Instead, Reddit has only banned things when they have been dragged kicking and screaming to that point, and then they ban the things in a pretty narrow way.

Doxxing has a pretty bad history on reddit; I forget the exact time when it became against the rules, but a bunch of shitstorms had started up by people forming internet mobs to chase after people they thought did something wrong.

So they banned doxxing.

Similarly, Jailbait was only banned after Anderson Cooper started talking about it on the news. There didn't seem to be a long discussion of what was and wasn't allowed and what makes consistent policy; instead it seemed (as an outsider) to be "what rule can we make that blocks jailbait and its clones and as little else as possible?"

When you see the historical reason, it's clear why the stopped doxxing while tolerated creepshots: they hadn't made a rule about the latter.

The people that hated creepshots saw all this and decided on the obvious strategy: make creepshots as unpleasant as possible for everyone involved. I think it's a pretty bad way to set policy, but it's the only path that reddit had laid out, so they took it.

In the end, reddit probably should have a policy board that decides what is and isn't allowed and have long debates and discussions (partially in public) about how to set up a sane policy.

Generally it seems like a bad idea for a platform to be too restrictive about what can be discussed (though I'd argue banning some types of content wouldn't be too controverisal) while allowing a community to run completely unrestricted seems quite irresponsible.

"doxxing" of the people who traffic in those photos is forbidden. That's not "free speech", it's something else.

Reddit has long had a problem with people posting identifying information of reddit users or people involved in videos/pictures/articles shared on the site. This has almost always devolved into harrassment. So, strangely, reddit has a kind of reverse Nymwars situation where you are not allowed to personally identify anyone but yourself.

1) You can't ban content just because it offends someone, there wouldn't be much content left, if any. Is religion distasteful? Violent images of war? Gay marriage?

And it's not like a user is forced into subreddits to view content they don't like. The whole point of the site is for individual users to make decisions on the type of content they are viewing and participating in.

2) "doxxing" isn't some random rule they came up with to protect people who post 'distasteful' photos. AFAIK it's been a long-standing issue to prevent users from rallying users to harass other users outside of the site, whether it's justified or not. Instances in the past have seen people twist facts about a story to make someone out to be a bad buy, post that person's personal information and then that person is harassed via phone calls, emails, letters about some non-existent offense they are accused to have perpetrated.

I'm not sure the specifics on the Gawker ban issue though, so I can't speak to that.

  > You can't ban content just because it offends someone,
  > there wouldn't be much content left, if any. Is religion
  > distasteful? Violent images of war? Gay marriage?

In fact, Reddit already has rules against this sort of content. From their user agreement: "You further agree not to use any sexually suggestive language or to provide to or post on or through the Website any graphics, text, photographs, images, video, audio or other material that is sexually suggestive or appeals to a prurient interest."

So what the pressure is really about is Reddit ignoring their own rules to benefit one of their personal friends, and a small horde of terrible people defending this decision by pretending that teenage upskirts are free speech.

Haven't they already decided not to allow the pictures of underage girls? I could be wrong, but I thought that had happened a while ago with the closing of /r/jailbait or some similar subreddit.

  > Haven't they already decided not to allow the pictures
  > of underage girls? I could be wrong, but I thought that
  > had happened a while ago with the closing of /r/jailbait
  > or some similar subreddit.

They do not ban the users who posted such content, and do not take measures to prevent them from re-creating the same subreddit under a different name.

Several clones of creepshots popped up and most of them got shut down pretty quick, so it looks like reddit has some kind of new rule but they haven't told the community what it is.

I'm pretty sure there were jailbait-clones set up that got shut down, too.

I like the rest of your argument, but this rule exists only on paper. This is lots of porn on reddit, both people posting self-shots as well as (almost assuredly pirated, but that's a separate discussion) professional porn.

Your description of "sexually-suggestive photographs of underage girls" is way off the mark.

The extent to which these photos were "sexually suggestive" was largely in control of the women concerned. If you're going to wear low-cut tops, yoga pants, etc. then a photo of yourself taken in public may be interpreted as sexually suggestive.

Contributors to the subreddit were just posting things they had seen in public. What's wrong with that?

I can sexualize whatever I like, thank you very much.

What is the long-standing issue that you would be preventing though? It's creepy and wrong to be sure, but say banning a specific subreddit with that content, what is the result of that action?

With doxxing you have documented cases of people being harassed based on people finding out their true identity. So banning doxxing helps to prevent situations where people are harassed outside of the site for the things they do on the site.

And banning posting candid sexually suggestive photos of kids helps to prevent the subjects of the photos from getting harassed at school when someone finds the photos online. I don't see why that should be any less important than trying to prevent harassment of people who take and post those photos.

