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BS. The only difference between the two discussion groups is that TD dropped all the pretense. I have seen the same kinds of things that are loosely defined as

BS. The only difference between the two discussion groups is that TD dropped all the pretense. I have seen the same kinds of things that are loosely defined as 'calls to violence' in both places.

vvG94KbDUtRa 6y ago
I don't agree with you, but even if I did, the "pretense" being referred to is "we don't actually want violence inflicted on the other party". I'd say that's a pretty important pretense to keep
jacobolus 6y ago
The “only difference” between a group of fascist white supremacists who fantasize about violently exterminating their perceived enemies and a bunch of ordinary people in a community organized around discussing newspaper/news magazine articles who are scared about the growing threat of fascist white supremacists and want them voted out of office and removed from positions of power is that the former have “dropped the pretense”? I guess that’s one way of looking at it...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwmehaweh 6y ago
  > group of fascist white supremacists who fantasize about violently exterminating their perceived enemies Ummm, what? so people that support the President are all fascist white supremacists? Is that really where we're at in this country? What about the sizable number of blacks/latinos/and asians that support him, are they white supremacists too? "white supremacist" and "racist", two terms that have been watered down so much that they've effectively lost all meaning.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    No, that reddit community is not representative of all people who nominally support Donald Trump (say, those who voted for him in 2016). However, that reddit community in particular has a substantial number of fascists and white supremacists among its members, and they are welcomed to bring their disturbing violent messages there. (They are also encouraged by the numerous statements by Trump himself – their “god emperor” – and other allied officials in support of overtly fascist and white supremacist viewpoints.) What would you consider to be fair definitions of “fascism” or “white supremacism” or “racism”? Does your definition include e.g. neo-Nazis marching chanting “Jews will not replace us”?
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    green user, only posts are in support of T_D, pretends it wasn't a hate filled shithole... Alright, I'll bite. t_d was a vile, hatred spewing, white nationalist, violence prone subreddit and its death made the world better. Let's link a few examples, not for you, but for the few people that might still doubt it. (NSFW links coming up, by the way.) Their mods regularly left up posts that advocated for violence against leftists [1], calling for civil war in response to impeachement [2], calling for the murder of those who disagree with them [3], general gay and islamic hatred [4], kept a discord with doxxes of leftist in their sidebar [5], calling for political opponent's murder [6], rounding up muslims into concentration camps [7], extermination of migrants [8], and many, many, many others [9][10][11] [1] http://archive.today/slkGP http://archive.today/slkGP [2] http://archive.today/DrQTU http://archive.today/DrQTU [3] http://archive.today/TbEpC http://archive.today/TbEpC [4] https://ld.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/f9owok/i_present_to_you_the_antichrist/ https://ld.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/f9owok/i_present... [5] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/trump-supporters-have-built-a-document-with-the-addresses#.jmvr3kEMK https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/trump-sup... [6] http://archive.today/0uCjr http://archive.today/0uCjr [7] http://archive.today/DwlAc http://archive.today/DwlAc [8] http://archive.today/oOqOR http://archive.today/oOqOR [9] https://archive.today/c76rt https://archive.today/c76rt [10] http://archive.fo/lGoMJ http://archive.fo/lGoMJ [11] http://archive.is/WEwv5 http://archive.is/WEwv5
    - thu2111 6y ago
      I've never read or posted to The_Donald before although I was aware of its existence, so I read your post with a neutral mindset and followed the links to verify your claims. Because if true then I'd agree with you on its closure. Many of the posts are quite nasty, for sure. But I feel rather deceived. Many of the cited links don't support your claims about them. I checked them all, here are the summaries here for others. advocated for violence against leftists [1] This post advocates deportation of low-IQ immigrants. Many countries impose proxies for IQ on immigrants, e.g. degree requirements. I've had to pass such requirements myself. For this claim to be correct any border enforcement must be considered "advocacy of violence", which given the widespread existence of borders would be in my view a misleading claim. None of the replies advocate for violence either. calling for civil war in response to impeachement [2] This post doesn't "call" for civil war but predicts that it would be a likely outcome of Trump being replaced by Nancy Pelosi i.e. someone of entirely opposite views, in case of impeachment. If this post is considered unacceptable speech then it's hard to see how anyone could say "action X would lead to civil war" without it being equally unacceptable, which would effectively ban all discussion of civil war including by academics. calling for the murder of those who disagree with them [3] This post says "Whats the penalty for treason? Death?" and the replies give a variety of other possible outcomes like CNN jobs, book deals etc. The US does have a history of executing people for treason. Lawful executions aren't legally considered murder. This post is thus a rhetorical question about constitutional fact. Obviously whether the act being discussed really is treason or not is a different matter, I didn't bother checking that, but it's not the same as saying "let's go murder this person" because the call is for the state to take action, not individuals. general gay and islamic hatred [4] This one is an image macro titled, "I present to you, the anti christ". The image is a cartoon of what appears to be a gay man wearing