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I would love to see a statement from Reddit/Twitter... explicitly stating that they will remain politically neutral. There’s certainly content that should legal

I would love to see a statement from Reddit/Twitter... explicitly stating that they will remain politically neutral. There’s certainly content that should legally be taken down, there’s probably content that isn’t advertising friendly and could be taken down. It seems like these companies are being very slanted in their evaluation of the latter category. Basically right leaning = bad, left leaning = good. All I want is impartial.

artursapek 9y ago
It's kind of an inside joke on reddit now how left-leaning /r/politics is. It frames itself as a generic political news page but it's so biased it's incredible.
- Pigo 9y ago
  Look at /r/politics right now, or any day of the week. Good luck finding one article that isn't about how Trump is literally Hitler. Whether you agree with it or not, I don't see how anyone can say it doesn't have an agenda.
  - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
    Or maybe he's an example of incompetence; creating national and international gaffs literally every day. Refusing to normalize his behavior isn't a devious agenda when it's that behavior that has paralyzed the government such that there isn't anything else to report on.
    - Pigo 9y ago
      Well, that does make sense that it's a daily story to you if you think that way. I just wish the people who do think this could understand how tiresome it is to see every story infused with a Trump angle. Like this Al Franken story for example, there are no posts about the topic that don't focus on the Trump accusations foremost. Why can't it be examined by itself?
      - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
        What would you have it focus on: Franken's need to apologize (he did that), status of the victim's case (she accepted the apology and dropped it), need for an ethics probe (Franken proposed one)? The only thing left of interest in this story (beyond the general theme of institutionalized sexism; which let's be fair isn't going to generate conductive discussion online) is the marked difference to how this was handled in comparison to how Trump, Moore, et al have chosen to conduct themselves.
        Pigo 9y ago
        I just used it as an example. I'm not even that interested in it honestly. But when I brought this up it was the first day of the scandal, and you're saying it'd already been talked about enough that we needed to "move on" to remembering that the President has had accusers too? Maybe things just move too fast for me.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        Because nothing happens in a vacuum. How would it be fair if Franken were to be held accountable (which he should be, absolutely), but Trump not?
  - untog 9y ago
    If a group of users come together and upvote content they individually agree with, is it "an agenda", or is it "consensus"? Unless I missed something, there's nothing inherent in /r/politics that requires it to be a dispassionate collection of links that represent all sides of the political spectrum. Don't get me wrong, it's a pit of human misery that I've long since removed from my subreddit list, but it's what users want it to be.
    - revmoo 9y ago
      > If a group of users come together and upvote content they individually agree with, is it "an agenda", or is it "consensus"? Shareblue literally pays staffers to post content there en-masse...
    - validationerror 9y ago
      It's agenda, specifically agenda set by the moderators in /r/politics, who have created the current far-left & anti-Trump circlejerk by banning conservative and right-wing posters. I've been using Reddit for over a decade now and while in the first couple of years it was totally possible to discuss even politically incorrect topics in most subreddits, over the past years you get banned for all kinds of nonsense simply because many of the moderators are a sensitive bunch and very biased. I'd say it started to get really bad in that regard about 5 years ago and has increased exponentially during the last US election. Try having a discussion about genetics, race and intelligence, crime statistics, feminism and "women's issues", sexism or something of that order on Reddit these days - it's downright impossible, no matter how civil the discussion being held is or how much you back your arguments up with scientific studies and facts. In every mainstream or larger sub that's not specifically meant to be "politically incorrect" you'll get banned for "bigotry" or "racism" or "sexism" or other such nonsense if you don't agree with the popular leftist narratives. In some of the right-wing oriented subs you get banned for being a "cuck" or such nonsense. Entering the mainstream has largely ruined Reddit as a discussion platform as far as I'm concerned. I only engage in the programming / tech related subs these days.
- josefresco 9y ago
  Politics wasn't always like that ... it's now a counter-balance to The_Donald. Hard to remain "neutral" when right next door there's not even an attempt.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Nah, it's always been absurdly biased. It's a horrific source on information on politics, which makes it sad that it is so popular. Unfortunately there are lots of subreddits like that. I can't read a thread in r/conspiracy without feeling bad about the human race. It's a fun (?) game to guess how people can spin any given event. Great rubbernecking material though.
  - tartuffe78 9y ago
    It was like that long before The_Donald existed
  - Pigo 9y ago
    t_d was a promotional subreddit for his campaign, it never claimed to be balanced. It bothers me because I would like to visit a subreddit that actually is balanced, and now there isn't one.
    - josefresco 9y ago
      How would this work? I'm curious. Any subreddit created on the topic of "politics" is going to attract armies on each side, who will then use their collective "brigading" (sp) power to influence the sub? Maybe with a strong mod, who tries to balance submissions 50/50 - but then was is the point? If a republican, or democrat is doing something wrong/illegal/immoral - shouldn't we all know about it regardless of potential bias?
      - snegu 9y ago
        https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ is actually pretty good. I don't spend much time on Reddit anymore, but it was one of my favorite subs when I did.
- chisleu 9y ago
  I started a subreddit as a safe space for political and current events discussion, but the idea being that you will be temporarily banned for posting biased articles and op eds, titles that misrepresent statements, or comments that attack or do not add to the conversation. I know it would be incredibly hard to moderate, at least at first. I'm just not sure there is really a desire for such a place since most subreddits seem to be safe-space/echo chambers.
