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Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits
- gruez 6y ago>The company also says that half (48 percent) of all hateful content on the site was targeting a person’s ethnicity or nationality. That was followed by their class or political affiliation (16 percent), [...] "Hate speech" now includes your political affiliation? That's news to me. I thought it's usually restricted to immutable characteristics about a person (race, religion, gender, etc.).
- niyazpk 6y agoHow is religion immutable when political affiliation is not?
- gruez 6y agoTheoretically both should fall under the same umbrella as "ideology", but in reality religion is given special protections. eg. in US law, religion is a protected class (you discriminate on it), whereas political affiliation isn't.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ip26 6y agoRace & religion are sometimes deeply entwined, see Jewish. Imagine if Jewish ethnicity was a protected class but Jewish religion was not. How would that even work in practice? "I was not discriminating against the Jews on account of being ethnic Jews but rather on account of their Jewish faith, your Honor!"
- haunter 6y agoClassic case of /r/politics where if you say anything negative about Israel (the state and its government) then you are automatically flagged and banned as an antisemite
- throw_m239339 6y agoIs there any other example of a "religion" that is both a religion and an ethnicity?
- ip26 6y agoMennonite (Amish) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnoreligious_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnoreligious_group
- nailer 6y agoThat would be reasonable. For example, if someone chooses very orthodox or liberal beliefs (whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish or Atheist) and they clash with your beliefs, you should be able to fire them at will.
- schwartzworld 6y agoWhy should an employer be allowed to fire someone for religious beliefs, unless they specifically make the person unable to do their job?
- nailer 6y ago>> and they clash with your beliefs > unless they specifically make the person unable to do their job Clashing with their employer would make someone unable to do their job
- schwartzworld 6y agoWhen most people describe Judaism this way they are only thinking of Ashkenazi Jews. My family comes from eastern Europe. We are not the same race as Ethiopian Jews. Nor do we have the same food, music or culture any more than a Christian from Mexico and a Christian from China. The idea of race is deeply flawed and riddled with contradictions. it has no real meaning in terms of genetics.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ip26 6y agoAre you finding fault with my point or simply trying to expand or add color? I hear a dissenting bent but am unable to connect your comment to the topic of what makes immutable vs mutable characteristics. Also, I cannot help but observe, whether or not race has meaning in genetics, we cannot simply pretend the social construct does not exist. Therefore it's still relevant & topical to discrimination & protected classes. It's literally right there in the Civil Rights Act.
- schwartzworld 6y agoYes, I was disagreeing with your description of Jews as a race. It's a very askenazi-centric view. Jews experienced a diaspora a very long time ago and are very diverse.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago"Hate speech" is a very specific term, and I'd guess Reddit's deliberately avoiding using it. They're targeting hate in the broad sense, the sense that they want to build communities where people are nice rather than mean.
- jaywalk 6y agoWhat they really want are echo chambers where only approved opinions are allowed.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI don't think that's fair. It's hardly unprecedented for a website to explicitly ban unapproved opinions, so if that was what Reddit really wanted, why wouldn't they just do it?
- jaywalk 6y agoThey desperately don't want the perception that only approved opinions are allowed.
- dgellow 6y agoI don’t see why the target of the hateful comment should matter when deciding that something should be removed. If I comment in more vulgar terms saying that “penguins are evil and people who like them should die”, that’s likely to be seen as hateful and Reddit may decide it doesn’t have its place on there platform, the fact that I’m talking about love for penguin doesn’t really matters. We aren’t talking about a government definition of hateful, in which case you would expect limits to be set by immutable characteristics, instead it’s about Reddit deciding what is off limit for them.
- implements 6y agoReligion is definitely not an immutable characteristic - there are many ex-theists, and people often change religion on marriage. Gender is a can of worms - sex is immutable, gender seems to be (like religion or race) a socially conditioned performance of expected behaviour. Personally I don’t think it’s helpful - we should see ourselves as unique individuals with agency - much less immutable.
- mundo 6y ago> "Hate speech" now includes your political affiliation? That's news to me. "Hate speech" is a legal concept that has to do with protecting human rights; Reddit's "hateful content" is just the rules they put in place to try to make their website less shitty. There's no reason to expect them to be identical or even closely related to each other, is there?
