Tag: Reddit

Is Reddit Poised to Succeed?

This doesn’t happen often, but I’m glad to say that I feel compelled to counter-balance my last post about Reddit with a measure of praise for CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman, who announced yesterday that Reddit intends to adopt new policies for content that may be hosted on the site. That last post, largely based on commentary from Sam Biddle at Gawker, was predicated on the idea that if Reddit cannot take the risk of losing the worst elements of its user-base, that it may not be able ultimately to mature in to the profitable and relevant business it wants to be.  But as stated in this article on Recode, Reddit appears ready to risk angering, and perhaps even losing, some of its users on the assumption that the majority of its community will support common-sensical boundaries of decency and legality with regard to prohibited content.   From Huffman’s statement regarding these new policies:

“As Reddit has grown, we’ve seen additional examples of how unfettered free speech can make Reddit a less enjoyable place to visit, and can even cause people harm outside of Reddit. Earlier this year, Reddit took a stand and banned non-consensual pornography[1] . This was largely accepted by the community, and the world is a better place as a result (Google and Twitter have followed suit). Part of the reason this went over so well was because there was a very clear line of what was unacceptable.”

Among the verboten, says Huffman, will be “anything actually illegal,” citing copyright infringement as an example, but this does not include (and neither should it) discussion of activities that are illegal; and it is certainly refreshing to hear a firm acknowledgement from a leader of this community that such lines of distinction actually exist.  I encourage you to read Huffman’s entire statement.

Needless to say, this editorial role is not easy, and Reddit won’t always get it right in either direction.  And that’s okay.  Why should they be expected to be any more perfect than any other enterprise? But for the moment, I think Huffman and the organization deserve kudos for turning an important corner with regard to the larger discussion about reasonable boundaries and the ethics of profiting from a free-for-all.  Even in the real world, the right of free speech does not necessarily protect some of very same activities—like inciting violence toward an individual—Huffman identifies as now off-limits for Reddit. But above all, it is notable that, as a private enterprise, the company has come to recognize that it is in no way obligated to provide a platform for harassment, privacy infringement, criminal behavior, or incitement to any of these activities, but that it does have an obligation to at least try to make these distinctions.  I hope the majority of Reddit’s community supports these efforts.

Is Reddit Poised to Fail?

The site that calls itself “The Front Page of the Internet” may be about to collapse. Not because of censorship or any legislative act or any aggressive move by litigious corporations, but simply because serious people will abandon them. The recent ouster of CEO Ellen Pao in response to her efforts to clean up some of Reddit’s more puerile and offensive threads is a good thing. I don’t say this because I lack sympathy for whatever frustration Pao may be feeling but because I am glad to see Reddit as an organization reveal itself for what it is; and in that regard, I cannot in this moment articulate what it is any better than Sam Biddle writing for Gawker, thus:

“… an overwhelmingly male group of very vocal power-users whose understanding of progressive politics is limited to the idea that their pirated ecchi torrents have just as much a right to bandwidth as Netflix, few things are more offensive than being told what to do by a woman. And when harassment was banned and their fat-hating subreddit was shut down, they plugged their ears and screamed and stomped and spammed swastikas until they got their way. (It obviously didn’t hurt that their way also happened to align with the interests of the site’s founders.)”

As Biddle implies in his article, the adolescent mob rule that forced the resignation of Pao may be a sign that the site as a business—because it is a business—cannot afford to mature without losing a large portion of its user base. And it will soon become clear that the serious people who give Reddit the credibility it has earned as a platform for real discourse—advertisers, prominent guests for the Ask Me Anything forums, and of course the publishing conglomerate that currently owns the site—will come to view Reddit’s ruling mob as a liability rather than an asset. If this happens, the site could disappear altogether or simply disintegrate into another 4Chan. To quote Biddle again:

“For Reddit to become something resembling a viable business, it has to make money, and that means making the bigots and stalkers and imbeciles feel less welcome—how many firms will do business with the company that pays to keep /r/GasTheKikes running? Any outside CEO is therefore facing an impossible job: fumigate Reddit sufficiently for advertisers while placating a hostile militia of superusers that can’t seem to distinguish between mild rules and a prison sentence on Robben Island.”