ch4s3 9y ago
While I imagine there is some bias among reddit's staff, because they're people and we all have bias, I don't think it's as simple as "right leaning = bad, left leaning = good". No one there is going to give you a hard time for discussing the influence of Catholicism on the views of William F. Buckley. Even Ann Coulter is in bounds, but the vile far-right 4chan garbage that some corners of reddit spew has no place in a civil forum.
sandworm101 9y ago
>> content that isn’t advertising friendly and could be taken down. That is a dangerous road. Today they might be taking down otherwise legal content with which advertisers do not want to be associated. Tomorrow they are being asked to remove content with which advertisers disagree. Suddenly my 1000-word rant on the evils of Microsoft's latest OS is being taken down. Rather than being a free space for discussion, reddit will have become just another moderated online forum where nothing of note ever happens. Reddit's power comes from negative posts. Facebook and twitter makes headlines when people 'like' things a billion times. They lack the capacity for users to express anger objectively. Reddit makes headlines when it empowers 50,000 gamers to dump on EA. Advertisers like EA should be be paying for such feedback. They evidently already listen to it.
- SolaceQuantum 9y ago
  Isn’t this a slippery slope argument?
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    It's the only argument that reliably gets trotted out whenever someone mentions curbing hate speech.
    - kirRoyale 9y ago
      Because it's true.
      - mastax 9y ago
        Counterexample: HN.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        Then why are you here? HN is extremely heavily moderated.
    - sandworm101 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
argv_empty 9y ago
The subs I've heard about banning were echo chambers dedicated to the idea that "this group of people I don't like ought to be [starved|exiled|thrown from helicopters|raped|enslaved]" and such things. If that makes you think the policy is "right leaning = bad, left leaning = good," that says some pretty nasty things about the modern right, doesn't it?
- coffeevradar 9y ago
  There are plenty of left-wing subreddits with equal measures of vitriol. Somehow they avoid earning the same opprobrium that the right-wing ones do. This apparent double standard creates the appearance of bias.
  - reefoctopus 9y ago
    Feel free to provide examples of the double standard.
    - coffeevradar 9y ago
      You'll note that I said that there was an 'apparent' double standard. If may not be apparent to you, but it certainly is to some. You seem like you spend more time on the political parts of Reddit than I, so I'm sure you're well equipped to investigate this yourself.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        Well, who cares. There will be an "apparent" bias to some of these guys unless they delete everything but the red pill and The_Donald.
  - hank_pank 9y ago
    Shit Reddit Says (r/srs) is a good example of this. By the way, I'm dead, right?
  - mrgoldenbrown 9y ago
zurn 9y ago
Nobody can agree on what "politically neutral" means, it's not a useful criterion. Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality".
- koolba 9y ago
  > Nobody can agree on what "politically neutral" means, it's not a useful criterion. It's pretty easy for a tech platform to be politically neutral. All you need are objective rules for how content "get to the top" and equal opportunity for whatever system is in place to be abused. That last one is the problem though. Regardless of which side is doing it, there's a sense of unfairness felt by the other side when they see the system get gamed. And it invariably will. Hence the knee jerk reaction to rebalance things, which leads to calls of bias from the other side, and the cycle continues. > Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality". Do you seriously consider unconsenting upskirt photos of women[1] political speech? Not just, free speech, but specifically "political speech"? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities#CreepShots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
  - zurn 9y ago
    I think the "All you need are objective rules" part is just going to square one. > > Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality". > Do you seriously consider unconsenting upskirt photos of women[1] political speech? Not just, free speech, but specifically "political speech"? No, and I'd kindly ask you not to attribute such a position to me. But I'm willing to bet someone does think it's political speech. See also NAMBLA, etc. And consider that gay rights boosters would have been put in the same basket a while ago.
lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
There's no such thing as "neutral". This modern demand that there are two or more equally valid positions in every debate is asinine. When facts become politicized there's no hope of neutrality if you want to remove lies.
tdb7893 9y ago
It's hard because people will always be mad when their stuff gets taken down and it's hard to tell where the line is. A good example on reddit is that r/the_Donald is often very racist, islamophobic, and misogynistic (and it's not a small portion, often the top comment on a post will be something that is islamophobic) but they don't see themselves as that way. I don't think they should ban that sub but even being impartial politically it's not desirable for most advertising
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- alexanderstears 9y ago
  Can you define "Islamophobia"? It's a serious question, I don't disagree that there's some prejudice against Islam on the western right. However, a lot of the top posts are ultimately factual claims. Sweden has a rise in grenade attacks and sexual assaults, British police looked the other way when Muslim Men formed a pedophilia group, most terrorism is motivated by Islam, and there are Islamists whose purported goal is to destroy western civilization. Is it Islamaphobic to highlight these things? Islamists are right wing themselves (or at least their views map better to right wing views than left wing views) so we need a better lens than "left vs right" to determine the boundaries of the conflict.
  - maaaats 9y ago
