That was effectively a challenge: how bad can you be without explicitly violating the rules?

(I call this "I'm not touching you Fascism", after the popular children's pastime. The goal is to enrage people without ever crossing anything that might be considered a clear line. Most systems evolve a meta-rule somewhere that "pushing the boundaries of the rules is itself against the rules". At the very least "ban evasion" is itself bannable.)

As someone who's moderated a community, this is exactly what things feel like. Especially given that our community has an explicit focus on freedom of expression (and what a thorn in our side that's ended up being)

We've adopted pretty vague rules as a result, with a lot of room for interpretation, and rather than changing the rules often we've just updated our interpretations and communicated them with the community.

It's been a slow boil. But things are different now than they were years ago. Not just because the community has grown but (at least from my perspective) because the tone of the internet seems to have shifted slightly.

We at least are fortunate to have the capability to build tools to identify behavior that might be an issue even without taking automated action. But "I'm not touching you" behavior is sometimes hard to catch when people avoid certain key words, at least until confronted. It's a pain, really.

> because the tone of the internet seems to have shifted slightly.

Over the time I've used it (94 to 2020) it's shifted radically, it used to be kooky, niche, fun or just weird (and it is still that on the edges) but by and large rarely mean/cruel, the main sites are just a torrent of bile spouted by morons venting their spleen at the universe.

Comment sections on any news article, youtube videos - pretty much everywhere outside of heavily moderated forums and the like are vile.

It's one of the reasons I visit a few heavily moderated subject specific sub-reddits, this place and IRC and ignore literally everything else (I have comment sections nuked in ublock origin).

I respect anyone who voluntarily wades through that crap honestly.

I do moderate https://old.reddit.com/r/realminimalism/ but no-one has ever gotten the joke.

Even back in '94 the Usenet could get ugly. The Usenet is where Godwin observed his famous law in practice.

As a community grows the probability that it includes disruptive assholes approaches 1. Unmoderated communities do not scale.

From this point of view I would almost prefer sites to adopt just overall stricter rules, strictly moderating both tone and "off-topic" content tuned to each individual forum.

I think that a lot of communities had a passion for cultivating a freedom of expression, but actually had a lot of unspoken/unrealized rules in mind.

In my opinion a lot of communities would gain a lot by a flashing banner "We decide what content we want on our platform and we will take arbitrary action to protect our choices". In practice is what social media companies are doing now even if they cannot state it as such (in part for legal reasons and in part for marketing reasons)

Rather like the serious end of anarchism, recognising that the price of freedom is taking responsibility for yourself. And it breaks down with scaling in the same way.

Biggest difference I have seen is a change from random trolls (often who were easy to identify and proud of who what/they were) to larger, organized campaigns. Even if the campaign isn't running on your forum, people are reading Facebook or whatever and this causes many people to start spouting similar stuff they have seen. And even here, the comments often get close to looking like astro-turfing. I barely read the comments anymore, usually only a quick glance to see if there are more links relevant to the topic.

But the current rules Reddit are still an invitation to "I'm not touching you Fascism". Fascists haven't gone away. They still are around and they still think fascist things, they've just metastasized into a subtler form of cancer. The only difference now is that we can't confront fascism with the truth any more.

Ironically, by using the tools of the fascist against them we've implicitly admitted that the fascist is right. When we censor, we're saying that our ideas should be determined by who has the power to enforce censorship, not by compassion and truth.

> The only difference now is that we can't confront fascism with the truth any more.

How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been? Especially on the web? My impression is that fascist/racist ideas aren't spread in open debates where the truth matters, but indirectly: through deniable memes and dog whistles initially, then slowly, as people's innate defenses are lowered, through many stages of more and more open exposition.

> Ironically, by using the tools of the fascist against them we've implicitly admitted that the fascist is right. When we censor, we're saying that our ideas should be determined by who has the power to enforce censorship, not by compassion and truth.

I think you're conflating censorship with exclusion, which every functioning social group needs to engage in to some degree.

Also, comparisons at very abstract levels aren't very enlightening in this case. You really have to get into the details to make a true comparison.

> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been?

When white people were afraid of black violence, Martin Luther King showed them black people peacefully hand in hand with ministers in their Sunday best, walking toward Selma and remaining nonviolent even as they were met with violence.

