I thought it really was founded by those two, and written in Lisp at that. Then YC hooked them up with Swartz and his big thing was rewriting in python. (And maybe there was some contention about this? I forget, but I seem to recall some drama at the time about his contributions.)
It was a long time ago, though, so I might be misremembering. In any case, I'm fairly certain Swartz did join after the fact, but I'm not sure if he joined with the title of co-founder or not.
> One of the points of the merger was that we would all call ourselves co-founders, so that's what I've been doing. I'd be happy to stop if that's what Steve and Alexis wanted, though.
It seems AS was given the title of co-founder by contract, but perhaps, the language was vague enough or they didn't fear retaliation so Steve and Alexis decided they didn't want to acknowledge him as co-founder.
> Paul wanted to give Aaron Swartz, another YC founder, a birthday gift in November. More than anything else, Aaron wanted co-founder so Paul suggested the “merger”. Merger is probably a bit hyperbolic for what actually happened, Aaron basically moved in with us and we made him a co-founder.
Yeah, I think it's accurate to say "Reddit was founded in 2005 by two college friends."
But some acknowledgement of the other early people, including Aaron Swartz (who I believe was nominally considered a co-founder), might've been appropriate.
What was the context of the graphic to which some people are objecting?
In that context, is the most important story what two people did alone initially (or with the help of YC and others)? Or the eventual cofounders of record? Or everyone who was influential/formative/contributor to a given milestone of Reddit? I don't know.
I found an Observer article[1] from 2011 that gives some more insight. It looks to me that Aaron could indeed be considered a Reddit co-founder. However, Huffman and Ohanian may have felt threatened by being associated to the criminal later on, so they went with a new narrative.
Every time this comes up, they have always been pretty clear that they felt he didn’t earn his spot and was MIA for most of the early work. So he joined after they started reddit, making him not a cofounder, and he abdicated his responsibilities after joining and being told by PG to give him a cofounder title, which they weren’t in a great position to decline. It’s hard to set the record straight here without denigrating someone, so they were always in an awkward position when this came up.
I don’t know anyone involved, but that’s the impression I got after seeing this topic beat to death on HN and reddit over the last 10ish years.
I doubt they cared at all that he was charged years after he left.
Funnily enough, in Aaron's 2007 comment explaining the basis for him to be called a "co-founder" [1], the top reply is someone berating him as "disingenuous" for calling himself that [2].
Note that on the Wikipedia page for Chris Slowe [3], another person who joined Reddit very early on, he is also described as a co-founder, but he doesn't appear on the About page, even though there's been no public falling out between him and Steve/Alexis (he stayed at Reddit post-acquisition, then jumped to Hipmunk with Steve, and is now back at Reddit).
The thing is, for any company that makes it big, there will be ambiguity over whether particular people are considered founders vs early employees vs key people post a merger or acquisition.
But for the sake of the origin story, the simplest is the best: two longtime friends wanted to start a company together, so they sought out Paul Graham, got into the first YC batch, started working on Reddit and got it to its early growth and success, then continued on-and-off running/directing the company even through to this day; it makes sense to call those guys the founders.
None of this detracts from Aaron's legacy. He achieved a huge amount in his life, and his time/role at Reddit seems minor compared to other things he did.
Reddit was founded in June 2005.
Aaron founded Infogami, Infogami merged with Reddit in November 2005.
When Conde Nast bought Reddit in 2006 they each got one third of the money.
The other founders then fired Aaron in 2007.
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html
So they are technically correct. It shows though that --given the near martyr status Aaron has-- he is left out of the picture. Reddit are no rebbels, at least not anymore or "less so nowadays".
I have most hopes for Lemmy[0] as a place for the more rebbel Redditors to seek refuge. Really cool project, advancing really nicely.
He was in fact, by the language of his contract, a cofounder. He had the legal right to call himself as such even if spez and co are assholes and pretended he wasn't
Not necessarily already established and crowded platform, but also free and open, privacy friendly ones that can be slowly brought to self sustaining levels by enthusiasts, so that they can attract normal users.
True. That's the kind of "freedom of speech" I would happily renounce to in any public platform. Let them spread their idiocy in private form by themselves alone.
Lemmy [1] is still in beta but is open source, self-hostable, and very usable already, and has federation with ActivityPub on the roadmap. There is a main instance up at [2] with a number of offshoots already.
It's only a good alternative if you're looking to hang out with people who really like to use the n-word and who believe that everything is Jewish conspiracy.
> It's only a good alternative if you're looking to hang out with people who really like to use the n-word and who believe that everything is Jewish conspiracy.
This was not uncommon on Reddit before Reddit became more streamlined. :-)
Chapo.chat is a popular one for leftists that formed after the chapo subreddits were censored/banned a couple months ago. Fair warning: most HN users aren't going to like it because they advocate for things like food and shelter and healthcare for everyone, no matter what
To be fair, that posting is largely tongue in cheek because they're bitter for getting banned on reddit under the false pretense of violence. I'm sure a couple people believe it unironically but no one is actually organizing to hurt anyone.
As a leftist myself I'd be inclined more to this one, although I wouldn't condone any violence that is not for self defense, nor attacking anyone just because of their ideals - unless their ideals consist in endorsing the opposite of the above.
My take on food and shelter and (basic) healthcare for all is that I agree until this can pose a (real, proven) problem for others. Judging from current military expenses and top manager leaves, I'd dare to say that there's enough wealth out there to guarantee most of that to the entire planet.
Wow thank you so much for this, I have only read the first chapter of the second link and I see so many similarities to what I am going through or thinking.
For the uninitiated, this is from the sci-fi series, “The Expanse” which has found a home on Amazon Prime. Highly recommended for those interested in an interplanetary sci-fi.
This is honestly not something I can relate to. HN has always had a policy of using titles of the articles themselves, and apart from a small subset of them being editorialized by the mods (typically because they’re misleading!), this is still the case.
And I haven’t seen a noticeable uptake in pro-drug/pro-medication posts compared to, say, a decade ago, and frankly I don’t understand how that has anything to do with this.
Parent poster might be reacting to the last few days, which really did have an uncharacteristically high number of very busy threads about psychiatric medication. Hopefully it’s just one of those “phases” HN goes through week-in week-out.
As a non-American, I lost track of this case - was there an investigation into prosecutors who went after Aaron? Are these people still prosecuting other people?
Yes why not. And I am not sure why you think they broke rules or for something that would be seen as job losing offense by law community. Even defense lawyers claimed this is how things are done.
Reddit today is the opposite of what it was in the beginning. Unsurprising that they’d write out Swartz in their quest to be a friendly corporate face.
Alas, a new competitor will replace it soon. Virtually no one has brand loyalty to Reddit and their audience is becoming narrower and narrower.
I read many subreddits. It’s my strong impression that most of the mainstream subs (which make up a vast majority of the userbase) are filled with questionable accounts.
If anything, Reddit is getting bigger. In my circle nobody knew what it was five years ago. Now it has effectively become mainstream, and is being (positively) quoted on TV, etc.
This is actually the second time it happens. Ten years ago people also claimed that "Reddit is dying". It wasn't, it was just changing its core audience of technical users to a broader one. And now it is doing it again.
Mainstream name recognition isn’t particularly indicative of success. In my experience, Reddit is slowly eliminating anything that doesn’t conform to a west coast American view of the world.
