to stay in space?? imagine someone completely untrained in a bunker with their family and they can NEVER come out. they don't nearly have what it takes, and eventually their technology will break down just as everything does

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veronicasawyer wrote

well at least i can use my favorite and first username from reddit again 😌

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Heywood_Floyd wrote

What kills me about all the talk on r/politics and in comments elsewhere is that nobody recognized the hard truth that The_Donald left Reddit last November when they set up a subreddit-like forum on a .win domain site, all over a dispute between their 35-40 moderators and Reddit corporate (Admins wanted them to get break up what had become a mafia of the same people for five years, the mafia said "no", began planning). There is no comparison - CTH was a real community and not a goon squad. Destroying it just made Reddit into more of a rightwing hellhole.

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hiitsme01 wrote

this is more dangerous than y’all seem to think. they didn’t ban chapo as a both sides thing, they banned td as a both sides thing. they banned td to take the attention off of banning chapo. any of y’all been to td recently? it was a ghost town. they weren’t spewing any hate anymore. they were dead. chapo, on the other hand, was having one of the biggest growth spikes in its history. with BLM riots and CHAZ, we were getting a LOT of attention. why the hell did they do this ban wave in the midst of potentially the biggest surge of leftist activity since occupy or even before? they don’t care about getting rid of hate, td was advocating for actual literal lynchings for years. they want to stop scary anti-liberal ideas from gaining traction.

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Canama wrote

i notice that it doesn't mention that t_d had been inactive for months

sure, it notes that most of the subs banned were inactive, but it describes t_d specifically as though it were still this massive hub for the online right and not a ghost town

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ziq wrote (edited )

I think they even disabled posting on t_d to force their users to go to their new site. Reddit was just a promotional platform for months to promote a fash site.

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very_homo wrote

what subs specifically/where did you hear that? a lot of TERF subs were banned and that sounds suspiciously like how a TERF would characterize what happened.

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ZestyDwarf wrote

"Many Republican lawmakers have accused social media companies of censoring conservative viewpoints on their sites. Mr. Huffman said that banning “The_Donald” was not an attempt to specifically target conservatives.

“Absolutely not, full stop,” he said."

Oh i believe him.

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ChaosRocket wrote

Has Spez ever actually said what rules CTH was supposedly breaking?

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TTemp wrote

I think it's the opposite

They used the banning of fash subs (T_D had long been dead) as an excuse to ban CTH. They can't be allowing such a large sub to exist that is advocating socialism. Its affect on advertisers is reason enough alone to do this.

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ziq wrote (edited )

yeah looking at the numbers, t_d was all but dead. it was one of the least active subs of the big subs they banned.

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Heywood_Floyd wrote

It's like Encyclopedia Dramatica - the site is still around as a kind/sorta bootleg of the original, which was wiped by Sherrod DiGrippo are replaced by the failed "Oh, Internet" and the even more failed "What Port 80." Most of the places spez killed were rinky-dink. Those people will either form new subreddits or go elsewhere.....the damage for Reddit began when they let child porn subreddits run wild early on, and u/Violentacrez (the guy who gave us r/spacedicks and r/picsofdeadkids) really did not help.

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Wendigalea wrote (edited )

Why was Chapo banned?

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hogposting wrote

That's where the term originates, yes, but here it's being used to describe an unpleasant conversation that likely won't come to a satisfactory resolution.

E.g., "I'm going to Thanksgiving with my family and I know once Uncle Ralph gets a few in him we'll have another struggle session over immigration."

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ZestyDwarf wrote

Pr the article: "There's a home on reddit for conservatives, there's a home on reddit for liberals." So that pretty much says it all.. Also suck it, MTC, WHO'S THE LIB NOW?

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ZestyDwarf wrote

Were never on any noteworthy position, neither did I receive warnings, but it seemed they never cared to explain, sometimes even not telling what post, comment or upvote was the offense. This is what I heard others had experienced, never have I seen anyone get an explanation..

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shellac OP wrote

One interpretation is they wanted to ban the Donald but also wanted to ban a leftist sub so that they won’t be seen to be targeting conservatives. “Both sides” and all that.

More likely IMO is reddit is run by Silicon Valley techbros who are hostile to leftists who just wanted it banned.

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