When straight people saw gay people as dangerous deviants, Harvey Milk showed them gay people in their families, jobs, and neighborhoods, behaving like the normal people they are. I personally grew up in a church that taught homophobia--my own opinions were fundamentally changed by one of my friends coming out in high school.

Ask yourself your own question: when has censorship ever been effective?[1] I'd argue that, among other things the election of Trump is partly a backlash against attempts to control speech by the left. It's no mistake that a big part of the pro-Trump narrative was just that he "spoke his mind".

[1] Whenever I ask this question, people always respond by pointing to one study which showed banning a few hate subreddits decreased hate speech on Reddit, so I'll preemptively respond to that by saying that there's absolutely no evidence that bigots on Reddit didn't simply move to Voat at that time.

It is worth noting that MLK was not popular in his time:

> Back in the 1960s, when King was actually leading protests, just 36 percent of white Americans thought he was helping “the Negro cause of civil rights,” according to historical polling data compiled by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. In a 1966 Gallup poll, more than 60 percent of the public rated King more negatively than positively.

> After King was assassinated, two-thirds of Americans said their strongest reaction to his death had been sadness, anger, shame or fear, another survey found. Another 31 percent, however, said they “felt he brought it on himself.”

Harvey Milk was also not necessarily popular amongst Americans, and a few years after his death we would have total mainstream paranoia about AIDS. The end of the US's majority disapproval of gay marriage only came about in 2010. [1]

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-1968-nearly-a-third-of-ame...

[1] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...

Is that worth noting? Why?

Change isn't a popularity contest. If King changed views on black voting rights from 20% for to 40% for, that's a pretty massive change.

Part of what makes authoritarian behavior so dangerous is that they don't need a majority to cause a lot of damage, just a very sizable group. You want to stamp it out quickly before a lot of damage is done, and "fighting fascism with the truth" generally takes time on a generational scale.

It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power.

You're playing very fast and loose with terminology here. Fascism is a form of authoritarianism, but not all authoritarianism is fascism. Censorship is authoritarian. We were talking about fascists before you joined the conversation, but if you're going to swap the terms here and start worrying about authoritarianism, neither side is innocent there, and taking a "stamp it out quickly" stance is inherently an authoritarian position, not an anti-authoritarian position.

> It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power.

Yes, but that's a fairly useless fact if you don't have any explanation for why that happened.

Those were IRL things that happened before people even had computers in their homes. We're talking about modern-day web forums.

How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?

> Those were IRL things that happened before people had computers in their homes. We're talking about modern-day web forums.

The internet is an IRL thing, and these things also happened before electric cars. Unless you have some reason to think people's reaction to the truth is somehow fundamentally different on the internet than on TV or newspaper, I really don't see what your point is.

> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?

Is there a reason you can't post memes with the truth? Anti-racist memes work just fine. In a similar vein, infographics have been extremely effective. The internet is one of the best tools for spreading the truth in existence.

Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they wouldn't bother with dog whistles, they would just say, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship? And if someone says "Black people are criminals", I can respond with, "While black people are convicted of crimes at a higher per-capita rate than white people, this is a result of poverty: black people and white people at similar income levels commit similar numbers of crimes."

What do you do when someone posts a subtly racist meme that hints that black people commit more crimes? Censor harder? The solution you're proposing takes us to a place where racists just agree on what codewords mean what in their own private spaces, say whatever they want in public using their secret codewords, and call us crazy if we figure it out and censor them.

> The internet is an IRL thing, and these things also happened before electric cars. Unless you have some reason to think people's reaction to the truth is somehow fundamentally different on the internet than on TV or newspaper, I really don't see what your point is.

The internet is a fundamentally different communications mechanism than TV or newspapers. Reasoning about internet forum social dynamics using pre-computer examples, is like reasoning about modern infantry tactics citing victories from ancient Greek history. A hoplite phalanx would be annihilated by a WWII German infantry battalion.

> Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they would just, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship?

Sorry, no. You're conflating censorship with exclusion again. "Censorship" didn't create those things; they were created by the widespread rejection and condemnation of the underlying racist ideas and the racist people who hold them. Earnest, up-front advocacy of racism isn't going to be effective in a population that's been primed to identify and reject it, so racists setup recruiting funnels with obscured entrances to spread their ideology by radicalizing people more slowly. That situation won't change, and the racists won't abandon their subtly racist memes and dog whistles, unless racism becomes respectable in polite company, which would be much worse than what we have now.