At least the person who gets harassed over posting the photos is getting harassed for something he actually deliberately did, whereas the kid might be getting harassed for accidentally showing some cleavage or some underwear. Or maybe it is ultimately the kid's fault for not dressing like a Saudi woman when in public.

Or you could just answer my question.

I was specifically not litigating the enforceability of "creepiness" standards.

For what it's worth: Watching anime isn't creepy. Two males kissing isn't creepy.

I don't what sense this rule would would make. As long as nobody can google it (since no name) no one is hurt. So what?

/edit

Or why the consent of a random 17 year old girl has more value that the consent of a random 20 year old guy working at a random CoS org.

- no sexual comments

- no kids

- no candid shots (where the subject is clearly not aware of the picture)

There's plenty of lines that could be drawn there. Various people have played stupid that no combination of these rules simply couldn't work, but this isn't a brand new problem no one has wondered about before.

So again, I don't see the equivalence.

(boy it's hard to post a URL with a ' in it)

People in public spaces can be photographed without their consent. That's a very clear rule, at least in the US. See: http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf

Because that is exactly what this is. A platform for the public humiliation of women who walk in public.

If we don't tolerate it for the guilty, why should we tolerate it for the innocent?

"Distasteful" subreddits that consist of compromising photos of teenagers taken without their knowledge are to be tolerated."

As per http://as.reddit.com/rules/

"No child pornography or sexually suggestive content featuring minors."

These kinds of things are not tolerated on Reddit.

Are you suggesting that "child pornography" and "sexually suggestive content featuring minors" is the bright line, and that anything on the privacy spectrum that doesn't cross that line should be defended? That's the implication I get from your comment, but I'm happy to be corrected.

It's entirely up to a private website to run itself in any manner it deems fit, and if you can't find "intellectual clarity" when the rules are posted then why do you even comment?

I was in fact not doing that. I was suggesting that the principle on which your argument rested --- that we should tolerate all content in order to defend free expression --- was probably counterfeit. I was saying that you did have a problem with child pornography, not that you accept it and were thus a suspect participant in this conversation.

Where in the rules do you see this?

The Internet is a bastion of free speech. Under the guise of pseudo-anonymity, people are free to post whatever content they see fit, and people on the receiving end generally understand that it's just the Internet; it's not serious business.

It is an escape from real life, where you don't have to kowtow to political correctness, fear the tyranny of the majority, and ultimately, and hide your true identity.

'Doxxing' is thus a direct attack on Internet culture.

This just doesn't make sense. Why is the poster (who has deliberately decided to participate in an online forum) entitled to privacy, but the subjects of these photos aren't?

At a stretch, /r/jailbait and the associated subreddits may have, but reddit took the decision to ban those a long time ago.

It makes perfect sense. Both posting photos of people in public on the Internet and 'doxxing' someone who does this are legal. However, the former is in compliance with Internet culture (the free sharing of information, no matter how controversial) and the latter is not. The latter is an attack on the Internet.

I provided that intellectual clarity for you, by explaining how these prima facie inconsistent views are actually entirely consistent with the principles of Internet culture.

Any questions?

The content on /r/creepshots was not, generally speaking, illegal. I cannot fathom any way in which it was harmful. I'm sure you will disagree on this latter point, and I will be very interested to hear you articulate in what sense you thought it caused harm.

You don't win the game by slapping the word "harmful" on controversial content.

Surreptitious, candid, compromising photos of minors are harmful. They put a very public spotlight on people who have neither the life experience nor the cognitive development nor the emotional stability to handle it. The photos themselves are fed into the random social eddies an currents these people have to live in, which currents are made of similarly dysfunctional teenagers making a whole new set of bad decisions based on those photos. Every snarky, gross, nasty, or salacious comment posted on the public threads in which the subjects of those photos are objectified also feeds into the drama.

At the same time, the practice of causing this harm solely for the amusement of groups of anonymous Internet commenters provides social reinforcement not just for the continued posting of harmful photos, but also for the fundamental sick ideas that animate those photos: that teenagers are not developing human beings with their own rights to privacy and personal space and well being, but instead objects for the amusement of strangers.

We are just now beginning to comprehend how harmful peer-bullying is among teenagers. It seems to me that it shouldn't be difficult at all to wrap our heads around the harm caused by the bullying of teenagers by adults.

How you know that there is at least some force to these arguments is, you're arguing on a thread that isn't simply about banning the posting of these photos, but rather about why it's inconsistent to tolerate those photos while banning the mere naming of the people who post them.

Photos of women, predominantly of age, seen in public. Statistically, and by virtue of the photos being taken covertly, very few of the women featured would have known there was a photo of them floating around on the Internet.

Very rarely is a name put to a photo, and reddit specifically prohibited the posting of personal details on the site.