a turban and smoking a cigarette. It does indeed seek to denigrate gays and muslims, I guess, if you accept that depicting a gay muslim is inherently "hatred". But isn't that a contradiction in terms? Isn't that only considered controversial because Islam is famously intolerant of gays? The combination of these two things really shouldn't be considered a problem, according to western values, and presumably that was the point. kept a discord with doxxes of leftist in their sidebar [5] The leftists in question signed a public petition, and petitions aren't signed by anonymous people. Still, I agree this breaks Reddit's rules on doxxing as addresses are more than names, and this is by far the strongest claim to bad behaviour so far. calling for political opponent's murder [6] This one calls for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned, not murdered. A small minority of comments talk about treason, but again when the state executes someone this isn't called murder, which is a legal term with its own meaning. rounding up muslims into concentration camps [7] This one indeed is bad, it describes China rounding up muslims in concentration camps and then says that whilst they "aren't applauding China" maybe the EU and Canada can learn something from it. For me that'd cross the line. The top voted comment and thread is describing muslims as feral animals, barbarians etc. The others are suggesting that China has legitimate reasons for it due to Islamic terrorism. extermination of migrants [8] This one says, "ICE isn't enough. The Federal government will need to implement martial law to eradicate the aliens and corrupt politicians" This one seems ambiguous. Grammatically it can be read as either ICE isn't enough to fulfil its mission of "eradicating aliens" (deporting them would be getting rid of them), which doesn't involve "exterminating" people let alone all migrants as they only care about illegal immigrants. Or it can be read as the difference between ICE and martial law is the level of killing involved. Given the Hacker News rule of the most generous reading possible this one would go the first way - not a call for "extermination of migrants" or indeed politicians but rather tougher enforcement of the existing rules. The replies are all discussing electoral demographics and don't make any statements about killing one way or another. The final three you didn't summarise. Oddly they seem like the strongest to build your case. They are anti-semitic comments about how "jews control our media" etc, a comment about "humvees with mounted machine guns" in response to a video of quite mild clashes between migrants and police, and a comment revelling and glorifying the impaling of someone who attempted to clime a border fence and was killed by the fence's protection mechanisms. Clearly there's some nasty content there the moderators failed to crack down on. But I've seen some very nasty posts on all kinds of subreddits over the years. To prove T_D was worse than others would require some sort of statistical analysis, which would itself be likely to be biased (obviously a lot of posters on Reddit think nothing of calling people they disagree with Nazis... and we know what happened to them)
nkozyra 6y ago
"Dropped the pretense" is an inference you're making into the motivations of the posters. Indeed, the difference between making a direct call to violence and an inferred one are very different things. The problems with TD stemmed far beyond inciting or glorifying violence. As mentioned, the biggest problem with /r/politics is it's an absolute echo chamber. Not even in the same realm.
hfourm 6y ago
People on the donald openly celebrated violence in top upvoted posts. Tons of open racism. Politics has turned into a bit of an echo chamber compared to 10 years ago, but it is in no way the same as T_D. That "dropping pretense" you describe carries a LOT more weight than you are giving it, in who it attracts, and the behaviors it promotes.
- purephase 6y ago
  It's just a thinly veiled allusion to "dog whistling" which all of these supposed free speech zealots like to throw around whenever they feel that their safe space is being questioned. I'm no fan of r/politics, but to actually believe that they're basically the same as TD is just wild.
- belorn 6y ago
  I would very much like to see a study on that. Because of the reddit quarantine I can't use a subreddit analysis tool to compare the subs. The only conclusion I can see is that both politics and the donald is likely to share the same word as the most commonly used: Trump. I would in particular be interesting to know if there is a significant difference in offensive words used in either sub.
  - lemmonii 6y ago
    T_D moved offsite to escape censorship from reddit, i will not post the url here but it is easily findable
chrisco255 6y ago
Free speech isn't hard to understand as a concept. If someone says something you disagree with, you debate them. Echo chambers radicalize us all. No one is immune to the effects of groupthink.
- throwanem 6y ago
  So, how do you feel about the fire-in-a-crowded-theater exception?
  - mst 6y ago
    Not sure what relevance an "exception" a judge made up to justify censoring protest against WW2 japanese internment camps has to this conversation.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Schenck was WWI (1919) and concerned anti-draft literature distribution. You've got the wrong case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
      - mst 6y ago
        Damnit. Thank you. Right spirit, completely wrong details. Story of my debugging life :D
  - defen 6y ago
    You're allowed to shout that there's a fire in a crowded theater if there's actually a fire. No one has ever argued that there is an unlimited right to say whatever you want whenever you want (libel and slander laws exist and don't seem to be controversial). If you falsely shout that there's a fire and cause a stampede and people are injured and it can be proven that you did it with malicious intent, you will be prosecuted or sued, but this isn't fundamentally different than libel or slander laws. Finally, you should know that the "fire in a crowded theater" phrase came from a unanimous Supreme Court decision that endorsed censorship and suppression of speech that criticized conscription during World War 1.