- zalkota 6y agoThe other 82% is /r/politics
- rvz 6y agoA long way to go to solving 'hate speech' on Reddit. If you can first find where to draw the line that is.
- chromedev 6y agoNope, definitely /r/conspiracy.
- moksly 6y agoI’m a sucker for conspiracy theories, like the Bermuda Triangle. Aliens abducting cows and lizards living inside the Queen. I don’t believe in any of it, but I’ve just loved that stuff since I was a kid. So I actually used to follow /r/conspiracy, but I stopped around the 2016 election when everything started being about American politics. Not sure what happened, but it went from “the lone gunmen” to “angry American central” over night, and the place has royally sucked since.
- Daishiman 6y agoIt was taken over as a tool for political propaganda. Political operatives realized that and have been refining this strategy.
- throw_m239339 6y agoNah r/politics is completely unhinged. I have rarely seen that level of vitriol anywhere else on reddit, even on Trump subs. This isn't just about ideas, this is about how people behave and talk. It's surreal.
- convery 6y agoThey'd never remove that though. Come to think of it, a lot of the banned subreddits were anti a lot of the politics that regularly get upvoted to the frontpage [0]. So looks more like a political purge. A selection of banned subreddits: r/CampusConservative r/HateCrimeHoaxes r/rightwingcomics r/rightwinglgbt r/Nationalism r/DebateAltRight r/GenderCritical r/blackcrimestatistics r/againstdiversity r/Holodomor r/ExposeCulturalMarxism r/AltRightChristian r/The_Donald r/BanBigMouth [0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/hi41t2/the_banwave_so_far/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/hi41t2/the_ba...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chrisco255 6y agoSince there's no objective definition of "hate content", this is akin to them patting themselves on the back for outright censorship based on their own arbitrary definitions.
- cma 6y agoThe_Donald promoted the Charlottesville hate rally, people with white shirts and torches.
- ubercow13 6y agoSeems pretty clear cut! What about the other 6999?
- golf4 6y agoHow many buildings did they burn down?
- TheGrim-888 6y agoI mean, I've been seeing out of my window in downtown Seattle hate groups marching on a nearly nightly basis, the difference with these hate groups being that they burn down vehicles, buildings, and other properties and violently clash with the police in order to forcefully enact their hateful/racist political policies, that hate me because of the color of my skin and the political polices I support. But sure, there was one time an entirely peaceful demonstration by people on the other side of the aisle, that was so hateful! They have to be banned, deplatformed, censored, removed, destroyed. But the people roaming my city, setting fire to the building opposite of mine a few weeks back because the owner is an "evil white capitalist"? They're good to go, no hate there.
- s9w 6y agowhite shirts and torches - that's so much worse than the BLM riots!
- cma 6y agoA small minority in both broke into violence (someone was murdered at Charlottesville).
- return1 6y agoThat’s 71% true
- jimbob45 6y agoSo between Reddit, YouTube, and Google News, we’ve got a bunch of websites that have become unbelievably and visibly corrupt but whose business models are so difficult to replicate and navigate that no one else can do what they do.
- striking 6y agoThere are plenty of alternatives that lean towards freedom of expression at all costs. I think the possibility of building another thing like Reddit has been proven (even if less popular and on a smaller scale), IIRC r/the_donald ended up moving to their own Reddit clone.
- jimbob45 6y agoPlenty of alternatives, none that can scale, financially or otherwise.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago7000 subreddits only accounted for an 18% reduction? What the heck is going on with that website.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jfengel 6y agoIt's a website with 138,000 subreddits. That sounds like a pretty conventional distribution, where 5% of the site contributed 20% of the problem. That's about what you'd expect from the Pareto principle, which says that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
- ffpip 6y agoVery few (like just a hundred) were active. Rest were quarantined or too small. banned due to having the name 'Trap' or 'Fragile' in the sub name
- chromedev 6y agoAnyone remember them saying in their ToS that hate speech is okay as long as it isn't against a group considered to be the minority?
- jaywalk 6y agoOh yeah. They removed that tidbit from the ToS but still enforce it the same way.
- haunter 6y agoRemoved but still enforced aka we have written and unwritten rules >While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.
- james-mcelwain 6y agoPunching up vs punching down is a super important distinction to make in these kinds of policies.