Unfortunately for them, the rest of the world is coming online and has a different view of things. We’re starting to see this with India and the EU. Best case scenario for Reddit is a link aggregator for a very narrow group, unless they turn off the hyper-partisan path and return to their roots.
You couldn't even make a clone of it as it is. It still allows free speech if your sub isn't too popular. The general user base certainly got more intolerant.
I didn't think you were talking about anything specific. Sorry if it came out this way.
My point is that any "Europeans view on immigration from Islamic countries" will clash with the views from other europeans.
Europeans are not single-minded about those issues. Views are probably way more varied than the US. Even an European-ran Reddit would ran into the same issues.
As an American also living in Europe, I think this is a highly naive view. American media pushes American values, and American values are hardly equivalent to technological development itself.
Instead, I’d say we’re at the very beginning of a massive global backlash against American values propagated by technology. Expect it to continually ramp up as media-creation technology spreads. China is just the beginning.
I remember when people were embarrassed to admit they're on reddit. When my not-at-all-nerdy college-football-playing personal trainer casually mentioned it, I realized just how much it'd grown.
Considering that Reddit's own popularity was boosted by Digg's collapse due to unpopular changes and dysfunction, you'd think that Reddit would be more aware of the risks of pursuing an antagonistic relationship with their users.
The problem is that such an open-ended prediction has absolutely no value whatsoever...
I'm sure Reddit will die someday, but people have been saying this for at least 10 years or more. When non-technical users started using it, when violentacrez et al were banned, with every layout change big or small, staff changes...
People said the same thing about Facebook when it opened to non-edu users or when it launched the timeline. Or when Apple is antagonistic towards developers.
Reddit, Facebook, Apple and other companies are able to do well by antagonizing niche users because niche users can be replaced by regular folk. And sometimes it's almost necessary to antagonize those early users, since they can be a barrier to growth.
Reddit wants to dissociate themselves from 4chan, t_d, Boston Bomber and all this stuff. And they're doing it via cat pictures and the sort.
The value is in knowing they always have to watch their toes because it can all be over in a heartbeat. There is a very fine line between domination and irrelevance.
Digg, MySpace and Friendster weren't "over in a heartbeat". It took decay and lack of care with the platform, plus strong competition with strong venture capital funding. Plus, they were never as dominant or as entrenched as Reddit is.
Reddit is not going away just because you dislike it.
As I remember it, what happened on Digg was that there was a kind of friendly rivalry between Reddit and Digg. So everybody on Digg was already aware of Reddit. Then when the redesign hit, a meme spread that "This redesign sucks, try reddit". And so people did. And what they found was a much better community (Digg was more like a news website with a comment section).
The cautionary tail for Reddit is that what keeps people locked into a social network is community. And if they replace community with cat pictures, the whole thing will fall apart.
Yep. Also, what Digg did wasn't just a redesign, but also a complete rewrite from scratch in the exact way Joel Spolsky told everyone not to do one decade before [1]. It was buggy and missing important community features, and it was incompatible with the old website because they had changed the whole database too, so there was no way of choosing between old and new running side by side like you can with Reddit.
Reddit is very much a nest of hate, if you are any stripe of conservative.
"The Donald" was censored, then banned, for speech less heinous, in lesser amounts, and with lower, or often negative, voting scores, than is currently allowed on the site now (by those with approved political beliefs, of course).
Those with non-approved beliefs find themselves silenced and censored by moderators and admins, while those who instigated their silencing are left unmolested.
Subreddits with thousands (or in the case of "The Donald", HUNDREDS of thousands) of members are banned for the actions of a very, very few. In some such cases, those few were outside instigators (Reddit calls them "brigaders") from subreddits with opposing views; purposefully posting inflammatory material under sockpuppet accounts. The "brigaders" then report the naughty speech to the admins.
Doesn't take many such reports to have all those thousands of voices silenced. Of course this tends to go one way. Although "brigading" is ostensibly against Reddit rules, subreddits with approved views are allowed to do it openly, although some do in private.
And lest we forget, the CEO of Reddit HIMSELF has hacked into user accounts of those with unapproved views, and posted inflammatory things posing AS them (an act which Redditors were assured was not possible). Supposedly he's only done it a few times, but how are Redditors to know for sure?
When all these activities on the part of Reddit's leadership go one way, and are directed specifically against one political persuasion, it becomes very clear that Reddit IS a nest of hate, and that's the way they like it. It is also clear that they censor not to stop "hate" but to cease the discussion and meme production of conservatives, to which they partially attribute Trump's 2016 victory.
To this end, they've recently gone so far as to announce that they will censure users for merely VOTING on unapproved topics. Sure, they say those unapproved topics are "hate", but when the people defining "hate" are so slimy as to hack into and pose as their own users to sow discord, or to tacitly approve one way "brigades", one need not wonder their actual purposes.
Like so many of their brethren in the media who took it personally when Hillary lost, they are taking drastic action to be sure that such free speech activities not continue if there is any possibility of a repeat of 2016.
I think this is wishful thinking. Reddit at its inception was sock puppet-boosted discussion of atheism and coding. Every choice its leaders have been made have been in support of further growth, not some philosophical ideal.
It’s now one of the most vibrant discussion forums on the internet. It’s been growing faster than it can manage, but that’s been the case for years. Hostage to a brittle moderation model that doesn’t scale, certain discussions can’t be safely or productively had at its scale.
It’s a practical reality...in support of further growth. For every open internet advocate that abandons it in disgust, another dozen grandmas and teens register and download the app.
Whatever the case, I do hope you’re right and a competitor finds a way to do this better.
This hurts so much, Goes on to show the lengths people will go to portray themselves as being politically correct.
Whenever I get thoughts of doing something to change the "system", I just end up getting discouraged and disheartened to the core because of what happened with Aaron.
The one thing which stood out to me was that this guy spent time interning in government offices just to understand how it operated from inside out.
I have enormous respect for people who stop being being keyboard warriors and actually head into the swaps to understand how difficult and complex a situation is, instead of just intellectualising and theory-crafting about society based on information available online.
If you run a forum and a user is constantly making up lies, harassing other users, and spamming misinformation then I don't think banning them is "free speech" issue.
t_D should have been banned long before it eventually was imo. It actively spread misinformation and hate and made the website worse for other users.
And a question for you: You say that Reddit is not in favor of free speech because it banned subs like t_D, but t_D and similar subs were banned anyone who questioned the narrative that was being pushed by those subreddits' moderators. So is it not fair to say that t_D (and similar subs) were very clearly not in favor of free speech either?
Perhaps. I know that a number of objectively hateful subreddits were not banned because they were hateful of people "in the majority" (whatever that means).
An archived copy of Reddit's "Account and Community Restrictions" from the time of the ban reads as such [0]:
> 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.
The question here veers into the territory of whether Reddit is a "publisher" or "platform". Their editorial decision to ban certain kinds of loosely-defined "hate" seems to clearly point to them being an editorializing publisher of content. This, in addition to their editing of user's posts criticizing their core team [1] and other such egregious acts.
There's no compelling reason for me to believe Reddit acted in good faith.
> I know that a number of objectively hateful subreddits were not banned because they were hateful of people "in the majority" (whatever that means).
Don't be vague, give concrete examples if you're going to make broad statements like that.