BS. The only difference between the two discussion groups is that TD dropped all the pretense. I have seen the same kinds of things that are loosely defined as 'calls to violence' in both places.

vvG94KbDUtRa 6y ago

I don't agree with you, but even if I did, the "pretense" being referred to is "we don't actually want violence inflicted on the other party". I'd say that's a pretty important pretense to keep

jacobolus 6y ago

The “only difference” between a group of fascist white supremacists who fantasize about violently exterminating their perceived enemies and a bunch of ordinary people in a community organized around discussing newspaper/news magazine articles who are scared about the growing threat of fascist white supremacists and want them voted out of office and removed from positions of power is that the former have “dropped the pretense”? I guess that’s one way of looking at it...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwmehaweh 6y ago
> group of fascist white supremacists who fantasize about violently exterminating their perceived enemies Ummm, what? so people that support the President are all fascist white supremacists? Is that really where we're at in this country? What about the sizable number of blacks/latinos/and asians that support him, are they white supremacists too? "white supremacist" and "racist", two terms that have been watered down so much that they've effectively lost all meaning.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jacobolus 6y ago
  No, that reddit community is not representative of all people who nominally support Donald Trump (say, those who voted for him in 2016). However, that reddit community in particular has a substantial number of fascists and white supremacists among its members, and they are welcomed to bring their disturbing violent messages there. (They are also encouraged by the numerous statements by Trump himself – their “god emperor” – and other allied officials in support of overtly fascist and white supremacist viewpoints.) What would you consider to be fair definitions of “fascism” or “white supremacism” or “racism”? Does your definition include e.g. neo-Nazis marching chanting “Jews will not replace us”?
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  green user, only posts are in support of T_D, pretends it wasn't a hate filled shithole... Alright, I'll bite. t_d was a vile, hatred spewing, white nationalist, violence prone subreddit and its death made the world better. Let's link a few examples, not for you, but for the few people that might still doubt it. (NSFW links coming up, by the way.) Their mods regularly left up posts that advocated for violence against leftists [1], calling for civil war in response to impeachement [2], calling for the murder of those who disagree with them [3], general gay and islamic hatred [4], kept a discord with doxxes of leftist in their sidebar [5], calling for political opponent's murder [6], rounding up muslims into concentration camps [7], extermination of migrants [8], and many, many, many others [9][10][11] [1] http://archive.today/slkGP http://archive.today/slkGP [2] http://archive.today/DrQTU http://archive.today/DrQTU [3] http://archive.today/TbEpC http://archive.today/TbEpC [4] https://ld.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/f9owok/i_present_to_you_the_antichrist/ https://ld.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/f9owok/i_present... [5] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/trump-supporters-have-built-a-document-with-the-addresses#.jmvr3kEMK https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/trump-sup... [6] http://archive.today/0uCjr http://archive.today/0uCjr [7] http://archive.today/DwlAc http://archive.today/DwlAc [8] http://archive.today/oOqOR http://archive.today/oOqOR [9] https://archive.today/c76rt https://archive.today/c76rt [10] http://archive.fo/lGoMJ http://archive.fo/lGoMJ [11] http://archive.is/WEwv5 http://archive.is/WEwv5
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I've never read or posted to The_Donald before although I was aware of its existence, so I read your post with a neutral mindset and followed the links to verify your claims. Because if true then I'd agree with you on its closure. Many of the posts are quite nasty, for sure. But I feel rather deceived. Many of the cited links don't support your claims about them. I checked them all, here are the summaries here for others. advocated for violence against leftists [1] This post advocates deportation of low-IQ immigrants. Many countries impose proxies for IQ on immigrants, e.g. degree requirements. I've had to pass such requirements myself. For this claim to be correct any border