Just a couple of posts ago, I wrote the following in regard to Reddit’s hosting hate forums like watchniggersdie and rapingwomen:

“…when the owner of a site or a publication makes a judgment call to moderate or even delete material that is both offensive and useless, it’s called editing, not censorship. It is the difference between a mature grasp of the contours of freedom and an adolescent penchant for anarchy. Anarchy is an illusion of freedom in which nobody is free except the monsters.”

Reddit is a sad parable for the enlightenment we promised ourselves we would make of the digital age. Its founders—progressives like Alexis Ohanian—have presumed themselves to be relevant voices, speaking on behalf of the cybernetic phase in the evolution of civil liberty; yet they cannot seem to extricate themselves from the adolescent mob of trolls, racists, misogynists, anti-semites, and general goons whence their political clout is derived. Or maybe they don’t want to.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to regular reader John Warr for this update from The Register. Says current CEO Steve Huffman, “The overwhelming majority of content on Reddit comes from wonderful, creative, funny, smart, and silly communities. That is what makes Reddit great. There is also a dark side, communities whose purpose is reprehensible, and we don’t have any obligation to support them. And we also believe that some communities currently on the platform should not be here at all,”

Flags & the Tyranny of Quantum Liberty

It has been fascinating to watch the power of social media rapidly catalyze a latent disdain for the confederate battle flag as a byproduct of our outrage over the hate-filled, random murder of nine defenseless people.  I say it’s interesting because I have long-believed that there are perfectly unemotional arguments against any official flying of these battle flags, even if they did not connote racism.  Slavery, Dixiecrats, and the KKK aside, those flags were carried by regiments who fought to sever allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, and so do not belong flown over any institution that now derives its authority, liberty, and security from the power of that same body of law. As such, I have never been able to fathom why any conservative would defend the flag’s use in an official context, let alone anyone who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution.

Of course, these battle flags do connote racism and slavery and hate. In fact, the Stars & Bars may well have become one of the symbols of the early KKK because that group’s first members were supposedly veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia, whose banner that was. And I suspect these flags will soon come down in their official contexts, while private sales of rebel merch will continue to skyrocket, despite mainstream retailers like Walmart and Amazon discontinuing the sale of confederate-themed items. Some citizens who purchase these emblems are, of course, racists and haters, who were doubly-appalled last week by the concurrent hoisting of the rainbow flag with the Supreme Court’s affirmation of marriage rights for gay couples.  (No doubt, It sucks to be on the wrong side of history. Just ask Robert E. Lee.)

But many who will suddenly crave rebel hats, mugs, tees, shot glasses, etc. will do so as a reaction to the feeling that this sudden anti-flag “tyranny” represents another example of federal government overreach. And it is this narrative, often expressed by both the left and the right, that I believe is being overlooked, particularly as it plays out in cyberspace. As Jacob Siegel explains in this excellent article for The Daily Beast, it is a narrative that has been seething in the underbelly of the Internet for years.  And most interestingly, Siegel describes a confluence in which the anarchic sensibilities of the left swim in the same ideological pool that nourishes hate-crimes destined to manifest in people like Dylann Roof. Siegel writes…

“A reactionary, defiantly anti-social politics has been emerging for the last decade. It was well known under the auspices of “trolling” and well hidden by its pretense of trickstersism. It was actually juvenile fascism and vitriolic racism but, because it grinned and operated in cyberspace, it was a sensation when it first appeared less than a decade ago. Excitable theorists, bored journalists and naive political activists looked at its strange, adolescent face and pronounced on its revolutionary potential.”

My fellow progressives look at Dylann Roof, see a racist with a gun and want to go after the racism and the guns.  This is understandable. But it has thus far been anathema to the progressive agenda to look critically at the role of social media itself in helping to foster the seemingly relentless increase in these localized massacres.  Siegel provides insight into the evolution of hate groups, first on 4Chan and now on Reddit, and he describes the split within the “community” of trolls that produced the vigilante-style hacktivism of Anonymous. From Siegel again …

“In 2008 when The Church of Scientology began suing websites, forcing them to remove videos the Church considered private or defamatory, 4chan turned its attention to trolling the Scientologists. Eventually that produced a schism on 4chan. Some members, inspired by their success going after Scientology and the attention it brought, wanted to take a more activist role. The dedicated trolls rebelled. The activists splintered off and became the collective represented by a Guy Fawkes mask, known as Anonymous.” 