You're just ignoring my questions:

1. When has censorship been effective?

2. How does your censorship plan deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?

And I'll add a question I haven't asked yet:

3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc. in your censorship plan?

I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you can't answer these questions.

The reason I'm asking the third question: I hear your point that I'm talking about exclusion rather than censorship, and I agree that racism becoming respectable in polite company would be much worse than what we have now. But I think you have to realize that the way we got to a point where racism isn't respectable in polite company is repeated, persistent confrontation of racism with the truth. The reason you and I know that black people aren't criminals, is that we both know the more nuanced truth. I know I didn't come up with that truth myself--I heard it from someone else, and I heard it in the context of confronting the racist trope that black people are criminals. I get the temptation to use censorship as a shortcut to remove subtle racism, but by doing that we're giving up something even more fundamental: the very debate that made racism not respectable in the first place.

And make no mistake: racism isn't respectable in polite company in our little internet bubbles full of tech and startup people, but racism is absolutely respectable in many communities in our country and the world. If we're going to make racism not respectable in those places, censorship isn't going to work. We're going to have to have conversations that make that happen. If we let those conversations happen in public spaces, we can have those conversations in spaces that are friendly to us. But if we censor those conversations, then we just push those communities out, and then our only option is to go into those communities to have those conversations, which is much more difficult. And to be clear: censorship won't work in those communities, because we don't have the power to censor there.

> You're just ignoring my questions:

> 1. When has censorship been effective?

> 2. How does your censorship plan deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?

> ...I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you can't answer these questions.

How can I answer them directly, when I think they're based misunderstandings? For instance, I don't classify many of the things you seem to be talking about as "censorship" (e.g. banning /r/The_Donald from reddit) despite your persistent use of that term, nor have I offered up any "plans" of any kind, let alone "[my] censorship plan."

> 3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc....

Education coupled with regular refreshers/responses as needed. If you want to teach kids anti-Nazism, it's not like you have to first invite an open and earnest Nazi to school to lecture the kids in class about how the Jews are subhuman and corrupt everything, etc. The anti-Nazi lesson can be taught directly.

I'll try to rephrase my first two questions to address your semantic concerns:

1. When has a silencing action similar to the banning of /r/The_Donald been effective in reducing bigotry and/or fascism?

2. Your criticism of free speech is that it allows people to post subtly racist memes and dog whistles, but you haven't presented an alternative. How do you plan to deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?

I'm putting in an effort to use terminology that's amenable to you, so please put in an effort to understand my questions and answer them, rather than objecting to semantics.

> > 3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc....

> Education coupled with regular refreshers/responses as needed. If you want to teach kids anti-Nazism, it's not like you have to first invite an open and earnest Nazi to school to lecture the kids in class about how the Jews are subhuman and corrupt everything, etc. The anti-Nazi lesson can be taught directly.

Let's be clear: no one is proposing we bring earnest and open Nazis into schools. We're both on the same side: we both want to stop Nazis. So let's keep this on topic and avoid straw man arguments.

The anti-Nazi lesson can be taught directly, but in that teaching, you have to teach people the Nazi ideology, otherwise they don't know what they're actually against. And you need to keep that up-to-date, otherwise people are defended against what Nazis were saying 10 years ago. Nazism changes and adapts and we have to adapt to fight it. And if we're constantly paying attention to and responding to what Nazis are saying now, that starts to look suspiciously like just having an uncensored conversation.

If we don't do this, we run the risk of creating a generation of anti-fascists who can't recognize fascism if it doesn't have a swastika on it. This is already a problem: check out Dianne Feinstein, for example.

> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?

I don't feel like I did this question justice with my previous answer.

The most obvious example would be the George Floyd video, and in a larger sense, the extremely effective tool of filming police as they harass, plant evidence on, beat, and murder the people they're supposed to serve. In the current situation, I think the results of that video speak for themselves.

In response to the pervasive narrative that focuses on looters and not on cops murdering black people (I linked to five minutes in, but the whole thing is worth a watch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWE8k5EUonE&t=5m0s This tends to be persuasive in my experience.

This doesn't address racism because it's a white guy, but I find it's effective in getting people to take the complete lack of police accountability more seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc That officer (Philip Brailsford) was acquitted in a trial where the prosecutor moved to strike the video from evidence, and then the officer was rehired by Mesa Police briefly, before being given early medical retirement based on a claim of PTSD from the murder, earning him a $2500/mo pension.