> The question here veers into the territory of whether Reddit is a "publisher" or "platform".
Well are subreddits "publishers" or "platforms" then? Because a lot of the hateful subs that have been shut down over the years (t_D, uncensorednews, European, etc.) banned users who disagreed with their moderators.
Well there is /r/BlackPeopleTwitter, which generally has a lot of vitriol aimed at white people which goes wholly unchecked.
It is also the home of "country club threads", wherein you're banned from commenting unless you are a PoC or have proved yourself to be a "white ally" (initially I think it was only PoC and none of the white ally stuff, but they let them in later in response to continued backlash – also because I think many of the mods aren't actual PoC so looked even more ridiculous than it was already).
Subreddits are composed of communities which (in theory) are self-moderating. The communities themselves can be publishers or platforms, the question here is about whether or not Reddit should have the editorial authority to delete subreddits at will.
Here is a small list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... Most of these subreddits are not Nazi or Stalinist-level hateful, but could still be considered hateful (the definition of hate is actually very shaky, I regret saying "objectively hateful" in my above comment).
I could back to you with a longer list of more underground subreddits, though I don't really have the time to. You can go to something like https://reddit.guide and search for subreddits similar to the ones banned. Plenty are still active, just much smaller.
Why do you guys always call t_d a hate sub? It was a Trump fan sub. Dedicated to positive content about Trump. It was the complete opposite of hateful, of course. Now, take the far left sub “/r/politics” which actively promotes hatred against half of the United States. Threats of violence against law enforcement abound there. Calls for actual bloodshed and violent “revolution” constantly.
Subreddits are private or public communities that all have their own rules for what can be posted. Reddit itself is a publisher. Legally speaking, they curate a collection of subreddits and publish them. Reddit (and other pro-communist and anti-American publishers like Twitter) will likely face massive legal action from the DOJ if Americans vote to give Trump a second term. I for one can’t wait to see these commies bite the dust in federal court!
California/Silicon Valley has a big issue of absolutely belief they are right. Big tech companies want to stop "disinformation" by banning people from their platforms.
A recent case is Dr. Li-Meng Yan who's been publishing research about CoV2 origins. There are academics who've taken issue with some of those releases/papers, and there is room for discussion for sure. But it should be discussed. Twitter just said, "nope, disinformation, cut and dry" and banned her account.
There are a lot of experts recently who have been banned on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, et. al. for spreading bad information. But science is not democratic. California companies have somehow become the arbitrators of what is good and bad science.
But coming back off of science to t_d, the same applies. It's a huge feedback loop of "he's bad" and a "fascists" and subs like these showed time and time again the massive media distortion of every one of his statements. There are a lot of agendas going on here and few of them are for the Truth.
[1] is an example of a hate sub against men that's not banned by reddit. But [2] is just a group of men who have decided to never date, marry etc. is quarantined because somehow that is hate. Also how are women a minority when they are 50% of the population? Baffles me.
Both those subs are sexist garbage and MGTOW is not "just a group of men who have decided to never date, marry etc.". It's a shitty community that frequently promotes sexist garbage like this [1, 2].
They were not as much in favor of free speech as they often proclaim. It is probably mostly due to reactionary behavior. I think the banning was a mistake, they were also discriminated against on political grounds.
If you do that because you think it necessary I would at least expect results.
Which is what /r/LateStageCapitalism, and many other subreddits, do. Only it's allowed because they are not right wing.
The anti-free speech claim is made not by judging the ban of t_D in isolation, but by looking at how their policies are selectively enforced across their platform in order to silence right-wing opinions and perspectives. In particular, support for Trump. A sub like /r/politics, dedicated primarily to anti-Trump content, is fine though, even if their users are wishing him death after getting COVID and are actively promulgating conspiracy theories.
It's interesting that your rationale is so similar to the same old propaganda. If you're going to make those claims you should source it, otherwise it's just a convenient way to dismiss this without really engaging.
In 1987, Tottle published his controversial book as Fraud, Famine, and Fascism:
the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, in which he asserts that
claims the Holodomor was an intentional genocide are "fraudulent", and "a
creation of Nazi propagandists". [1]
Russian publicist Yuri Mukhin has a published a book titled "Hysterical Women of
the Holodomor", dismissing Holodomor as "Russophobia" and "a trump card of the
Ukrainian Nazis." [2]
I'm definitely not denying the Holodomor or any of Stalin's crimes. But unfortunately some of the people who are most adamant about spreading information about the Holdomor are not doing so to spread information about the atrocity, but rather to spread their own anti-semitic propaganda.
u/soccer was a moderator of r/911truth and, according to archived versions of their user page, posted quite a lot of links to "Israel did 9/11" conspiracy websites like https://careandwashingofthebrain.blogspot.
r/uncensorednews essentially did the same thing. It posed as an "unbiased" source of news but the sub's creator and top moderator was pretty clearly pushing his own neo-nazi views.
I'm going to take your claims at face value. Let's say this is all 100% correct. Maybe then the prudent action is not to ban a subreddit that is a valid topic, but instead to ban users who have a history of behavior that's not acceptable?
In fact, Reddit does ban users including u/soccer. To conflate r/911truth and r/Holodomor isn't fully honest.
This looks like a joke comment. If you're not going to add anything please comment elsewhere.
It's not a joke sub there are people who legitimately believe this. And the point it's illustrating is that even if it's a "joke" some "jokes" are more well tolerated by Reddit than others. My original point is that there is definitely ideological biases at play in what is/is not bannable on reddit.
No, when I say it’s a joke sub I really mean it’s a joke sub. Just like https://old.reddit.com/r/EmpireDidNothingWrong/. There might be people who actually believe that Stalin was a saint, but they’re not the ones posting memes about it.
I agree; r/Holodomor should not have been banned but should instead have had its moderators replaced.
That Stalin sub's creator and sole moderator is already banned btw, so I'm pretty sure they just missed banning the sub or something. And it hasn't had any activity in 7 months so at least it's not active.
There is still plenty of racism on reddit. Look up any thread about Indian, Chinese and Romani (Gypsy) people.
The Reddit admins only goes after racism when the target is people contemporary liberal media sympathize with.
They only banned anti-black racist subreddits and users after the 2015 Charleston church shooting. They only banned anti-Semitic subreddits and users after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. They only banned Islamophobic subreddits and users after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings.
How does banning those reddits only after shootings prove it is about groups liberals sympatize with? I mean it shows mostly that reddit bans after shootings.
Shootings that the contemporary liberal media highlight. We can't recall mass violence that target Asian, Romani, or global south communities because our media doesn't think it's notable enough.
and yet there's nothing on the anniversary of the Las Vegas shooting this year (most likely because the media needs to memory hole what was really a failed assassination attempt)
If misinformation and hate are why t_D was banned, why are r/latestagecapitalism (openly hateful and violent / ban dissenters),r/blackpeopletwitter (openly racist, spread misinformation), r/socialistrifleassociation (openly fomenting revolution) allowed to exist?
Reddit just bans speech it doesn't like. It has nothing to do with hate -- only who you hate. Hating conservatives, Republicans, Whites? That's all fine on reddit. Hell, it's fine here. How long will this comment last?
Don't comment on comments. It's against the rules and isn't constructive.
But I agree with you. Reddit is growing to be as hard-left as voat is hard-right. It's not quite there because there are still a lot of old communities before everything got political who still use Reddit (/r/MechanicalKeyboards/ and such).