    Today, through browsing r/popular, I saw a post about a swedish woman having been raped by a refugee. The comments were neither factual or objective. Most actually claimed she deserved it, because she "probably voted for the left". Be careful about who you try to defend here, just read any top comment. And dont confuse facts with what's really relevant. For instance, a few days ago I saw a discussion about this: > a police officer is eighteen and a half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be by a police officer This is true, and tries to paint a picture of black males being violent (should've seen the comments). But it's two incomparable metrics! Actually, a police officer is ~165 times likelier to be killed by a white male given the same rules. So yeah, "facts", but always distorted in these subreddits.
grandalf 9y ago
Excellent point. Sadly this will likely not happen. Google and Facebook are gradually imposing a highly censored world view. We can’t effectively reason about social media censorship by analogizing it to meatspace. Just as virality mechanisms amplify “good” content, they also change the equilibrium state of whose ideas can spread. Censorship programs work like a squirt of insecticide into a beehive, they kill off some functional parts of the hive organism and eventually lead to the destruction of all of the bees inside. Similarly, censoring “fake news” or “abusive content” poisons the environment for ideas in a similar way. Ideas are not evaluated objectively. We each react to them emotionally and experience them via the social meaning we associate with them. Prejudices are not rational and are countered by ample evidence, yet there is much prejudice and much religious faith... such beliefs carry a meaning payload enjoyed by their host. The fear suffered by social media firms (like reddit) is that someone will screenshot a piece of offensive speech alongside an ad paid for by an advertiser, and the advertiser will worry that his/her brand is being associated with that speech. This is why Colin Kaepernick doesn’t have a job. Social media firms are thus following in the path of other media firms and are (like The NY Times) putting ad revenue ahead of the first amendment. This isn’t unexpected, these firms are the “tories” of our day.
- fhood 9y ago
  First off, the first amendment is specifically with respect to congress, and I don't understand why I have to say this so often. Second, society has always been self censoring, but the internet has thrown a wrench into that by allowing people to escape into pockets of like minded individuals. And you might have noticed that hacker news is fairly heavily censored, and as a result has managed to avoid turning into a cesspool like much of reddit. I think that reddit is worried about advertising, yes, but I also think they are concerned about a decline in engaged usership.
  - hiram112 9y ago
    It's strange, but I've never considered Reddit a cesspoll. The fact of the matter - and this is why Reddit is successful - is that it has lots of unique subs and a pretty decent voting system which pushes trolls to the bottom, often collapsed. But if I want to really see what these people are writing, I am free to browse any sub, sort by controversial, and expand the collapsed threads. Win - Win. Hacker News, OTOH, just seems to 'disappear' wrong-think. There's a big difference.
ebbv 9y ago
Your "right leaning" is another person's hate speech. There's no onus on these privately owned web sites to be your definition (or mine) of "politically neutral." If you don't like them start your own platform or use a different one.
- alexanderstears 9y ago
  >There's no onus on these privately owned web sites to be your definition (or mine) of "politically neutral." You're right. However when there are copyright violations on Reddit, they claim it's a platform and they're not responsible for the content on it - ultimately the users are responsible. And then the courts agree and decide that ultimately the violation rests with the user and not with the platform. However, as they increase the moderation of their platform, they move closer and closer to being responsible for the content. At some point of restriction, they're completely responsible for the content on their platform. They're welcome to operate the site however they want, but they shouldn't reap the advantages of a public platform while advancing their private interests.
  - abiox 9y ago
    > At some point of restriction, they're completely [...] seems to me that there is no "completely" unless they literally screen and evaluate every single post before accepting them. until that point's it's all matters of degree.
ProAm 9y ago
> politically neutral There is no such thing as politically neutral when there is money involved. And Reddit owes VC a lot of money.
mozumder 9y ago
Is stupid to expect ad-driven media properties to be neutral. Just dumb. Reddit is an ad-supported system. The moment you take advertising, you are now required to maintain editorial control. And that's fine. Advertisers have strict content guidelines, things like: no blood, no violence, no gore, no porn, etc.. Do you think a company like Calvin Klein is going to want to put their fashion ad next to an image of a dead kid? Yah that's not happening. Instead of setting the expectation on corporations, we need the public to understand what their support of ad-driven media properties mean. And that it's fine. Reddit isn't a public service. It's not a charity. It's an ad-driven media property, like a TV show or magazine. That's it. And if conservatives can't accept advertising-based media, they need to find some other outlet to express their views. Let me put it another way: Do you really think Calvin Klein is going to want to put ads next to images of dead kids? Is that your expectation? If not, how do you expect Reddit to become a profitable company? Of course, Reddit & Twitter isn't going to state that they're an ad-driven media property, since they want to "appear" unbiased and neutral, but that's completely false. They are absolutely responsible to their advertisers as their core business plan.
- visarga 9y ago
  You probably don't know but there are NLP and computer vision methods to detect "blood, violence, gore and porn" automatically and stop ads on those pages (subreddits).
  - mozumder 9y ago
    This doesn't just apply to obvious and simple visual problems, but also more subtle content problems. How does Honda avoid placing ads next to a pro-Roy Moore articles that might associate their brand with pedophilia?
    - visarga 9y ago
      Use word vectors to compute similarity of the page content to banned topics, and if it is > threshold, then avoid that page. When word vectors are trained on billions of words they can pick up even the slightest hint of pedophilia. They also understand slang and memes, if present in the training corpus. I think SOTA in content filtering and classification is pretty good today for both image and text. Another way to filter pages is to follow it in time, for a longer period and if it has multiple positives, then ban it entirely.
jackmott 9y ago