Even if the subjects did find out, so what? I'd be flattered if someone had taken a photo of me in public and posted it online saying they'd like to have sexual relations with me, that I have a nice ass, etc.

I'd be a little creeped out, but not to the point where I'd be calling for the banning of the activity.

This thread is about the /r/creepshots debacle, which has nothing to do with compromising photos of minors.

I don't see how /r/jailbait is relevant to this discussion. violentacrez's involvement in that subreddit does not somehow justify his doxxing.

Besides, there was nothing wrong with most of the content on /r/jailbait either. Almost all of it was legal, rarely were any photos sexually suggestive, and actual child pornography was strictly prohibited.

Reddit only shut it down because the media furore over it was threatening to damage the reddit community as a whole.

Unfortunately, I do agree with you that the only reason anything actually happened on Reddit is that it hit the media, and the admins just want to avoid the wrong kind of media attention. It's unfortunate because there is a more important reason to ban subreddits like that: they exist in order to milk amusement from harm.

You're dragging /r/jailbait into the discussion because you think it adds weight to your argument. I'm saying it is no only irrelevant to the current discussion, but even if it were relevant, there was nothing 'wrong' with /r/jailbait.

/r/creepshots and /r/jailbait are completely different animals.

(b) The controversy we're discussing is the outing of the person responsible both for creepshots and for jailbait.

(c) The root comment in this thread isn't specifically about either subreddit, but rather "photos of minors". The distinction you're trying to draw between the subreddits isn't relevant to my point.

(d) It is nevertheless disingenuous to try at this point to back away from defending photos of minors after you've specifically attempted to justify them. The subtext in this little branch of the thread is that you do in fact think it's wrong to "censor" photos of underage children, so it's not productive for you to fall back on "creepshots wasn't about that".

If, by switching back to "creepshots isn't about underage subjects", you mean to concede the argument about the legitimacy of posting photos of underage subjects, just say that. Don't pretend that you're formulating a convincing argument by repeatedly moving the goalposts. It's not like I'm suddenly going to forget that you stuck up for "jailbait", or that there were in fact underage photos on "creepshots".

I think the content on both /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots was, with only a few exceptions, legal and harmless.

Neither subreddit was shut down because it was illegal or harmful. The former was shut down as a result of media hysteria, and the latter as the result of blackmail.

I don't think you know much about either subreddit, to be honest.

I kind of suspected this from the start, but it's nice to have you finally admit it.

Nice try, though.

Most of creepy captions were hyperbolic if you hadn't noticed. The Internet is not, after all, serious business.

So, it's OK to share the personal information of people on the Internet?

If that was true subreddits like r/shitredditsays would be banned for "doxxing" and harboring hostility towards reddit as a whole. All this noise is generating from that single subreddit and it would be so easy for reddit to make it disappear. But they don't.

(I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm obviously not saying that there shouldn't be social and legal consequences for the people who kept on posting her overt topless photos. Why aren't those draconian sexting laws we hear in other places being applied to them?)

Do you just disagree that they're the same kind of information? Is that where the controversy is here?

And creepshots largely didn't meet the definition of that rule, because no one knew who the people in the pictures were.

Now, you can certainly wish the rule were something that would have blocked creepshots and doxxing. Like "information about anyone that they don't want a bunch of strangers on the Internet reading."

Reddit has tried to turn over the decisions about what to allow to a rule-based system instead of having to have any human discretion involved. I can see the appeal in wanting that (any google search for "technical solution for social problem" will describe why people keep on trying it), but it leads to things that obviously look absolutely crazy to outsiders.

Reddit probably needs to grow up and have some human discretion involved. It is going to collapse under its own weight without that.

And yes, I do think that information inciting or enabling real-life harassment is different from just a photo taken in public without the accompanying additional info.

What if those photos do leak information that could enable real-life harassement (like EXIF metadata, street sign, etc) . Can we trust the submitter to guarantee it never will? If it happens, who's to blame?

Those are both nuts. You handle the issue the way adults handle the issue:

1. Say "you can't post X."

2. Count on the fact that most people won't post X once you tell them not to (on pains of account sanction, which are already in place for rules against things like spam).

3. Deal with the complains of false positives and false negatives on a case-by-case basis.

Then they should be removed. Imgur (Reddit's favourite image hosting) already strips meta data.

If there's a face in that image, then there is the identity of a person in that image.

Taking a photo of someone in public and sharing it online does not constitute a breach of privacy. You do not have any expectation of privacy when you step out in public.

Or the more Orwellian, "All speech is free on Reddit. Some speech is just freer than others."

At least they'd be honest that they are just making the rules up as they go and your speech is as free as the next Anderson Cooper exposé or changing of the tides.