But honestly, everyone needs to get off Reddit and go back to the days of phpBB forums, individual blogs and RSS feeds. Aggregation sites like HN, Reddit, etc should be where you go to promote stuff you've found though following individual you like.
I’m amused when people post flat out lies like this. T_d was a positive sub that loved Trump. They were pretty “rah rah” about him. It drove the anti-Trump people crazy, which is why it was banned. That’s the only reason. Just go cruise the comments on /r/politics for proof. They call for actual bloodshed and for the death of Trump and his supporters every single day.
TDS is very real. It causes people such as yourself to parrot flat out lies that have no basis in reality — and you seem to actually feel good about it. It’s bizarre and I suspect history will look back on it as a mass hysteria event.
You can't in good faith make the argument that t_D was a positive sub. It loved Trump, yes, but it also frequently called for the execution of Muslims [1], immigrants [2], Planned Parenthood employees [3], Hillary Clinton [4], etc. [5]
If I cared to waste my time doing so, I could find plenty of objectionable comments in just about any Reddit sub. You seem to believe tough conversations about whether Muslim culture is compatible with Western culture, or whether the US should begin mass deportations of illegal aliens should not occur. I’d have to disagree with you there. If we can’t discuss complex topics like this on the internet, then where can we discuss them?
What you are describing are not “tough conversations”, they are hardly a conversation at all. Trying to misrepresent the parent comment’s claim that they want to suppress all discussion of these topics and then calling their description an attempt at “gaslighting” is fairly poor-faith.
If you're not interested in having those conversations then don't participate in them. No need to claim those who are are somehow "hateful". You have expressed your opinion, which I totally disagree with. But thanks for writing!
Free speech stands against the financial interests of social media. Reddit is the real estate for ads, and the best value for top global advertisers are safe spaces that are free of controversy. In the end, it's the advertisers that decide what is allowed to be published there.
Unless you’re willing to pay for it you can’t have social media that isn’t a real estate for ads or at least some sort of commercial interest.
Arguably even HN despite being technically a pro-bono side project serves the commercial interest of YC (and possibly others) if it didn’t and especially if it would have a negative impact on them it wouldn’t be around.
And HN is a very niche social media (if you can even call it that) with strict rules.
Anything with wider appeal has to be monetized.
The only monetization we have for the Internet is attention/value extraction from the user base.
HN is heavily moderated with strict posting rules, as far as "safe space"... Eh as long as you maintain a level of respectful discourse I never found that you can't comment on social or political issues due to fear of Dang or any other mod (I'm not sure how many are there) interfering in the discussion.
The community itself is another issue but even that isn't as clear cut as it seems if you look at any of the more political topics that are being posted.
In general HN isn't the place you go to discuss politics, social issues or current events some posts are allowed when it's in the public's interest or they are relevant to the wider tech industry but that's about it.
I always turn on "Show Dead" and on controversial topics, go to the bottom first.
This thread (along with all COVID threads) are weighted to sink very quickly. So you won't see them often, but when you do, there's a treasure of diversity of information and viewpoints. The best threads are the ones that start with a greyed out comment.
I have no doubt their investors play a role as well. Though some argue the Tencent investment is good for Reddit [0], I can't help but wonder what the nudging looks like behind the scenes.
Having advertisers control online narrative is very worrying and an unintended consequence of Brand Safety. There is no financial reason for reddit or youtube to distribute content they can't monetise, especially if that content is popular.
The question is who should have this control in media? Traditional media had gatekeepers that allowed for extreme (but popular) opinions to be suppressed.
We've seen what it looks like when opinions form in a bubble online without oversight and spirals out of control in the real world. From conspiracy theories and extremism to doxxing the wrong person in mass murder.
We should be aware of the limitations around a model based entirely on unfettered free speech. Otherwise we are just ideologues trying to put out a fire with more fire.
>>it's the advertisers that decide what is allowed to be published there
1. How much would/should advertisers care about their "brand image"? Cancel Culture has taken the long history of corporate boycotts and connected it to a hair-trigger, with massively amplified effects compared to the per capita aggrieved consumers. The leverage that advertisers exert on publishers is a rational risk-avoidance policy in these times of massive outrage-induced revenue losses.
2. How much of the risk-aversion in advertising is related to demographic shifts in the personnel making up the advertising and public relations departments?
No, the utterly ridiculous "paradox of tolerance" is just a bad cope for people who truly do not believe in free speech. "Free speech" which only applies to your predefined set of approved speech is not free speech, but a monstrous parody of it. The purpose of free speech is to enable dissent, not to affirm the status quo.
Nonsense. Do you think movies of child abuse are "free speech", or recruitment/instruction videos tot terrorist organizations, or inciting violence and hate? What about Assange, he published some stuff, could that be free speech? Or violations of copyright?
To me free speech is like free markets. The word does not adequately cover the implementation as boundaries do apply. There are little to non truly free markets (no tax, no imp/ex restrictions, etc). And there is not truly free speech.
And to limit freedom to speech to prevent hate/violence inciting crowds to get a platform may --according to me-- be necessary in some cases and is allowed by many of the worlds constitutions.
On top of that Reddit is a private platform, so they are free to set their standard, just like you may prohibit some speech in your own household (under the thread of being expelled or "no longer welcome).
The line where free speech ends is pretty clearly delineated, and that's when it crosses over into criminal or violent action in the "world of atoms".
Almost all of your examples can be prosecuted based on their direct effect on the real world (or representation of a crime, such as with child abuse videos), not the content of their speech. The difference is crucial.
To take things to an extreme, if I say "all XXXX should be killed", that's very different from actually killing all members of the XXXX group, or even plotting to do so.
So you want law to protect people that say "all X should be killed", then X is not demonstrably super violent/intolerant in the first place?
Let's say someone campaigns that all people that have gay sex should be killed: do you want this "speech" protected?
Well: I dont. That's why I think "intolerance of the intolerant" is good. Most law books in developed democracies agree with me. White supremacists, racists, fascists, extreme wahabists/salafits dont. They want to incite hatred/violence (to non-violent/tolerant people). I'd say shut 'm down and/or dont give platform.
We have a number of tiny fringe groups like this in the US, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, which would surely be illegal in most of Europe. I will defend their full right to speech so I can have my full right to speech.
In Europe, free speech laws shut down leftist activists, not just "white supremacists, racists, fascists, extreme wahabists/salafits". I think this is a strawman and an idealistic vision of being able to control speech fairly. One of the biggest active groups is the IHRA, a Zionist organization. The IHRA consists of 31 member nations including the United States, Canada, Australia, France, England, Germany, and twenty-six other European countries.
This has become a big problem in Germany for Palestinian/Muslim activists who are critical of Israel. Curtailing free speech is a slippery slope.
Now, perhaps the AfD will be banned in Germany, as it has been placed under so-called "Verfassungsschütz beobachtung", an agency that protects the German constitution. Should it be criminal to identify as a communist or nationalist in Germany? What comes after that — perhaps it should be criminal to be a Jew or Muslim or Christian, given the hateful teachings of the Torah, Quran, and Bible?
A political party may be banned in Germany, as in: You cannot vote for them any more. For that to happen, they have to be hostile against fundamental parts of the constitution. That is division of powers, free development of the individual, independence of courts and stuff like that. Only then a ban might be even considered.