Why should anyone remain politically neutral no matter what? What if the Nazi party came into power? Impartiality can impart political bias if the facts happen to lean one way or the other, as they will from time to time.
- Cuuugi 9y ago
  Nazi's came to power because a strong feeling of victimization of a group of Germans. Most of the atrocities around the world are justified because of a feeling of victimization. I think both sides of the political spectrum feel victimized by each other, and that scares me. When GP asks for impartiality, think GP would settle for reasonableness, which i think both sides have lost track of years ago. All i say, is think inwardly, question your beliefs, and most importantly don't question other peoples motives.
- zeth__ 9y ago
  The Nazi came to power largely because the communists would constantly fight them in the streets and "no-platform" them. You'd think someone would have read a history book. Downvoting does not change facts. The constant street battles between the Communists and Nazis helped the Nazi far more than the Communists.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    While the KPD made many stupid mistakes, and frankly given their Stalinist policies at the time were not much better than the NSDAP in most respect, it was the power hungry right wing parties that entered into a coalition government with Hitler and voted for the Enabling Act.
    - zeth__ 9y ago
      Which has nothing to do with the fact that the street battles between communists and nazis allowed Hitler to take 30% of the vote in two consecutive elections. The left wins elections when it is the victim of violence, it loses when it tries to use violence itself.
emodendroket 9y ago
I don't think that's true at all. Frankly Twitter seems to have pretty relaxed judgments on hate speech when it comes to people associated with Trump.
gadders 9y ago
This is happening all over. Twitter is banning/de-verifying mostly right-wing users, Shopify is stopping carrying stores for right wing people like Milo etc etc.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  In Milos case there is soliciting views of neo nazis and video examples of defending child rapists. Quite apart from not wanting your company associated with that content there is probably a legal need to distance ones self to avoid litigation in some countries.
  - gadders 9y ago
    He made a joke about his own experiences as a young gay man on the Joe Rogan podcast. He has continually distanced himself from the Alt-Right and neo-Nazis. He has also recently married his fiance, who is a person of colour.
    - ignoramceisblis 9y ago
      It's extremely telling that false statements made against predominantly right-leaning individuals in this thread maintain their prominent hue, whilst true statements correcting those beliefs are fading to a less visible hue.
      - lostlogin 9y ago
        You know he acknowledged what he said and did and apologised? You can read the leaked emails and read his statements and listen to what he said. What’s false?
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      "He has continually distanced himself from the Alt-Right and neo-Nazis" When? "He has also recently married his fiance, who is a person of colour." And? Because a man marries a woman, they can't be misogynist?
    - 9y ago
cryptonector 9y ago
Reddit is full of non-advertiser-friendly content. Not just the posts, but the comments. Banning all that content will make Reddit boring to many of its users. As for content that breaks the law, there isn't much of that in the U.S., for obvious reasons. Elsewhere it's another story. As to politics, I don't think you can expect any of these sites to be politically neutral. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit -- all show their bias. It's OK, it's part of life in a free market. There is a concern that many voices can be shut out of the market, and so maybe there will, at some point, be a decent rationale for temporary (say, ten years) regulations on digital town squares.
- imglorp 9y ago
  Right. Unrestricted, adult conversation is what makes it reddit, not kindergarten. It's not always respectful but neither is real discourse in person. If you make it all kittens and candy, you will lose many demographics.
bfuller 9y ago
read spez's quarterly AMA, he went pretty deep into defending /r/the_donald
ksk 9y ago
Yeah, Twitter fucked up IMO. They wanted the check mark to mean verification, not endorsement, and ironically after removing the checkmark from people they don't like, its back to square one.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  I think the problem is "who gets to be verified?" Why can't I be verified? The implication was that verified users were special in some way (maybe just in a Sneeches "stars upon thars" way), and so giving it to admitted Nazis and white nationalists was seen as saying they deserved to be special. And then taking it away made them and their supporters feel they weren't special anymore.
  - ksk 9y ago
    Right, its all about how people outside of Twitter perceived the checkmark. Twitter made it worse for themselves, because people are just going to find sexist/racist tweets from verified people and get Twitter to un-verify them via negative clickbait PR.
tryingagainbro 9y ago
<<All I want is impartial. First they are prepping for an IPO and need to clean up image. Second, is being impartial even possible, short of some super-duper AI that after being programmed by biased programmers cleans itself of the bias?
tzs 9y ago
What happens when being impartial leads to an appearance of bias? There was an interesting segment on NPR sometime after Trump won the Republican nomination, looking back on how they had covered Trump during the primaries. When they got a sense that they had been running more negative things about Trump than they had about the other Republican candidates, or less positive things about him than about the others, they started skipping negative things Trump did or said that would have been top stories if, say, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich had said or done them, to bring the total number of negative Trump things they ran more in line with the negative things about the others. Same with positive Trump things...they adjusted to keep those at least in the ballpark as those of other candidates. In retrospect, they realized that they were simply unprepared for a situation where a candidate would have as many negatives compared to others of the same party as Trump had. If they had set some impartial, objective threshold and covered everything from every candidate that crossed that threshold their news segments would have been something like 90% about Trump. They had implicitly assumed that no candidate would ever be that far out on his party's bell curve, and so killed legitimate, newsworthy stories to try to make the results match that expectation.

