Stated reason != real reason. A common method reddit uses is to first ban all the mods, not accept any request for other users to take over the sub, then ban it for being unmoderated. Attempts to recreate the community will result in another ban, since you are recreating a banned community. If they want a sub gone, they will generate a reason to remove it.
By that logic, I have seen hardcore misandry on many of the feminist forums. Many even talk about killing their partners or harming their body parts routinely. Even moderators respond positively to those comments sometimes. But hey, it doesn’t fit their narrative and there would be a shitstorm if they banned such forums. “Reddit bans popular feminist forum, paving a new way for misogyny”
My point is they only ban the ones that don’t fit their narrative or their political views and they know they can get away with.
> If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules.
Some subs do get brigaded by users intentionally posting content that violates reddit TOS. The same happens on Discord. Some are trolls, others are intentionally malicious so they can report things. If you have an inactive mod team in either community, yeah your sub will go poof.
The magic the gathering subreddit has to moderate out the word "proxy" or risk getting banned. seems plausable like there are just a lot of speicfic rules you gotta follow to be a subreddit
I don't know of any social media site that has been able to "consistently" enforce moderation at scale. When you have millions of humans they will find every edge case and workaround to any specific legalese you come up with.
Smaller sites like HN do better compared to twitter or reddit, because it's easier. But ultimately it all depends on what kind of communities the company wants to nurture.
While it would be nice if social media companies actually said the truth about moderation rather than pretending there's some content neutral principals they're applying, I also think a lot of people would be better off if they accept that social media is what it is, and move on if they don't like it.
> If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules.
No, because the rules specifically mention soliciting. As far as I can tell, the only other time this is mentioned is for "soliciting or facilitating illegal or prohibited transactions".
>If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules.
They just change the rules as needed. Look at /r/blackpeopletwitter, they have a rule that you can only post in "country club threads" if you have sent a picture of your skin color in to the mods to verify you aren't white, since they don't want white people posting in there.
When people pointed out the obvious hypocrisy of Reddit endorsing racial discrimination by one of its largest subs, they just re-wrote the rules to make it kosher.
Another “politically oriented sub” had users who got pissed that they were banned for spamming a sub that I frequented.
They made new accounts (they did that a lot…) and posted a couple normal posts in our sub and then again spammed but this time pretending to be organizing a brigade vs … their sub.
Admins didn’t act when they complained because it was all pretty obvious and we moderated the brigade posts.
In my experience it’s not just “hey there are a few posts” that triggers these kinds of actions.
ah, the heckler's veto. I had only heard of that happening on college campuses recently. Never expected it to happen on someplace as big and diverse as Reddit
>Even though many such posts skirt perilously close to copyright-driven bans, the continuing survival of ‘IP-appropriated’ non-porn deepfake video posts by major YouTube deepfakers such as Ctrl-Shift-Face suggest a broad studio and rights-holder tolerance towards such activity, at least for the time being.
I would not be surprised if this isn't so much tolerance as much as it is ignorance. Copyright enforcement is hilariously expensive, and the only reason why any litigation even happens is that larger outfits are also hilariously petty. The mantra of copyright maximalism is that if anyone is even remotely touching "your work", you storm in and demand whatever money you can purely for the sake of keeping people off your "property".
Trust me, once they run out of nominally-SFW-but-actually-NSFW communities to ban, you'll see movie studios cotton onto what they consider to be theft[0] and start prosecuting something that doesn't really harm them in any way.
[0] Assume, for the sake of this discussion, that if we as a people decide someone gets a government monopoly on something, then depriving them of their monopoly is stealing from them.
The book, Light of Other Days, has a good take on that - everyone can see everything everywhere with wormhole cameras, they "effectively destroy all secrecy and privacy". So prudishness in the generations that grow up with wormcams is non-existent. (not dissimilar to kids and mobile phones ...)
We're in the middle of a moral panic over trans people at the moment; I think there's a significant community of people who want the world to be much less sexually tolerant.
Well until then nothing stops you to generating extra income to the ladies from senior house and turn them victoria secret models recording mic licking videos to monetize
I thought nuclear weapons were an outlier, but it seems like humanity is going to have to figure out a more general way to handle technology that exists but is more harmful than not.
Important note: the largest "SFW" Deepfake community, r/SFWdeepfakes, was not banned, rather a smaller competing subreddit which doesn't have a recent archive on the popular archive sites.
This is really interesting. I saw this post on hckrnews and instantly had a flashback to that moment my account was banned from reddit.
I had actually created the SFWdeepfakes subreddit, because i thought those edits of Nicolas Cage on everything were absolutely hilarious.
Guess what? Suspended for "posting involuntary pornography". Tried to get my account back, but reddit was "experiencing higher than usual support volume" and never got back to me. Oh well.
If you'd asked me a few years ago, I'd have said deepfakes aren't a problem - that lack of media literacy is the problem. We've had photoshop and staged photos and impersonators and satirical news for years, after all. And although a tiny fraction of the population falls for hoaxes like bigfoot and astrology and homeopathy, 99% of people manage to sift through this stuff.
What I learned from the pandemic, though, is that people are much worse at telling fact from fiction than I expected.
It's given me a greater understanding of the people who are very worried about deepfakes - if you think it's more like 10%-30% of the population that are very easily fooled, new technology for fakery is an ominous thing to see.
Those are rookie numbers. I think the % of people who can be easily fooled is almost 100%. There are fewer and fewer people who live their lives doubting what they see unless they’re already attached to the opposite of that idea.