And it is still fully legal to be against these things, tweet about them or whatever.
This is to -protect- Jews, Muslims and Christians, because as was so colourfully demonstrated in Germany 33-45 it is very easy to run a platform striving to destroy these values within a democratic framework. (Similar to what the Free Speech Paradox is about)
There is no slippery slope here, and your argument that there is either bad faith or extremely uniformed.
> > By accusing Muhammad of paedophilia, [E.S.] had merely sought to defame him, without providing evidence that his primary sexual interest in Aisha had been her not yet having reached puberty or that his other wives or concubines had been similarly young. In particular, [E.S.] had disregarded the fact that the marriage with Aisha had continued until the Prophet’s death, when she had already turned eighteen and had therefore passed the age of puberty.
To which the author rightly responds:
> Having sex with a child isn’t pedophilia, in other words, if the child’s prepubescence is not your biggest turn-on, or if you also have sex with adults, or if you continue having sex after the child reaches maturity. (Am I alone in finding the Austrian court’s reasoning offensive?
Just look at a map of blasphemy laws in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law). Germany is on par with Yemen, Oman, Turkey, Indonesia, Myanmar... This is not a good thing to have in common with those countries.
I maintain that the government should never hold the right of censure. It is a slippery slope. Given the ECHR rules, it's quite possible criticism of Islam will be fully illegal in the next 10 years. This is dangerous.
The Muhammad story is about Austria (which I did not discuss and do not know a lot about). I don't know much about the religious issue at hand either, but the possibility of getting fined 500€ for accusing people of paedophilia if your claim does not hold does not strike me as such horrendous. Isn't this slander in the US and illegal as well?
How is Germany on par with the countries you listed? You may not disturb public peace with speech and not insult people. Example is a dude who printed "The Holy Quran" on toilet paper. Nothing wrong with enforcing human decency via the law. Such insults is also literally what Nazis did in the first stage of the holocaust. Looking at the countries this is supposed to be on par with: Yemen uses blasphemy laws to imprison establishment enemies. Oman is not even on the list. Turkey is extra ironic because there was a comedian who made a parody of the Turkish government and Germany had a diplomatic crisis because Germany refused to do something against it (obv. totally on par). Myanmar put a guy in jail for wearing Buddha headphones. Indonesia's mention is so brief I guess you could say the law sounds similar.
Dann haben wir haben ganz verschiedene Weltbilder.
The right to religious criticism should be absolute.
The reason I bring up the Austrian case is because itw was upheld by the ECHR, which Germany also defers to. To defend the woman in that case from the ECHR's deranged ruling: Scholars estimate that Mohammed married Aisha, his youngest wife, when she was only 6. If that is not paedophilia, I don't know what is.
You bring up libel laws in the US. Historically, they have had a very, very high burden of proof. Only oligarchal authoritarians like Trump try to expand their reach. Libel cases are also exceedingly rare, and if they are brought to court, they are brought to court as a civil matter. And, to top it off, criticism or slander of a figure who is:
- Dead
- Partly mythologized
- A religious figure
is completely fair game under the US doctrine of free speech and religious freedom. In the US I would be just as free to say "Jesus was a gay man" or "Mohammed was schizophrenic" as anything else, and in my opinion this is the proper approach. Anyone should also be allowed to print the text of the Quran on toilet paper or burn the Bible or deface the Talmud — why the hell should that be illegal???
Noam Chomsky (who is an extremely prominent Jewish-American scholar and linguist), is one of the staunchest supporters of free speech, from a leftist position. He even made efforts to defend a French Holocaust denier (holocaust denial is also not something I believe should be illegal). I would recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-oV42OMQoE if you would like to see more on that specific case.
If you take a look of the depicted world map, you'll see what I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law#/media/File:Blas.... What Germany shares in common with the other countries I named is that blasphemy is a potentially imprisonable offence.
I strongly believe that there are many things which are done far better in the German/European system:
- Healthcare
- Data privacy
- Taxation
- Criminal prosecution/the prison system
- etc.
but there are a few things about the American system which I ascribe extreme value to, chiefly the right to freedom of speech.
I say all of this as a dual German-American citizen myself.
> Should it be criminal to identify as a communist or nationalist in Germany?
It seems somewhat likely that it'll become illegal to identify as a communist in the US, since, as of two days ago [1], Communist Party members are no longer allowed to enter the country.
What if they spread their ideas via proselyting and convert more people to their way of thinking, causing abortion centers to close and gay marriage to become illegal? Should that be allowed?
It's not just a saying, the pen is truly mightier than the sword.
Hitler never physically dragged a jew into a gas chamber. After 1933 he never shot someone or so much as brawled with anyone. Yet it was only words, his words, his speech, or ink on a paper, that compelled millions of people to commit some of the greatest atrocities in modern history.
Words can obviously be a more powerful thing than actions. In another example, if someone is depressed or suicidal, and they are close to you, you can probably make them kill themselves with words alone, if you choose them correctly.
Hitler's orders had an extremely clear and well-traced direct effect on the physical world, borne out in the tragedies you mention. He could therefore be tried for war crimes. His actions were not free speech, they were military orders. This is not an argument against freedom of speech.
The first thing any dictator does is begin to curtail the rights of their citizenry. The first right to go is the right to free speech.
Child abuse is a physical act and isn't speech. Recruitment and instructional videos are speech. Assange is speech, but, he wasn't a journalist with protections for handling secret information. Copyright used to have a limited term before it dropped in to the public domain where it would become speech.
These are all different things with their own problems.
A video is a form of expression that falls under speech for all intents and purposes. There is no general caveat to freedom of speech which states that one cannot create a video of some illegal act. Child pornography seems to be the only exception in the US.
Further, metaphysically, 'physical acts' such as burning flags fall under freedom of expression, and all physical actions are themselves expressive. We prohibit child abuse because it is abuse, not because it is a physical act and therefore not speech.
The expression of copyrighted material, likewise, is speech. Disney is exercising its right to free speech by releasing a movie, even if that movie falls under copyright. Just as in the case of child porn, copying and/or distributing such media is a restriction on speech, albeit a widely accepted one.
To me, there is no way to argue that child porn and unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material isn't a kind of speech, or at least a kind of expression. It is absolutely speech, just as sharing a video of a murder or theft is speech, and just as sharing some public domain music is speech, and it is also speech that most people agree should be restricted.
Your point about child abuse is ridiculous. We prohibit child abuse precisely because it is a physical act. If I said "I will whip my child 50 times", and didn't do it, that would not be child abuse. It becomes child abuse once it is a physical act.
You make the faulty presumption that speech itself can be a form of abuse. This is where free speech absolutists such as myself would disagree. Speech is a protected class of expression precisely for this reason: it cannot be abusive.
To argue that child pornography is a form of speech is rather ridiculous, if we define speech as "the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words". A form of expression, sure, but there are limits on forms of expression. I cannot choose to stab people as a form of free expression, nor torch a building.
>It becomes child abuse once it is a physical act.
Agreed, so being a physical act seems to be necessary for its prohibition. But we're not talking about child abuse, we're talking about the creation and distribution of child abuse videos, i.e. child pornography. These are two separate crimes.
>Speech is a protected class of expression precisely for this reason: it cannot be abusive.