artursapek 9y ago

It's kind of an inside joke on reddit now how left-leaning /r/politics is. It frames itself as a generic political news page but it's so biased it's incredible.

Pigo 9y ago
Look at /r/politics right now, or any day of the week. Good luck finding one article that isn't about how Trump is literally Hitler. Whether you agree with it or not, I don't see how anyone can say it doesn't have an agenda.
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  Or maybe he's an example of incompetence; creating national and international gaffs literally every day. Refusing to normalize his behavior isn't a devious agenda when it's that behavior that has paralyzed the government such that there isn't anything else to report on.
  - Pigo 9y ago
    Well, that does make sense that it's a daily story to you if you think that way. I just wish the people who do think this could understand how tiresome it is to see every story infused with a Trump angle. Like this Al Franken story for example, there are no posts about the topic that don't focus on the Trump accusations foremost. Why can't it be examined by itself?
    - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
      What would you have it focus on: Franken's need to apologize (he did that), status of the victim's case (she accepted the apology and dropped it), need for an ethics probe (Franken proposed one)? The only thing left of interest in this story (beyond the general theme of institutionalized sexism; which let's be fair isn't going to generate conductive discussion online) is the marked difference to how this was handled in comparison to how Trump, Moore, et al have chosen to conduct themselves.
      - Pigo 9y ago
        I just used it as an example. I'm not even that interested in it honestly. But when I brought this up it was the first day of the scandal, and you're saying it'd already been talked about enough that we needed to "move on" to remembering that the President has had accusers too? Maybe things just move too fast for me.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      Because nothing happens in a vacuum. How would it be fair if Franken were to be held accountable (which he should be, absolutely), but Trump not?
- untog 9y ago
  If a group of users come together and upvote content they individually agree with, is it "an agenda", or is it "consensus"? Unless I missed something, there's nothing inherent in /r/politics that requires it to be a dispassionate collection of links that represent all sides of the political spectrum. Don't get me wrong, it's a pit of human misery that I've long since removed from my subreddit list, but it's what users want it to be.
  - revmoo 9y ago
    > If a group of users come together and upvote content they individually agree with, is it "an agenda", or is it "consensus"? Shareblue literally pays staffers to post content there en-masse...
  - validationerror 9y ago
    It's agenda, specifically agenda set by the moderators in /r/politics, who have created the current far-left & anti-Trump circlejerk by banning conservative and right-wing posters. I've been using Reddit for over a decade now and while in the first couple of years it was totally possible to discuss even politically incorrect topics in most subreddits, over the past years you get banned for all kinds of nonsense simply because many of the moderators are a sensitive bunch and very biased. I'd say it started to get really bad in that regard about 5 years ago and has increased exponentially during the last US election. Try having a discussion about genetics, race and intelligence, crime statistics, feminism and "women's issues", sexism or something of that order on Reddit these days - it's downright impossible, no matter how civil the discussion being held is or how much you back your arguments up with scientific studies and facts. In every mainstream or larger sub that's not specifically meant to be "politically incorrect" you'll get banned for "bigotry" or "racism" or "sexism" or other such nonsense if you don't agree with the popular leftist narratives. In some of the right-wing oriented subs you get banned for being a "cuck" or such nonsense. Entering the mainstream has largely ruined Reddit as a discussion platform as far as I'm concerned. I only engage in the programming / tech related subs these days.
josefresco 9y ago
Politics wasn't always like that ... it's now a counter-balance to The_Donald. Hard to remain "neutral" when right next door there's not even an attempt.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Nah, it's always been absurdly biased. It's a horrific source on information on politics, which makes it sad that it is so popular. Unfortunately there are lots of subreddits like that. I can't read a thread in r/conspiracy without feeling bad about the human race. It's a fun (?) game to guess how people can spin any given event. Great rubbernecking material though.
- tartuffe78 9y ago
  It was like that long before The_Donald existed
- Pigo 9y ago
  t_d was a promotional subreddit for his campaign, it never claimed to be balanced. It bothers me because I would like to visit a subreddit that actually is balanced, and now there isn't one.
  - josefresco 9y ago
    How would this work? I'm curious. Any subreddit created on the topic of "politics" is going to attract armies on each side, who will then use their collective "brigading" (sp) power to influence the sub? Maybe with a strong mod, who tries to balance submissions 50/50 - but then was is the point? If a republican, or democrat is doing something wrong/illegal/immoral - shouldn't we all know about it regardless of potential bias?
    - snegu 9y ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ is actually pretty good. I don't spend much time on Reddit anymore, but it was one of my favorite subs when I did.
chisleu 9y ago
I started a subreddit as a safe space for political and current events discussion, but the idea being that you will be temporarily banned for posting biased articles and op eds, titles that misrepresent statements, or comments that attack or do not add to the conversation. I know it would be incredibly hard to moderate, at least at first. I'm just not sure there is really a desire for such a place since most subreddits seem to be safe-space/echo chambers.