enforcement must be considered "advocacy of violence", which given the widespread existence of borders would be in my view a misleading claim. None of the replies advocate for violence either. calling for civil war in response to impeachement [2] This post doesn't "call" for civil war but predicts that it would be a likely outcome of Trump being replaced by Nancy Pelosi i.e. someone of entirely opposite views, in case of impeachment. If this post is considered unacceptable speech then it's hard to see how anyone could say "action X would lead to civil war" without it being equally unacceptable, which would effectively ban all discussion of civil war including by academics. calling for the murder of those who disagree with them [3] This post says "Whats the penalty for treason? Death?" and the replies give a variety of other possible outcomes like CNN jobs, book deals etc. The US does have a history of executing people for treason. Lawful executions aren't legally considered murder. This post is thus a rhetorical question about constitutional fact. Obviously whether the act being discussed really is treason or not is a different matter, I didn't bother checking that, but it's not the same as saying "let's go murder this person" because the call is for the state to take action, not individuals. general gay and islamic hatred [4] This one is an image macro titled, "I present to you, the anti christ". The image is a cartoon of what appears to be a gay man wearing a turban and smoking a cigarette. It does indeed seek to denigrate gays and muslims, I guess, if you accept that depicting a gay muslim is inherently "hatred". But isn't that a contradiction in terms? Isn't that only considered controversial because Islam is famously intolerant of gays? The combination of these two things really shouldn't be considered a problem, according to western values, and presumably that was the point. kept a discord with doxxes of leftist in their sidebar [5] The leftists in question signed a public petition, and petitions aren't signed by anonymous people. Still, I agree this breaks Reddit's rules on doxxing as addresses are more than names, and this is by far the strongest claim to bad behaviour so far. calling for political opponent's murder [6] This one calls for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned, not murdered. A small minority of comments talk about treason, but again when the state executes someone this isn't called murder, which is a legal term with its own meaning. rounding up muslims into concentration camps [7] This one indeed is bad, it describes China rounding up muslims in concentration camps and then says that whilst they "aren't applauding China" maybe the EU and Canada can learn something from it. For me that'd cross the line. The top voted comment and thread is describing muslims as feral animals, barbarians etc. The others are suggesting that China has legitimate reasons for it due to Islamic terrorism. extermination of migrants [8] This one says, "ICE isn't enough. The Federal government will need to implement martial law to eradicate the aliens and corrupt politicians" This one seems ambiguous. Grammatically it can be read as either ICE isn't enough to fulfil its mission of "eradicating aliens" (deporting them would be getting rid of them), which doesn't involve "exterminating" people let alone all migrants as they only care about illegal immigrants. Or it can be read as the difference between ICE and martial law is the level of killing involved. Given the Hacker News rule of the most generous reading possible this one would go the first way - not a call for "extermination of migrants" or indeed politicians but rather tougher enforcement of the existing rules. The replies are all discussing electoral demographics and don't make any statements about killing one way or another. The final three you didn't summarise. Oddly they seem like the strongest to build your case. They are anti-semitic comments about how "jews control our media" etc, a comment about "humvees with mounted machine guns" in response to a video of quite mild clashes between migrants and police, and a comment revelling and glorifying the impaling of someone who attempted to clime a border fence and was killed by the fence's protection mechanisms. Clearly there's some nasty content there the moderators failed to crack down on. But I've seen some very nasty posts on all kinds of subreddits over the years. To prove T_D was worse than others would require some sort of statistical analysis, which would itself be likely to be biased (obviously a lot of posters on Reddit think nothing of calling people they disagree with Nazis... and we know what happened to them)