Although it is presently a progressive or liberal position to champion an “open” Internet bordering on a lawless internet with an absolutist approach to speech and a professed intolerance for infiltration by intelligence services, we might want to reconsider a more sober and balanced approach to these matters.  Because we can remove all the flags we want and scream for all the gun control we’re never going to get (or isn’t going to work), but what does work from time to time is intelligence gathering and, dare I say it, public demand that owners of businesses not support or profit from hateful, offensive, or criminal behavior. Siegel writes …

“Reddit defends the existence of communities like r/gasthekikes, r/watchniggersdie, and r/rapingwomen on free-speech grounds. That atmosphere has attracted right-wing extremists who left or were booted from other more established sites like Stormfront, where moderators, aware of scrutiny from law enforcement, have stricter posting rules.”

If Arkansas-based Walmart believes it’s time to remove a half-innocuous symbol from its merchandise, does it really make sense that San Francisco-based Reddit can defend hosting platforms that support the encouragement of racists, misogynists, and anti-semites to commit acts of violence?  Even if 99% of the idiots in the rapingwomen “community” on Reddit are not prospective assailants, and their speech is technically protected, that does not mean Reddit can claim this forum serves any social value whatsoever. And when the owner of a site or a publication makes a judgment call to moderate or even delete material that is both offensive and useless, it’s called editing, not censorship. It is the difference between a mature grasp of the contours of freedom and an adolescent penchant for anarchy. Anarchy is an illusion of freedom in which nobody is free except the monsters. Perhaps the most compelling statement Siegel makes is this one:

“What’s long been clear to the fascists has eluded the rest of us for a few reasons. The self-serving deceptions embedded in the idea of trolling, for one. And our persistent difficulty in grasping, despite all evidence to the contrary offered by governments and Silicon Valley plutocrats, that the Internet was not built to liberate us.”

Yes, I’ll be happy to see confederate flags placed in their proper historic context despite the fact that doing so is already amping up racist reaction.  As such, it may be time, while we rebuke the symbols of hate, that we also look more critically at the new mechanisms through which hate preaches, recruits, radicalizes, and activates its soldiers and lone-wolf terrorists. Because many progressive “digital rights” proponents have bought into what I’ll call a quantum view of civil liberty in which the infinite, micro-universe of cyberspace creates infinite opportunities for micro-infringements against an infinite sense of liberty. This mindset cannot help but redefine ordinary boundaries of fairness and decency as censorship. It assumes naively that people left to work things out in the cage-match of cyberspace will naturally produce a collective morality that is somehow more pure than the morality we shape in the physical world and express through the antiquated “rule of law.” Call me a cynic, but as black churches burn once again in the South, I struggle to see evidence of this new, cybernetic enlightenment expressed in the Reddit forum watchniggersdie.

Meanwhile, progressives who buy into the quantum view of civil liberty inadvertently provide aid to domestic terrorists like Roof by demanding policy, which actually makes the job of intelligence services more difficult.  As recently posted, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) stated that Internet-industry funded fears, exaggerating the role of public vs private surveillance of cyberspace has made rational debate in Congress over the proper role of intelligence nearly impossible.  So, while we insist upon the removal of hateful symbols, accepting that this will inspire more hate crimes, perhaps we progressives should also allow for the possibility that there are well-intentioned intelligence experts crawling through threads and chat rooms, who are in fact looking for the next son of a bitch planning another lynching.

When it comes to flags, corny as it may sound, I think about Aaron Sorkin’s fictional President Bartlett from The West Wing, who concluded many stump speeches with the declaration, “This is a time for American heroes, and we reach for the stars.”  The reference to stars is both literal and metaphoric.  Literally, the nation born in science and the enlightenment, and blessed with so many resources, has both the capacity and responsibility to lead the world in grasping the actual stars.  As a metaphor, I think “reaching for the stars” broadly refers to looking with hope toward the future.  The U.S. flag is grounded in heritage, it’s composition a derivative of the British colonial flags, but in place of the Union Jack that once adorned the corner, is the field of stars.  The stripes represent history, but the stars are about the future — about the capacity for the collective states to continually transcend the past, even to defy gravity, as when MIT nerds and good-old-boy pilots once reached for the stars together. Surely anything we call progress must be held to that standard.

Have a safe and happy Fourth of July.