ch4s3 9y ago

While I imagine there is some bias among reddit's staff, because they're people and we all have bias, I don't think it's as simple as "right leaning = bad, left leaning = good". No one there is going to give you a hard time for discussing the influence of Catholicism on the views of William F. Buckley. Even Ann Coulter is in bounds, but the vile far-right 4chan garbage that some corners of reddit spew has no place in a civil forum.

sandworm101 9y ago

>> content that isn’t advertising friendly and could be taken down. That is a dangerous road. Today they might be taking down otherwise legal content with which advertisers do not want to be associated. Tomorrow they are being asked to remove content with which advertisers disagree. Suddenly my 1000-word rant on the evils of Microsoft's latest OS is being taken down. Rather than being a free space for discussion, reddit will have become just another moderated online forum where nothing of note ever happens. Reddit's power comes from negative posts. Facebook and twitter makes headlines when people 'like' things a billion times. They lack the capacity for users to express anger objectively. Reddit makes headlines when it empowers 50,000 gamers to dump on EA. Advertisers like EA should be be paying for such feedback. They evidently already listen to it.

SolaceQuantum 9y ago
Isn’t this a slippery slope argument?
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  It's the only argument that reliably gets trotted out whenever someone mentions curbing hate speech.
  - kirRoyale 9y ago
    Because it's true.
    - mastax 9y ago
      Counterexample: HN.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      Then why are you here? HN is extremely heavily moderated.
  - sandworm101 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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argv_empty 9y ago

The subs I've heard about banning were echo chambers dedicated to the idea that "this group of people I don't like ought to be [starved|exiled|thrown from helicopters|raped|enslaved]" and such things. If that makes you think the policy is "right leaning = bad, left leaning = good," that says some pretty nasty things about the modern right, doesn't it?

coffeevradar 9y ago
There are plenty of left-wing subreddits with equal measures of vitriol. Somehow they avoid earning the same opprobrium that the right-wing ones do. This apparent double standard creates the appearance of bias.
- reefoctopus 9y ago
  Feel free to provide examples of the double standard.
  - coffeevradar 9y ago
    You'll note that I said that there was an 'apparent' double standard. If may not be apparent to you, but it certainly is to some. You seem like you spend more time on the political parts of Reddit than I, so I'm sure you're well equipped to investigate this yourself.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Well, who cares. There will be an "apparent" bias to some of these guys unless they delete everything but the red pill and The_Donald.
- hank_pank 9y ago
  Shit Reddit Says (r/srs) is a good example of this. By the way, I'm dead, right?
- mrgoldenbrown 9y ago

zurn 9y ago

Nobody can agree on what "politically neutral" means, it's not a useful criterion. Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality".

koolba 9y ago
> Nobody can agree on what "politically neutral" means, it's not a useful criterion. It's pretty easy for a tech platform to be politically neutral. All you need are objective rules for how content "get to the top" and equal opportunity for whatever system is in place to be abused. That last one is the problem though. Regardless of which side is doing it, there's a sense of unfairness felt by the other side when they see the system get gamed. And it invariably will. Hence the knee jerk reaction to rebalance things, which leads to calls of bias from the other side, and the cycle continues. > Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality". Do you seriously consider unconsenting upskirt photos of women[1] political speech? Not just, free speech, but specifically "political speech"? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities#CreepShots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
- zurn 9y ago
  I think the "All you need are objective rules" part is just going to square one. > > Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality". > Do you seriously consider unconsenting upskirt photos of women[1] political speech? Not just, free speech, but specifically "political speech"? No, and I'd kindly ask you not to attribute such a position to me. But I'm willing to bet someone does think it's political speech. See also NAMBLA, etc. And consider that gay rights boosters would have been put in the same basket a while ago.

lordCarbonFiber 9y ago

There's no such thing as "neutral". This modern demand that there are two or more equally valid positions in every debate is asinine. When facts become politicized there's no hope of neutrality if you want to remove lies.

tdb7893 9y ago

It's hard because people will always be mad when their stuff gets taken down and it's hard to tell where the line is. A good example on reddit is that r/the_Donald is often very racist, islamophobic, and misogynistic (and it's not a small portion, often the top comment on a post will be something that is islamophobic) but they don't see themselves as that way. I don't think they should ban that sub but even being impartial politically it's not desirable for most advertising

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
alexanderstears 9y ago
Can you define "Islamophobia"? It's a serious question, I don't disagree that there's some prejudice against Islam on the western right. However, a lot of the top posts are ultimately factual claims. Sweden has a rise in grenade attacks and sexual assaults, British police looked the other way when Muslim Men formed a pedophilia group, most terrorism is motivated by Islam, and there are Islamists whose purported goal is to destroy western civilization. Is it Islamaphobic to highlight these things? Islamists are right wing themselves (or at least their views map better to right wing views than left wing views) so we need a better lens than "left vs right" to determine the boundaries of the conflict.
- maaaats 9y ago
  Today, through browsing r/popular, I saw a post about a swedish woman having been raped by a refugee. The comments were neither factual or objective. Most actually claimed she deserved it, because she "probably voted for the left". Be careful about who you try to defend here, just read any top comment. And dont confuse facts with what's really relevant. For instance, a few days ago I saw a discussion about this: > a police officer is eighteen and a half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be by a police officer This is true, and tries to paint a picture of black males being violent (should've seen the comments). But it's two incomparable metrics! Actually, a police officer is ~165 times likelier to be killed by a white male given the same rules. So yeah, "facts", but always distorted in these subreddits.