Watch any of those videos that you haven't seen, and see how that feels, and realize that that's how they make people who were on the fence about these issues feel.

What the fuck did I just see?

That second video is revolting. I don't think I can correctly articulate my thoughts after watching that.

Wow. Just wow.

Share it around. The world needs to know that Philip Brailsford is a murderer, and Mesa PD and Maricopa County DA think murder is okay if it's done by a cop.

You can't confront fascism with the truth, because they've no interest in playing that game and will laugh in your face. There is no statement you can present that will trigger a Damascene conversion.

You can confront fascism with truth, because the goal of that is to inform those reading the conversation, not to persuade the fascist.

You're literally saying that because they're not playing our game, we should let fascists control what game is played.

The meme that you can't have a conversation with a person that changes their perspective and ideologies is a false and harmful one.

Look at Daryl Davis's amazing work getting over 200 klansmembers to turn away from the klan through honest conversation.

Is it easy? Of course not. But it's not impossible to reach people - it happens every day.

https://twitter.com/RealDarylDavis

https://youtu.be/oGTQ0Wj6yIg

Wow, that's really interesting. Thanks for posting that.

You call what fascism?

The internet (and Reddit itself) was rather different in 2012.

The whole US was definitely different, Mitt Romney to Donald Trump is quite an extreme transition.

It went into both extremes unfortunately (the other extreme being the rise of militant SJWs).

There's no militant SJWs in the highest political office in the country. There's not even any in Congress.

I think those on the other side of your argument would consider Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be a militant SJW.

People don't understand the meaning of the word "militant" then, because AOC has never participated in arming herself during a protest.

As opposed to say, WA State rep Matt Shea, who was found to be conspiring with militias to start a civil war that would end in a theocracy: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790192972/washington-legislat...

> People don't understand the meaning of the word "militant" then

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/militant

1. Fighting or warring.

2. Having a combative character; aggressive, especially in the service of a cause: a militant political activist.

It seems to apply quite well to some of those SJW types who caused people to quit or get fired, and physically threatened them at the same time (e.g. see Bret Weinstein).

Those on the other side of that argument would consider Woodrow Wilson to be a militant SJW.

Yeah they just control about every university. I'd argue it's even worse to have fanatics control what's supposed to be the most liberal places than to have a clown and moron for a president.

Was it that different? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-tells-african-american-au...

> Biden tells African-American audience GOP ticket would put them "back in chains"

Donald Trump was a democrat for most of his life. The basic tenants of secure borders + protecting american jobs was basically the Democrat platform for most of its existence.

The issue of uncontrolled immigration used to be common ground for the left and the right. For a long time even Bernie opposed it on the grounds that large numbers of low-skilled immigrants were driving driving down wages for the poorest Americans[0].

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/16/years-ber...

Yes, its not surprising that big business wants it.

But it is surprising how many "progressives" have been co-opted into F100 talking points, who they claim they oppose.

That’s the Reddit and Youtube we need again.

IDK, the internet of that era was a pretty toxic place. Sexism and racism were rampant, such that many people I know IRL simply refused to participate in most internet spaces (including HN). This gave the impression that those viewpoints were mainstream, but that was never the case. I don't think losing out on so many voices of people who don't want to be around that stuff is worth it.

I can’t support this idea. These thoughts and people exist. Silencing them or pretending they don’t exist is not something I subscribe to.

I would rather see it, be educated that it exists, and choose to think the way I want to.

Thought policing is a slippery slope.

so who should get to device which people are blatantly censored and silenced on what is basically public space?

> and no interfering the site's functions

Spamming the r/all homepage due to eliminating downvotes certainly interferes with the sites functions

That's not what happened. T_D was hardly the only subreddit that disabled upvotes with CSS (which prevents you from clicking the button on the old.reddit desktop version.. nothing else).

Furthermore, most of Reddit's traffic is mobile, where CSS has no functionality.

Why not just remove them from r/all?

I don't really expect people's opinions/beliefs to stay constant when presented with new facts. People are horrible on the internet and there needs to be moderation. It's evidenced time and time again. The consequences of not doing this weren't obvious then (maybe, I wasn't really on reddit then), but they are obvious now.

Perhaps they are consistent in only acting based on convenience, and they might finally have reached the inflection point where doing all this was the easiest, laziest thing they could do.