People can absolutely be abused by speech, even in the common meaning of the word. Spousal and child abuse often happens through speech. Teachers may abuse their students through speech. Cyberbullying is widely regarded as a form of abuse through speech. Threats are themselves speech. If speech is so important as to have no real-world consequences, what makes freedom of speech such an important principle?
> if we define speech as "the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words"
Freedom of speech (or more accurately, expression) law is much wider than this, and applies to, say, artistic works in which not a single word is spoken, and it also applies to burning flags or silently protesting. There is no need for a word to be spoken, or even a concrete thought - speech can be purely emotive, or a command, or a shopping list, too. Child pornography can easily be considered artistic. The fact that it is art, and therefore expression, is irrelevant to illegalizing it.
>I cannot choose to stab people as a form of free expression, nor torch a building.
The same law that protects freedom of expression also protects freedom of speech. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are two sides of the same coin. You're noticing that not all physical acts count as speech, and this is certainly true for child abuse, stabbing people, or torching buildings. However, in general, it is not true for videos depicting those things, with the exception of child porn.
Obviously this is probably the most egregious and disgusting form of criminality out there, so it's an important issue to deal with. I'm not sure what the proper solution is, but what we have now seems to work, given its extremely limited and well-defined scope.
I say movies of such acts. That's not the act itself. See Japan where comics that show sexual abuse of "young looking individuals" are freely distributed.
> These are all different things with their own problems.
> You're mixing up a lot of things.
No, they are all current limitations to free speech encoded in law. I mean to say (please re-read my comment) that "true free speech" already does not exist (just like "truly free markets" dont).
> Recruitment and instructional videos are speech.
Try massively sharing those to the wider public: I'm curious how long you stay free or your endeavors remain uninterrupted. Lol.
A manga that depicts serious child abuse that turned the author into a porn star. It's written by herself. Maybe she shouldn't be allowed to express herself and hide it. We can all then live a happy fantasy where everyone is a good person in any depiction.
My first thought when reading the manga, how can we stop this?
Suffice to say, I didn't enjoy it one bit but I never thought this should be censored.
There are many similar manga that depicts all sorts of stuff. Some of them written by the people which were unfortunate.
It's also evident you don't care about the medium because you used the word comic.
Censorship of evil acts was rampant in the history. People didn't want to admit what others were doing. There are broader issues if people are pushed to the extreme by media. Why would someone join a terrorist group after watching one of their videos? There must be something else causing the problem. The videos are a symptom, not a cause.
Last, I have consumed media of both your examples. It didn't turn me into a child abuser or a terrorist. I want to help make world a safer place for children and terrorism free more than before. I want to stop it so it stops get depicted on its own.
Incitement of violence and abuse is already illegal. I am not sure what your point is then. Your first comment paints a broad stroke. Please be more concise when talking about censoring heavy handed topics because otherwise you may be causing a chilling effect.
There are limits in every country for free speech. It's usually images of child abuse, threats of direct and imminent harm to specific people, etc. I just did a post about this:
Remember, at one time, saying homosexuality was okay was considered dangerous, hateful, flawed and needed to be banned. Saying god didn't exist could get you expelled from a university, excommunicated from your community or killed.
You only view some speech as okay today because you don't understand what some people went through to fight for that idea.
Assange is clearly free speech. However leaking that information is a crime if you're a member of the US military (hence Manning; maliciously prosecuted by Obama, and then also symbolically freed by Obama).
The NYT published information about Trump's taxes. That's free speech. The Person who leaked it committed a Federal crime. (technically NYT may be guilty of a crime here too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrvYNfsAgJY)
I would argue that your argument is nice in theory, nonsense in practicality.
Who decides what speech is hateful or violent and should be limited? You, me, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un ?
How easy is it to label something as hateful and ban it? Very easy.
That's the flaw in your argument, the human element.
The revolution to create America had violent and hateful speech towards the British crown.
Private companies can do what they want, but in public sphere the parent poster was right free speech exists to enable dissent, not support the status quo.
> I would argue that your argument is nice in theory, nonsense in practicality.
Well, it already is encoded in law. Most countries prohibit hate speech and/or inciting violence, while most people consider that free speech is protected in those places. So it's already practical.
> Who decides what speech is hateful or violent and should be limited? You, me, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un ?
This gets coded in law and jurisprudence and gets enforced by police. Just like any other unlawful acts. Again: this is already how it works in most developed democracies.
> How easy is it to label something as hateful and ban it? Very easy.
See my other comment about pesticide. Please answer that question. Inciting hate/violence is quite easy to detect in practice.
> That's the flaw in your argument, the human element.
Please explain. I dont get it. It's all down to culture, true. But that does not prevent it from being pretty much universal.
> The revolution to create America had violent and hateful speech towards the British crown.
Yes. Which was behaving intolerant and violent in the first place!! Just like now with police brutality in the US: so much violence from them that expressing/inciting hate toward them becomes acceptable in my book.
> Private companies can do what they want, but in public sphere the parent poster was right free speech exists to enable dissent, not support the status quo.
Dissent have no need to exist when there is no oppression/violence/exploitation/marginalization. Hence dissent is the best example of "intolerance of the intolerant". Thanks.
> Just like now with police brutality in the US: so much violence from them that expressing/inciting hate toward them becomes acceptable in my book.
So it is you, personally, that is the arbiter of what is and isn't OK? Does your own repeated expression of intolerance for the fundamentals of free speech in this thread similarly allow me to mark "expressing/inciting hate" toward you as "acceptable" as well? Where does this kind of reasoning end?
> Well, it already is encoded in law. Most countries prohibit hate speech and/or inciting violence, while most people consider that free speech is protected in those places.
Depends. Germany for example takes a similar route as Reddit does. If you're Turkish, you're allowed to say "Germans are a dog race" when the German parliament recognize the fact that Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians (hey, fun fact, they're re-activating their ISIS-buddies to try again right now).
If a German said "Turks are a dog race", they'd be prosecuted.
Hate speech isn't outlawed, it's majority hate speech that's outlawed.
This is the exact problem I'm talking about. Millions of people all are arbitraily classified as Germans or Turks just because they were born in a geographical region... most of them did not participate and had zero connection to any genocides.
But their free speech can be infringed upon simply because they've been labeled a certain way by other human beings, no matter how accurate or inaccurate.
As much as we would like to censor speech that sounds horrible to us you can't because it's such a slippery slope.
Painting an opposing view as "utterly ridiculous" is not the best way to start an argument. But moving on.
It's always interesting to see that, when actually probing deeper, almost no-one believes in truly unrestricted free speech, even people who proclaim themselves as free speech champions (such as yourself). For example, can I slander you? If I own a newspaper, can I try to convince my readers that you're a pedophile? Can I tell someone to commit murder for me (after all, it's just speech, it was the other guy who pulled the trigger)? Can I tell a suicidal person that they're worthless, nobody will ever like them, and they should just kill themselves? Can I lie under oath? Can I psychologically abuse my children? If you responded "no" to any of these questions, you also don't believe in absolute free speech, now it's just a matter of arguing where to draw the line.
I really do not see what your point is. Of course there are things that are and should be illegal to say — but none of them are really politically relevant. Protecting free speech is about protecting dissent and the expression of political and related (e.g. artistic) ideas. Perhaps you can contrive of situations where your examples overlap with dissent. I guess the main one will be inciting violence, and in this case the "paradox" isn't entirely ridiculous. The problem is that it can be used as a very convenient justification for the suppression of entire heterogeneous groups. Which is why the violence itself is what should be illegal, and not the speech.