Most people are not trained to detect deep fakes and certainly most of us here still would fall for a deepfake unless we’re specifically looking for it.
It's not just the people who are easily fooled, even the people who aren't fooled end up harmed. First we learned not to trust images in the days of Photoshop:
But the end result is also that we no longer trust true information either. We have become cynical, detached, disorganized. But each of us ends up somewhat arbitrarily deciding what to believe out of the sea of indistinguishable bits forehosed at us by the Internet, we no longer have any shared experience or consensus to build a functioning society on.
Propaganda does not require you to believe it. It's equally effective if you end up believing nothing.
[+] [-] jjbinx007|3 years ago|reply
If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules.
[+] [-] syrrim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neya|3 years ago|reply
My point is they only ban the ones that don’t fit their narrative or their political views and they know they can get away with.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|3 years ago|reply
Some subs do get brigaded by users intentionally posting content that violates reddit TOS. The same happens on Discord. Some are trolls, others are intentionally malicious so they can report things. If you have an inactive mod team in either community, yeah your sub will go poof.
[+] [-] dangrossman|3 years ago|reply
Reddit closes subreddits for lack of active moderation all the time.
[+] [-] treesrule|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewrv|3 years ago|reply
Courts struggle with it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhWCk2f2alI
Smaller sites like HN do better compared to twitter or reddit, because it's easier. But ultimately it all depends on what kind of communities the company wants to nurture.
While it would be nice if social media companies actually said the truth about moderation rather than pretending there's some content neutral principals they're applying, I also think a lot of people would be better off if they accept that social media is what it is, and move on if they don't like it.
[+] [-] Semaphor|3 years ago|reply
No, because the rules specifically mention soliciting. As far as I can tell, the only other time this is mentioned is for "soliciting or facilitating illegal or prohibited transactions".
[+] [-] yucky|3 years ago|reply
They just change the rules as needed. Look at /r/blackpeopletwitter, they have a rule that you can only post in "country club threads" if you have sent a picture of your skin color in to the mods to verify you aren't white, since they don't want white people posting in there.
When people pointed out the obvious hypocrisy of Reddit endorsing racial discrimination by one of its largest subs, they just re-wrote the rules to make it kosher.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/us/reddit-race-black-peop...
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
Didn’t work.
Another “politically oriented sub” had users who got pissed that they were banned for spamming a sub that I frequented.
They made new accounts (they did that a lot…) and posted a couple normal posts in our sub and then again spammed but this time pretending to be organizing a brigade vs … their sub.
Admins didn’t act when they complained because it was all pretty obvious and we moderated the brigade posts.
In my experience it’s not just “hey there are a few posts” that triggers these kinds of actions.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|3 years ago|reply
Pretty sure that's how every subreddit that's ever been banned got banned.
[+] [-] sprayk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmeisthax|3 years ago|reply
I would not be surprised if this isn't so much tolerance as much as it is ignorance. Copyright enforcement is hilariously expensive, and the only reason why any litigation even happens is that larger outfits are also hilariously petty. The mantra of copyright maximalism is that if anyone is even remotely touching "your work", you storm in and demand whatever money you can purely for the sake of keeping people off your "property".
Trust me, once they run out of nominally-SFW-but-actually-NSFW communities to ban, you'll see movie studios cotton onto what they consider to be theft[0] and start prosecuting something that doesn't really harm them in any way.
[0] Assume, for the sake of this discussion, that if we as a people decide someone gets a government monopoly on something, then depriving them of their monopoly is stealing from them.
Yes, I hate this logic too.
[+] [-] polote|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrBazza|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
[+] [-] mdanger007|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolsal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrgiger|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|3 years ago|reply
Generating offense and disgust is not necessary inherently harmful.
[+] [-] adolph|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badRNG|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvschuilenburg|3 years ago|reply
I had actually created the SFWdeepfakes subreddit, because i thought those edits of Nicolas Cage on everything were absolutely hilarious.
Guess what? Suspended for "posting involuntary pornography". Tried to get my account back, but reddit was "experiencing higher than usual support volume" and never got back to me. Oh well.
[+] [-] michaelt|3 years ago|reply
What I learned from the pandemic, though, is that people are much worse at telling fact from fiction than I expected.
It's given me a greater understanding of the people who are very worried about deepfakes - if you think it's more like 10%-30% of the population that are very easily fooled, new technology for fakery is an ominous thing to see.
[+] [-] wonderbore|3 years ago|reply
Most people are not trained to detect deep fakes and certainly most of us here still would fall for a deepfake unless we’re specifically looking for it.
[+] [-] munificent|3 years ago|reply
https://www.npr.org/2008/07/11/92454193/on-the-smoky-trail-o...
https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/93783294351871590...
Now with deep fakes, we learn not to trust video:
https://www.12newsnow.com/article/news/nation-world/ukraine/...
But the end result is also that we no longer trust true information either. We have become cynical, detached, disorganized. But each of us ends up somewhat arbitrarily deciding what to believe out of the sea of indistinguishable bits forehosed at us by the Internet, we no longer have any shared experience or consensus to build a functioning society on.
Propaganda does not require you to believe it. It's equally effective if you end up believing nothing.
[+] [-] haunter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kanzure|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] honkler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martythemaniak|3 years ago|reply
edit: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1519239024379973632.html
[+] [-] Dracophoenix|3 years ago|reply