nkozyra 6y ago

"Dropped the pretense" is an inference you're making into the motivations of the posters. Indeed, the difference between making a direct call to violence and an inferred one are very different things. The problems with TD stemmed far beyond inciting or glorifying violence. As mentioned, the biggest problem with /r/politics is it's an absolute echo chamber. Not even in the same realm.

hfourm 6y ago

People on the donald openly celebrated violence in top upvoted posts. Tons of open racism. Politics has turned into a bit of an echo chamber compared to 10 years ago, but it is in no way the same as T_D. That "dropping pretense" you describe carries a LOT more weight than you are giving it, in who it attracts, and the behaviors it promotes.

purephase 6y ago
It's just a thinly veiled allusion to "dog whistling" which all of these supposed free speech zealots like to throw around whenever they feel that their safe space is being questioned. I'm no fan of r/politics, but to actually believe that they're basically the same as TD is just wild.
belorn 6y ago
I would very much like to see a study on that. Because of the reddit quarantine I can't use a subreddit analysis tool to compare the subs. The only conclusion I can see is that both politics and the donald is likely to share the same word as the most commonly used: Trump. I would in particular be interesting to know if there is a significant difference in offensive words used in either sub.
- lemmonii 6y ago
  T_D moved offsite to escape censorship from reddit, i will not post the url here but it is easily findable

chrisco255 6y ago

Free speech isn't hard to understand as a concept. If someone says something you disagree with, you debate them. Echo chambers radicalize us all. No one is immune to the effects of groupthink.

throwanem 6y ago
So, how do you feel about the fire-in-a-crowded-theater exception?
- mst 6y ago
  Not sure what relevance an "exception" a judge made up to justify censoring protest against WW2 japanese internment camps has to this conversation.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Schenck was WWI (1919) and concerned anti-draft literature distribution. You've got the wrong case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
    - mst 6y ago
      Damnit. Thank you. Right spirit, completely wrong details. Story of my debugging life :D
- defen 6y ago
  You're allowed to shout that there's a fire in a crowded theater if there's actually a fire. No one has ever argued that there is an unlimited right to say whatever you want whenever you want (libel and slander laws exist and don't seem to be controversial). If you falsely shout that there's a fire and cause a stampede and people are injured and it can be proven that you did it with malicious intent, you will be prosecuted or sued, but this isn't fundamentally different than libel or slander laws. Finally, you should know that the "fire in a crowded theater" phrase came from a unanimous Supreme Court decision that endorsed censorship and suppression of speech that criticized conscription during World War 1.