Libel laws have historically had an extremely high burden of proof. The right wing is usually the first to try to expand these laws (as with Trump, maybe Peter Thiel/Gawker). Libel is also a civil offence if it is one, which again, is extremely hard to prove.
Telling someone to commit murder for you is an example of speech directly inciting violent action, so no, that would be a criminal act.
It's iffy whether telling someone they should commit suicide is free speech or not. Given that suicide is illegal in most societies, it would probably be illegal in the same way directly inciting violent action is, though the subtleties of the case matter.
No, lying under oath is a violation of a contract. That is outside the realm of free speech because you willingly and knowingly restrict your freedom of speech to testify under oath.
Psychologically abusing your children — again, a very fine line, with a very high burden of proof. Psychological abuse is almost never punishable unless it crosses over into the physical world, which can also include things like curtailing access to proper nutrition, etc. But at that point, it's not a matter of free speech, but of child neglect.
To piggyback on this, here is a quote from Karl Popper (the "discoverer" of the Paradox of Tolerance):
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.
With t_D it was clearly not possible to counter them with rational arguments, because all users who went against their moderators' views were immediately banned from the sub.
When one sides always takes the intellectual high ground, the other side can go continually lower, all while amassing significant cult-like follower ship. Alphabet Soup, machinegun argumentation, at hominem, gaslighting, oversimplification, non sequitur. It does not end in free society prevailing.
>as long as we can counter them by rational argument
I don't know if y'all are new to the internet, but I've been here since around 1990 and we ration argument hasn't done any good. I feel like a lot of these ideas around speech are ones that came from people who were used to arguing with other intelligent people. When the unwashed masses are involved, rational argument doesn't work at all. Some people understand this, which is why people like Trump can get elected. It wasn't as if there was a failure of making rational arguments to counter him. The average person just does not care/understand what a rational argument is.
> When the unwashed masses are involved, rational argument doesn't work at all
I believe this is an extremely illiberal viewpoint. Someone who can make this argument could well be a monarchist, fascist, or totalitarian at heart. The foundation of a democracy is the belief that the "unwashed masses" can hold informed views on politics, and at the very least should have the right to.
Also, the average person DOES care what a rational argument is. A significant amount of Trump's 2016 voter base understood him to be a populist to the left of Hillary. His campaign rhetoric of isolationism and ending the wars spoke to large swaths of the population, which swept him into office.
Now, all the issues you point out are important, and must be tackled, but I don't think the right way to tackle them is to label groups of people with a broad brush.
If we understand that people are capable of being informed, we should ask: "how can people be informed>", and "what can we do to make sure that informing people in an unbiased way is possible?". I don't think social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have asked themselves these questions, at least not with any sincerity.
I think HN is a great example of the principles of (nearly) free speech in action. Look at the discussion we're having now!
You can start by not referring to the public at large as ‘unwashed masses.’ With rhetoric like that commonplace among the media elite, are you really surprised Trump won?
Clearly I must have misunderstood something, then. Reddit's suppression is obviously an anomaly, and in actuality the POTUS and his followers are dictating the boundaries of acceptable speech via their domination of academia, the media, and tech giants.
Yeah, but r/thedonald did not provide free speech to the other side. Don't try to tell me it was some bastion of free speech that could be brought up as an example of such.
>is just a bad cope for people who truly do not believe in free speech
I don't think this is the case; there are theories which are highly skeptical of free speech, and they are easy to turn to; one doesn't have to give up much in order to be a free speech skeptic. Further, even in the United States, the country with the fewest restrictions of free speech, there are still several kinds of speech prohibited by law. I'm not aware of any theory, liberal or not, which argues for purely unrestricted speech. There are always caveats in every theory proposed, whether it relates to incitement of violence, child pornography, threatening letters, hate speech, or pornography.
It's good that you acknowledge your (or so I assume) skepticism of the concept as such. Pretending that the exceptions which do not relate to political speech are relevant or even interesting is almost in bad faith, however. Free speech is about political speech, and the expression of controversial views. Things which you cannot say which are non-political are curiosities, things for lawyers to get excited about. They are of no concern to those who actually care about freedom of speech and thought as such. But "hate speech", which you offhandedly list among other largely irrelevant forms of expression, should most certainly be covered by any serious definition of free speech. And that is the actual reason for why many find free speech so repulsive — it requires them to accept the expression of political views which are inimical to their own. This is of course not exclusive to that particular form of speech — I think history can provide plenty of similar examples.
>It's good that you acknowledge your (or so I assume) skepticism of the concept as such.
Personally, I'm skeptical only to a philosophical level, as I am critical of both liberalism and the state, and in particular how the state would exercise its blunt power if free speech protections were weakened. In practical terms, I'm in favour of freedom of speech.
> Pretending that the exceptions which do not relate to political speech are relevant or even interesting is almost in bad faith, however.
My point was more to get accross the idea that there are political theories of free speech (actually implemented or not) which (1) have what is called a "free speech principle", that is, an explicit endorsement and guarantee, to some or any extent, of the right to speak freely (2) enshrine this principle into a law, or suggest that it should be enshrined.
>Things which you cannot say which are non-political are curiosities, things for lawyers to get excited about.
They're also interesting in philosophical thought experiments and determining the value and extents of free speech - most imporantly in the idea of consistency. If threatening letters are disallowed, for instance, what implications does this have, speaking in terms of principles, for more "interesting" sorts of speech? It may have no implications (according to one theory of justification) but it may have far-reaching implications for another.
>But "hate speech", which you offhandedly list among other largely irrelevant forms of expression, should most certainly be covered by any serious definition of free speech.
My point in listing the exceptions was to say that if there is some exception, any exception, it means the rule is not absolute, and caveats can be made under certain circumstances. For example, incitement to immediate and direct violence is often an "uninteresting" exception. This is because violence is a kind of harm. However, the law also recognizes various other forms of harm (such as psychological harms). Which harms should or shouldn't be included, and why?
The question that 1A scholars and political philosophers have tried to answer is what, precisely, the exceptions should be, what the existing exceptions may allow scope for (copyright infringement? child pornography? cyberbullying? obscenity? defamation? - by no means uninteresting), and in general, whether we should have a fundamental law to guarantee freedom of speech at all. I think they're valid questions, and I think that too often we take ideas such as free speech allowing hate speech (however those two things are defined[0]), or free speech being worth the cost of hate speech, for granted.
[0] To paraphrase Susan Brison, these are hard to define. That's okay, we can talk about it. We don't have to write the law before we can discuss whether there could be alaw.
Sorry,free speech does not mean that private companies have to provide their resources and time to support your hate speech. It means that you, on public property, using your own resources, have the freedom to say what you want without reprisal from the government. But even that should have limits, especially when your “free speech” limits the right to liberty and prosperity of others (most isms).
The first half of your statement is true but irrelevant here as the controversy touched on in the OP is that reddit as an organization _used to_ purport to stand for free speech.
Thedonald existed on reddit for quite some time and during that period, free speech survived relatively intact. Since the banning of thedonald along with hundreds of other subs, free speech has suffered, not improved, inconsistent with your hypothesis.