And then the site exploded, and it had to learn how to handle things like actual nazis calling for the deaths of jewish people.

I'm not sure I see where the joke is - this was inevitable.

I spent years on that subreddit and never once saw somebody that identified as a Nazi calling for the deaths of Jewish people. I bet you can't find any such examples. Your viewpoints of the world are based on hearsay and propaganda, not facts and logic.

Which subreddit? /r/the_donald? I was talking about the site in general, which did have explicit hate subreddits, which Reddit started struggling to grapple with back in 2015. I do find it kinda funny though that you saw an accusation of antisemitism and immediately started defending /r/the_donald.

It is worth noting that I did see explicit and implicit (((antisemitism) on /r/the_donald, but also, no examples are possible anymore, as the subreddit is gone /shrug

Perhaps not literally, however the subreddits namesake literally retweeted a video of someone exclaiming 'white power'. Most people who are not facists and are not nazis wouldnt exclaim something like this and would not support someone who retweets such things.

Searching /r/AgainstHateSubreddits easily finds examples of Holocaust denial and other Anti-Semitic behavior.

> I spent years on that subreddit

But why ?

There’s a clue in his username...

> And then the site exploded, and it had to learn how to handle things like actual nazis calling for the deaths of jewish people.

Oh, so is that why they banned The Donald? Or any of the other number of subreddits they have quarantined and slowly killed?

No, they banned those subreddits for violating the rules, specifically

> promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability

Reddit was a smaller community back then, and just like the article implies, smaller communities are easier to manage and of generally higher quality overall

Living under this rule would enable reddit to survive and adapt far longer in a democratic republic. This philosophy and the sub-reddits were reddit's strength. If anyone didn't like what reddit currently had, anyone could form their own sub-reddit. That's over. I can't put all the blame on reddit leadership when SESTA and FOSTA exist as laws.

The bad content isn't going to go away. It's just going somewhere else. imo this is the start of a diaspora The only question is where will everyone go?

the announcement itself: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/updat...

Makes sense to me; the Reddit folks have learned from their experience. Maximalist free speech policies have failed all over the Internet, the only places that adhere to them are Nazi cesspools like Gab.

Define failed?

The Donald would have been deleted under the old leadership too...

They got in hot water not for supporting Trump (there are plenty of pro-Trump subreddits) but actively breaking the most basic rules of Reddit, maybe you should actually look at their history.

Spamming the same images to the subreddit, interfering with other subreddits, trying to out whistleblowers in federal cases, gaming the content discovery system with sticky posts.

I'm tired of this narrative that The Donald was banned for censorship reasons, they were banned for being a virus that was infecting Reddit.

They could have been supporting the Dalai Lama and their behavior would have been against the basic expectations of Reddit, and that's exactly why they were quarantined/banned

-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#History

In true fashion of people trying to push a made up point, every reply is nitpicking over which one of their many incredible misbehaviors was the deal breaker, from doxxing people to brigading other subreddits, instead of actually providing a rebuttal

It doesn't matter which one broke the camels back, anyone who can read their history of behavior and pretend Reddit didn't have a reason to take action, even by those 2012 rules, is in denial.

It was initially quarantined for "threats of violence against police", but they seem to have changed their narrative since, you know, everyone else started doing it: https://i.redd.it/s2pdnningy451.png

Already said it in another comment:

Are we going to pretend everything in that history section is wrong and they were only quarantined for anti-police comments?

There are literally dozens of crisis that the subreddit spawned, literally any of which would have been explained it. The fact we can actually go back on forth on which one of the many many many straws broke the camels back says it all.

You also seem to want to go so far as to imply the only reason other subreddit get away with anti-police sentiment is some kind of hypocritical favortism?

Another fun factoid about The_Donald's love of free speech is that they immediately and permanently banned anyone who disagreed with anything said on that sub. Good riddance

at least they were honest about it. And yet /r/politics remains

Your history is quite wrong.

They were initially quarantined for “anti police” comments.

Which looking through the current state of Reddit is a bit hypocritical.

Edit: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Scree...

Are going to pretend everything in that history section is wrong and they were only quarantined for anti-police comments?

There are literally dozens of crises that the subreddit spawned, literally any of which would have been explained it. The fact we can actually go back on forth on which one of the many many many straws broke the camels back says it all.

You also seem to want to go so far as to imply the only reason other subreddit get away with anti-police sentiment is some kind of hypocritical favortism?