grandalf 9y ago

Excellent point. Sadly this will likely not happen. Google and Facebook are gradually imposing a highly censored world view. We can’t effectively reason about social media censorship by analogizing it to meatspace. Just as virality mechanisms amplify “good” content, they also change the equilibrium state of whose ideas can spread. Censorship programs work like a squirt of insecticide into a beehive, they kill off some functional parts of the hive organism and eventually lead to the destruction of all of the bees inside. Similarly, censoring “fake news” or “abusive content” poisons the environment for ideas in a similar way. Ideas are not evaluated objectively. We each react to them emotionally and experience them via the social meaning we associate with them. Prejudices are not rational and are countered by ample evidence, yet there is much prejudice and much religious faith... such beliefs carry a meaning payload enjoyed by their host. The fear suffered by social media firms (like reddit) is that someone will screenshot a piece of offensive speech alongside an ad paid for by an advertiser, and the advertiser will worry that his/her brand is being associated with that speech. This is why Colin Kaepernick doesn’t have a job. Social media firms are thus following in the path of other media firms and are (like The NY Times) putting ad revenue ahead of the first amendment. This isn’t unexpected, these firms are the “tories” of our day.

fhood 9y ago
First off, the first amendment is specifically with respect to congress, and I don't understand why I have to say this so often. Second, society has always been self censoring, but the internet has thrown a wrench into that by allowing people to escape into pockets of like minded individuals. And you might have noticed that hacker news is fairly heavily censored, and as a result has managed to avoid turning into a cesspool like much of reddit. I think that reddit is worried about advertising, yes, but I also think they are concerned about a decline in engaged usership.
- hiram112 9y ago
  It's strange, but I've never considered Reddit a cesspoll. The fact of the matter - and this is why Reddit is successful - is that it has lots of unique subs and a pretty decent voting system which pushes trolls to the bottom, often collapsed. But if I want to really see what these people are writing, I am free to browse any sub, sort by controversial, and expand the collapsed threads. Win - Win. Hacker News, OTOH, just seems to 'disappear' wrong-think. There's a big difference.

ebbv 9y ago

Your "right leaning" is another person's hate speech. There's no onus on these privately owned web sites to be your definition (or mine) of "politically neutral." If you don't like them start your own platform or use a different one.

alexanderstears 9y ago
>There's no onus on these privately owned web sites to be your definition (or mine) of "politically neutral." You're right. However when there are copyright violations on Reddit, they claim it's a platform and they're not responsible for the content on it - ultimately the users are responsible. And then the courts agree and decide that ultimately the violation rests with the user and not with the platform. However, as they increase the moderation of their platform, they move closer and closer to being responsible for the content. At some point of restriction, they're completely responsible for the content on their platform. They're welcome to operate the site however they want, but they shouldn't reap the advantages of a public platform while advancing their private interests.
- abiox 9y ago
  > At some point of restriction, they're completely [...] seems to me that there is no "completely" unless they literally screen and evaluate every single post before accepting them. until that point's it's all matters of degree.

ProAm 9y ago

> politically neutral There is no such thing as politically neutral when there is money involved. And Reddit owes VC a lot of money.

mozumder 9y ago

Is stupid to expect ad-driven media properties to be neutral. Just dumb. Reddit is an ad-supported system. The moment you take advertising, you are now required to maintain editorial control. And that's fine. Advertisers have strict content guidelines, things like: no blood, no violence, no gore, no porn, etc.. Do you think a company like Calvin Klein is going to want to put their fashion ad next to an image of a dead kid? Yah that's not happening. Instead of setting the expectation on corporations, we need the public to understand what their support of ad-driven media properties mean. And that it's fine. Reddit isn't a public service. It's not a charity. It's an ad-driven media property, like a TV show or magazine. That's it. And if conservatives can't accept advertising-based media, they need to find some other outlet to express their views. Let me put it another way: Do you really think Calvin Klein is going to want to put ads next to images of dead kids? Is that your expectation? If not, how do you expect Reddit to become a profitable company? Of course, Reddit & Twitter isn't going to state that they're an ad-driven media property, since they want to "appear" unbiased and neutral, but that's completely false. They are absolutely responsible to their advertisers as their core business plan.

visarga 9y ago
You probably don't know but there are NLP and computer vision methods to detect "blood, violence, gore and porn" automatically and stop ads on those pages (subreddits).
- mozumder 9y ago
  This doesn't just apply to obvious and simple visual problems, but also more subtle content problems. How does Honda avoid placing ads next to a pro-Roy Moore articles that might associate their brand with pedophilia?
  - visarga 9y ago
    Use word vectors to compute similarity of the page content to banned topics, and if it is > threshold, then avoid that page. When word vectors are trained on billions of words they can pick up even the slightest hint of pedophilia. They also understand slang and memes, if present in the training corpus. I think SOTA in content filtering and classification is pretty good today for both image and text. Another way to filter pages is to follow it in time, for a longer period and if it has multiple positives, then ban it entirely.

jackmott 9y ago

Why should anyone remain politically neutral no matter what? What if the Nazi party came into power? Impartiality can impart political bias if the facts happen to lean one way or the other, as they will from time to time.

