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Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

559 points| LordAtlas | 5 years ago |gamerevolution.com

528 comments

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[+] LordAtlas|5 years ago|reply
The Reddit CEO has announced that the employee in question is no longer employed there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/mcisdf/an_up...

But it's such a weaselly post.

First, it admits they didn't vet her before hiring: "We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her." Apparently, a basic google search is too difficult for HR.

Second, it says this: "On March 9th, we added extra protections for this employee, including actioning content that mentioned the employee’s name or shared personal information on third-party sites, which we reserve for serious cases of harassment and doxxing."

OK, and they _still_ didn't check why people were opposed to this person? Still no Internet search or, oh, reading the comments people were posting?

Notice that this "protection" was two weeks ago, not recently.

[+] phreack|5 years ago|reply
Why did they even hire such a controversial person in the first place? It's baffling how they're doubling down on defending her after her previous actions. I wonder if this'll all cool down in a couple of days with everyone forgetting about this or if there'll be a new established rhetoric in inflammatory communities like 'reddit admins are confirmed pedophiles'.
[+] Dma54rhs|5 years ago|reply
Good PR, trans activist etc.
[+] undefined1|5 years ago|reply
I find it interesting that Reddit still manages to find themselves invoking the Streisand effect in full force.
[+] Rebelgecko|5 years ago|reply
Reddit has addressed the situation here, in a mealy mouthed sort of way: https://www.reddit.com/r/modsupport/comments/mbqgx2

However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name.

This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accomplishment is being forced out of politics due to her connections to multiple pedophiles? Why did they taking such extreme steps to hide the admin's name, when they don't offer the same protections to mods or other users of the site? Does reddit have any audit trail or safeguards when admins edit comments? It would be interesting if they did a postmortem on the situation, but so far they seem reluctant to say that anything went wrong on their end.

[+] esja|5 years ago|reply
I agree, but a minor nitpick: Aimee was forced out not just for being connected to pedophiles, but also for lying about and/or endorsing them (among other issues). A massive failure of safeguarding from the Greens and Lib Dems, and now from Reddit.

It's astonishing to me that a person like this can become an admin on a website used by millions of teenagers. We already know that admins can access private messages and other personal information.

[+] jl6|5 years ago|reply
This person was probably hired because they have great trans advocacy credentials, which seems well aligned to the political orientation that Reddit is converging on. It’s easy to imagine how safeguarding issues were overlooked in a rush to hire an ally.
[+] duxup|5 years ago|reply
Reddit administration seems pretty ad hoc, undisciplined, at times weirdly disconnected from the community, and uncoordinated as it could possibly be.

Then again so are all its subreddits, and the volunteer mods are about as opaque and strange as the admins, with the added excuse that they're doing it for free.

The fact that the ecosystem has survived seems more like happenstance.

[+] Accujack|5 years ago|reply
> Does reddit have any audit trail or safeguards when admins edit comments?

No, and despite being told multiple times over the years they have not made any attempt to develop anything like this, despite it being an obvious step to prevent admins from controlling group think on the site.

My theory is that the company is worried that if they start letting people see under the covers that all the users will realize how much the site is used to manipulate them... deletions of "wrong think", bot posts, etc.

[+] Sebb767|5 years ago|reply
> possibly including the individual in question

Even assuming that Reddit learned nothing from the /u/spez-debacle and that admins can still edit comments, it would be a problem in its own right if she already had such far-reaching permissions when just getting started.

[+] camdenlock|5 years ago|reply
> why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accomplishment is being forced out of politics due to her connections to multiple pedophiles?

Hiring trans people gets you a lot of Virtue Credits. The incentives are clearly there.

It’s ridiculous, of course. And I say this as a trans person.

[+] stjohnswarts|5 years ago|reply
I suspect they are circling wagons and presenting a united front but this person will be fired or "resign" in the next day or so. She must not have told them about her history. You would think a network savvy company like Reddit would have HR department that can do a google search on someone's name though.
[+] jefftk|5 years ago|reply
> However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name.

Are you talking about replacing contents / titles with "[Removed by Reddit]"? That's the "Content Removed by Reddit Admins" category in https://www.redditinc.com/policies/transparency-report-2020-...

[+] dvfjsdhgfv|5 years ago|reply
I'm asking myself the same question. There many LGBT+ activists out there; hiring this particular person is just asking for trouble. And the current censorship situation simply makes no sense.
[+] shultays|5 years ago|reply
I remember related articles being flagged on HN as well. That is some very effective moderation tools
[+] unloco|5 years ago|reply
I pretty sure that response was as close to a post mortem as we are going to get.
[+] mansion7|5 years ago|reply
One can be forgiven a lot of one's politics are correct, especially if one has the mitigating status of minority status, even if it's a minority status that one grants oneself and no one is allowed to question.

We've just witnessed two celebrities on the same show, make tweets comparing a political situation to Nazism. Only one was fired for it.

One was conservative, the other liberal. If you immediately knew that one kept their job based purely on that description, the question of why Reddit would hire such a disastrous individual becomes much less mysterious.