- sukilot 6y agoWhen punching down it's important to dress it up so it looks like punching up. Attack the innocent who look like the guilty because the guilty are too hard to reach.
- meowface 6y agoI don't think it should be. I think punches above a certain threshold of force shouldn't be permitted, regardless of whether they're aimed left, right, up, down, or diagonally. Also, who exactly is definitively judging these directions in each of these cases? What's the judgment criteria when two people reside among a distribution of different relative directions across multiple different parameters? I think eliminating double standards in the enforcement of these policies is crucial for them to be effective and accepted by a community. You're just trading one set of implicit and explicit biases in for another, and many of the same issues start to bubble up. Yes, certainly not all of the same issues in the case of one group wielding more capability to carry out a threat than another group, but many of the important ones, especially when it comes to matters of epistemology and reasoning.
- salmon30salmon 6y agoMore accurately would be to say Reddit reports 18% of hate content moved to a different platform. This would be akin to saying "salmon30salmon saw a reduction in hate content when he stopped attending hate group meetings". While I appreciate any attempt to reduce hate, it isn't really something to cheer in this case. The goal is to reduce hate, and pushing people further into the fringes doesn't do that. Now instead of being part of a community that has hate, but also positive information, the hate groups are going to be forced into a more focused hate forum. It is a means to further push people to the fringes which could further radicalize folks. Essentially, Reddit etc. doesn't make people hate more, the internet just exposes the hate that already existed. It is part of a larger cultural problem. People don't generally become hateful after seeing 12 memes, they are raised in an environment that breeds hate. Banning the subreddits _feels_ good, but it is not a solution to the core problem.
- pkulak 6y agoEverything I've seen suggests that removing platforms actually does reduce this stuff. It's analogous to the argument that there's no point trying to reduce suicides; people are just gong to do it some other way. But no, if you put a barrier on a bridge, suicides really do go down in total. If you make something even just a little bit more difficult, you reduce it.
- dcow 6y agoI don't think “places to be hateful on the internet” are in short supply.
- justchilly 6y agoSaid differently: "Reddit banned nearly 7,000 subreddits, but left alone the ones that contribute 82% of hate content." That seems like a dismal result, practically an admission that many of the bans were unjustified and/or subs that should have been banned were not.
- laurent92 6y agoVery true and interesting twist of fate. I find it amusing that any group becomes very good in science only once they’re under attack. See Galileo: They defined the scientific process when they were under bigoted criticism. In fact, the best way to ensure that a group who’s right makes an excellent demonstration of their correctness, is to censor them and tell them they’re wrong. That is how we get incredible advances of science. And that is also how huge totems become mainstream. Think « Winnie the Poo » in China, or the « 13% » number in USA.
- tomlagier 6y agoI think it just depends on the number of subreddits. If 7,000 is 1% of subs, then it seems like a good investment. If it's 30%, then yeah, that's.. not great.
- pietrovismara 6y agoThe last bunch of bans was simply a leftist purge, banning several subreddits that at most advocated violence against landlords, not really a "minority".
- gfodor 6y agoJust imagine what they could accomplish if they just shut down the site!
- GaryNumanVevo 6y agoDefinitely could get 100% of hatespeech taken off it they shut it down. Not to mention the absolute productivity boost to everyone working from home.
- davesque 6y agoI actually noticed this over the past month or so. It made a precipitous difference.
- oxymoran 6y agoYou
- oxymoran 6y agoWe could banish 100% of hate if we just banished people entirely.
- p7hwfizeONj 6y agoGreat idea. They could just shadow ban everyone and then have /r/SubSimulatorGPT2 bots fill in the comments.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bra-ket 6y agothere is still plenty of hate content there, mostly addressed against Trump supporters and anyone who disagrees with BLM agenda and violence. it's a radical left site.
- oxygenmolds 6y agoHow much of that hate content was expressing politically inconvenient facts?
- ffpip 6y agoBullshit. Hardly 100 were active of the 7k. And they say hate speech against majority (which spez implied as straight white men) is not 'hate speech'.
- throwaway590007 6y agoReddit hasn't been taken over by communist SJWs, they're just preparing for an IPO. If you're unhappy that participating in capitalism usually entails some kind of unaccountable censorship you should probably revise some of your pre-existing beliefs about capitalism.
- jungletime 6y agoWill they an Vampires for hating the Sun?