Cuuugi 9y ago
Nazi's came to power because a strong feeling of victimization of a group of Germans. Most of the atrocities around the world are justified because of a feeling of victimization. I think both sides of the political spectrum feel victimized by each other, and that scares me. When GP asks for impartiality, think GP would settle for reasonableness, which i think both sides have lost track of years ago. All i say, is think inwardly, question your beliefs, and most importantly don't question other peoples motives.
zeth__ 9y ago
The Nazi came to power largely because the communists would constantly fight them in the streets and "no-platform" them. You'd think someone would have read a history book. Downvoting does not change facts. The constant street battles between the Communists and Nazis helped the Nazi far more than the Communists.
- vidarh 9y ago
  While the KPD made many stupid mistakes, and frankly given their Stalinist policies at the time were not much better than the NSDAP in most respect, it was the power hungry right wing parties that entered into a coalition government with Hitler and voted for the Enabling Act.
  - zeth__ 9y ago
    Which has nothing to do with the fact that the street battles between communists and nazis allowed Hitler to take 30% of the vote in two consecutive elections. The left wins elections when it is the victim of violence, it loses when it tries to use violence itself.

emodendroket 9y ago

I don't think that's true at all. Frankly Twitter seems to have pretty relaxed judgments on hate speech when it comes to people associated with Trump.

gadders 9y ago

This is happening all over. Twitter is banning/de-verifying mostly right-wing users, Shopify is stopping carrying stores for right wing people like Milo etc etc.

lostlogin 9y ago
In Milos case there is soliciting views of neo nazis and video examples of defending child rapists. Quite apart from not wanting your company associated with that content there is probably a legal need to distance ones self to avoid litigation in some countries.
- gadders 9y ago
  He made a joke about his own experiences as a young gay man on the Joe Rogan podcast. He has continually distanced himself from the Alt-Right and neo-Nazis. He has also recently married his fiance, who is a person of colour.
  - ignoramceisblis 9y ago
    It's extremely telling that false statements made against predominantly right-leaning individuals in this thread maintain their prominent hue, whilst true statements correcting those beliefs are fading to a less visible hue.
    - lostlogin 9y ago
      You know he acknowledged what he said and did and apologised? You can read the leaked emails and read his statements and listen to what he said. What’s false?
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    "He has continually distanced himself from the Alt-Right and neo-Nazis" When? "He has also recently married his fiance, who is a person of colour." And? Because a man marries a woman, they can't be misogynist?
  - 9y ago

cryptonector 9y ago

Reddit is full of non-advertiser-friendly content. Not just the posts, but the comments. Banning all that content will make Reddit boring to many of its users. As for content that breaks the law, there isn't much of that in the U.S., for obvious reasons. Elsewhere it's another story. As to politics, I don't think you can expect any of these sites to be politically neutral. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit -- all show their bias. It's OK, it's part of life in a free market. There is a concern that many voices can be shut out of the market, and so maybe there will, at some point, be a decent rationale for temporary (say, ten years) regulations on digital town squares.

imglorp 9y ago
Right. Unrestricted, adult conversation is what makes it reddit, not kindergarten. It's not always respectful but neither is real discourse in person. If you make it all kittens and candy, you will lose many demographics.

bfuller 9y ago

read spez's quarterly AMA, he went pretty deep into defending /r/the_donald

ksk 9y ago

Yeah, Twitter fucked up IMO. They wanted the check mark to mean verification, not endorsement, and ironically after removing the checkmark from people they don't like, its back to square one.

s73ver_ 9y ago
I think the problem is "who gets to be verified?" Why can't I be verified? The implication was that verified users were special in some way (maybe just in a Sneeches "stars upon thars" way), and so giving it to admitted Nazis and white nationalists was seen as saying they deserved to be special. And then taking it away made them and their supporters feel they weren't special anymore.
- ksk 9y ago
  Right, its all about how people outside of Twitter perceived the checkmark. Twitter made it worse for themselves, because people are just going to find sexist/racist tweets from verified people and get Twitter to un-verify them via negative clickbait PR.

tryingagainbro 9y ago

<<All I want is impartial. First they are prepping for an IPO and need to clean up image. Second, is being impartial even possible, short of some super-duper AI that after being programmed by biased programmers cleans itself of the bias?

tzs 9y ago

What happens when being impartial leads to an appearance of bias? There was an interesting segment on NPR sometime after Trump won the Republican nomination, looking back on how they had covered Trump during the primaries. When they got a sense that they had been running more negative things about Trump than they had about the other Republican candidates, or less positive things about him than about the others, they started skipping negative things Trump did or said that would have been top stories if, say, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich had said or done them, to bring the total number of negative Trump things they ran more in line with the negative things about the others. Same with positive Trump things...they adjusted to keep those at least in the ballpark as those of other candidates. In retrospect, they realized that they were simply unprepared for a situation where a candidate would have as many negatives compared to others of the same party as Trump had. If they had set some impartial, objective threshold and covered everything from every candidate that crossed that threshold their news segments would have been something like 90% about Trump. They had implicitly assumed that no candidate would ever be that far out on his party's bell curve, and so killed legitimate, newsworthy stories to try to make the results match that expectation.