[+] lawnchair_larry|5 years ago|reply
The obvious answer is because diversity trumps qualifications, and Silicon Valley companies are desperate to get their diversity numbers up.
[+] akhilcacharya|5 years ago|reply
The obvious answer is they probably didn't, this is probably a pseudo QAnon/Pizzagate conspiracy theory where people were "censored" for the harassment of a random person.
[+] brabel|5 years ago|reply
> due to her connections to multiple pedophiles?

You mean, her own father? The article says her fiancee also had been accused of saying he feels attracted to children but they claim his account was hacked, which may be true as no one in their right mind would tweet something like that.

[+] jbroson|5 years ago|reply
I think the idea that we should cancel people because of what their parents or partners did is incredibly wrongheaded.

Is there even a shred of evidence this person did anything illegal, immoral or unethical themselves?

they hired their dad, BEFORE he was even convicted of crimes she had nothing at all to do with. That's the worst thing this person ever did?

Usually I'm not a "cancel culture" critic but this is just insane.

[+] Nacdor|5 years ago|reply
This is the Reddit "Out of the Loop" thread that sort of explains what's happening: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mbeycw/whats_...

It's still somewhat difficult to find a clear explanation because the admins were banning people who mentioned her by name (despite the fact that she is a public/political figure in the UK). That had an extremely chilling effect on the discussions, but now the Streisand Effect is kicking in.

[+] wing-_-nuts|5 years ago|reply
This all feels very witch hunt like to me. If there's any evidence that she's a danger to children, I feel like people should put up or shut up. All I've seen is people slandering her for the actions of her father (proven) and some comments that might have been made by her partner about his own interests (completely unprovable). It's kind of disgusting what conservatives are trying to turn this into without a shred of proof.
[+] sixothree|5 years ago|reply
Reddit as a whole is less useful since comment sections were demoted from first class citizens to something barely usable. I think they saw imgur as a threat and wanted to better replicate that experience.
[+] znpy|5 years ago|reply
I just want to comment again because something else came up in my mind.

I've learnt through the years that "about us", "company policies" and "our values" pages are mostly marketing bullshit.

Who we hire, fire and promote show the actual values of a company.

What does this mean regarding reddit, considering this situation?

Everybody should draw their own conclusion.

[+] nojito|5 years ago|reply
Reddit protests are always so humorous to me.

For every mod that "leaves", dozens more will gladly step up to take over.

Reddit Admins will also not think twice to remove mods that do things like this to "hurt reddit"

[+] adzzzz|5 years ago|reply
I'm still shocked Reddit is allowed into the wider ecosystem of tech infrastructure. Between hosting explicit gore content and very extreme pornography with borderline legality at best (Including under Alexis's and Steve's leadership allowing a jailbait subreddit to continue for years) I would have thought they'd be booted from AWS etc.
[+] commandlinefan|5 years ago|reply
> borderline legality

There's a technical term for something that's borderline legal: legal.

[+] unethical_ban|5 years ago|reply
Well, that would be improper, so I'm glad they haven't been.

Booting people off core infrastructure (IaaS, colo, DNS) for reasons outside violation of law is a very slippery slope.

[+] varispeed|5 years ago|reply
Do you want projects that you disagree with deplatformed? That's pretty extremist position to take. Why do you think it is a good idea?
[+] tornato7|5 years ago|reply
Reddit must be spending 10s of millions of dollars a year with AWS. They're not about to boot them off without a court order.
[+] kumarvvr|5 years ago|reply
Wait, doesnt reddit have control over it servers? It surely can revoke such rules.

Looks like all this drama is to give an illusion of control and free speech. Am I missing some other dynamic at play?

[+] VectorLock|5 years ago|reply
It can. Reddit can simply remove all the mods from the subreddits and make them public again.

Nobody should be under any illusion that they "own" their subreddits.

[+] unethical_ban|5 years ago|reply
Just like armies technically could curbstomp civilians during protests, but many countries realize that's a bad idea.

I don't doubt admins and "powermods" are often the same people, and I'm not defending the morality of reddit as an org. However, the etiquette is that mods have total control over their subs as long as site-wide rules and real laws are not violated.

[+] BitwiseFool|5 years ago|reply
Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.
[+] akhilpotla|5 years ago|reply
An interesting question I've been thinking about, though I haven't really gotten anywhere is: At what point does a private platform become a public utility, so that censorship is not permissible on the site?

I agree that reddit shouldn't be censoring anyone or certain topics since it feel like a public utility. But if I were to have a blog, I think I should be allowed to block someone or delete certain comments based on how I think my blog should be, but my blog isn't a public utility. Or is it?

[+] znpy|5 years ago|reply
Reddit is getting shittier and shittier as the years go on...
[+] j0n5ilver|5 years ago|reply
Like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, reddit has gone to hell. The only downside to this is the wave of nutjobs that will attempt to flock over to here. I'm crossing my fingers in hope that that they won't discover this place.
[+] jerrygoyal|5 years ago|reply
Prediction: next reddit will be the decentralised one. Yes, those decentralised communities already exist but will become mainstream once those achieve good usability (UX) and accessibility (apps)).
[+] imwillofficial|5 years ago|reply
Why the scare quotes around censorship? People are clearly getting censored. People are mad about it. If that censorship is justified or not is another discussion.