Also, "the paradox of tolerance" can be trotted out to justify just about any banning or censoring of someone you don't like
Nope, it specifically covers "preaching of intolerance", that's not "just someone's speech you dont like".
Lets say I speak about gardening without pesticides, and someone with a pesticide factory does not like that speech. How do you think the "the paradox of tolerance" can be used to shut me up in this case? You can't. Case closed.
I was referring to the health of free speech across the site in general, I wasn't making a defense of thedonald. And 90% of political subs on reddit blatantly ban people from $opposite_side, that's just how reddit is
> I do not imply for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would be most unwise.
> the intolerant using violence to physically make it impossible for the tolerant to exist.
Are the KKK and some extreme white supremacist org not exactly that?
They want a sub group of society to be removed, and have shown to not shun violence.
Being intolerant to these hate groups is VERY NORMAL to me, and sometime we need law help platform them. It get really sad when a president seems to kinda like these groups.
If any extremists act on their ideas using violence, then of course they would count. Otherwise, tolerance of negative ideas is a part of the ‘free society’ package. Merely having unpopular or wrong opinions is not equivalent to preventing the tolerant from existing.
If that majority has been oppressing a minority then I find a little push back to that majority acceptable. Anyone should be able to address and counter oppression/exploitation. Hating the oppressor falls in line with my expectations.
All those political bannnings by admins aren't really the big issue (and only relatively recent). The big issue re: reddit and free speech has to do with things that Reddit corp has trouble monetizing and putting ads beside. Sure, some of the bans might come from a partisan political place but the vast majority of reddit admin actions are just that of corporate drones protecting corporate image in order to make more money.
Centralized corporate run proprietary systems will always end up like this. It's the circle of web life.
Yep, an interesting idea, and definitely something worth thinking about and discussing.
The problem is that people like the GC pretend that this is some sort of Universal Law which has been proved to be true, and therefore use it as a carte blanche to "weed out intolerance".
Unfortunately it is not a such. It's just an idea, unproven and untested.
Though it's also worth noting that I highly doubt Karl Popper would've agreed (based on his various clarifications) with almost any situation where it has been used to justify silencing "the intolerant" on the internet in the last decade.
TBH the platform itself doesn’t lend particularly well to free speech by penalizing unpopular opinions through karma. Ironically I think HN is worse in this regard by greying out posts once they get to -1, I often find out that sorting by controversial on many topics gives you the most interesting read on reddit.
I would actually love if both HN and Reddit allowed you to see a Karma graph for each post.
Any upvote/downvote concept on online content is flawed because it does not show the historical score of a post over time. Even here on HN I can post something during GMT business hours that gets scored based on the views of HN's readership at that time, but when the US wakes up the score can change dramatically. Essentially, the US west coast can have the 'final say' because of its timezone and probably larger user base. It's really interesting to observe.
Yes it’s interesting but it’s also more complicated than that.
I tend to start at the top and up/downvote some of what I encounter. By the time I get lower on the page, I have several reasons to care less about each comment:
1) fatigue
2) an expectation that these lower ranked comments may be less worthwhile to read
3) the fact that any reply I make to a lower ranked comment is unlikely to have any impact or even be read at all (so why bother).
Even voting for low ranked comments has little payoff, because the ranking setup virtually guarantees that they are only being read by a couple people.
You can verify this fact by posting a quality comment right as the west coast is waking up on a story that has already been up for say 8 hours, where comments in the story have already garnered a lot of votes. Your good / interesting comment will likely sit at 1 point forever.
This seems to be a blind spot in the design of most comment vote ranking systems. Including HN.
So in case it wasn’t clear, although I agree it’s interesting, the part I disagree with is that the west coast has the last word. Technically they are the last, but for some stories that have already been voted on by other time zones, the ranking is already cemented.
There are a lot of issues with the upvote/downvote concept:
1. It favors people who are more careless with their votes. If pro-Coke users only downvote poor comments and upvote well crafted ones regardless of beverage choice, and pro-Pepsi users downvote any pro-Coke comment and upvote any pro-Pepsi one, you're going to have pro-Pepsi comments at the top and pro-Coke comments at the bottom. The better behaved group is going to have less of an impact.
2. It favors people who skim and read carelessly. If you're reading the original article, if you're taking time to fully read someone's comments, if you're taking time to see who they are reply to and the context, your voting output is going to be less than someone who quickly skims things and carelessly throws out upvotes and downvotes.
3. It favors individuals that spend all their time online over ones that have a more balanced life. There is simply going to be more votes coming from terminally online people. This is particularly an issue in cases where you have to pass the filter of people who vote on new submissions in order to get to the front page.
4. It favors group think. There are a lot of people who think that a top comment must have some validity, and that a downvoted comment must have some problem with it.
5. It can give people a skewed idea of where the community stands. Even if everyone in the community had an equal impact on things, a 45%-55% split in the community could still leave someone with the impression that one view is completely supported in the community while another is almost universally rejected.
They don't. As the earlier points indicate, a small minority drives the conversation, and posting habits outside of the upvote/downvote system play a huge roll as well.
Not sure this is a studied problem, but I feel English-speaking forums/social media/conferences are extremely biased towards the views of US west coast tech. With some issues, the rest of the world has moved on, e.g., by not selling guns / not arming the police.
I find myself reading online articles in languages I don't command well, just to get a break from the one-and-only view.
Yes, it also on a wide scale leads to silos being formed where you only share content with people you know that will upvote it this is why reddit gets a subreddit on every subject and even then those communities tend to split over and over until they get their perfect echochamber.
Heck there are two primary subreddits for the Labour party in the UK - Labour and LabourUK.
A year ago someone asked what's the difference between Labour and LabourUK and this was pretty much the answer (I've quoted one comment but the same answer was repeated across that entire post):
>r/LabourUK is a Blairite echo chamber for bitter right wingers, and if you dare criticise Israel they'll call you an antisemite and ban you. You can call for the destruction of the left as much as you want over there but don't dare say anything against the Blairites, that's another bannable offense. Not sufficiently sucking up to the mods, also a ban.
>r/Labour is mainly frequented by supporters of the Labour Party and not by people who are praying for Labour to lose so they can replace Corbyn.
I think it was Jess Phillips (I could be wrong) who, in an interview during the last election, claimed something along the lines of 'Labour are winning the social media war'.
They really have no idea how social media works.
(For non-UK, Jess Phillips is a Labour MP who went to see her party suffer one of the biggest defeats in their history)
Jess indeed said that, but also quite a few people pretty much lauded that Labour was so omnipresent on social media and that the response from the users was so overwhelmingly positive not realizing that Twitter and Facebook showing them what they want to see (and in some cases if the leaks to be believed factions in their own party targeted party politicians with their own ads).
Targeted ads and bespoke feed algorithms are bad enough, but when you combine it with political campaigns it's just a recipe for disaster.
And this isn't a problem that is easy to solve and honestly I don't know how and if it can be solved. Targeted ads are arguably the easy one but even then how you define targeting, as well as what is clearly a political ad (e.g. a corporation making an ad that exploits a given event such as BLM, OW or anything remotely political), the feed is oh boy... People want their feeds curated for them, at this point these platforms know their users better than the users know themselves they know what content keeps them engaged and what drives them away and that's the problem. The content that may be relevant for a given user isn't necessarily a content that would have a positive effect on that user and "what is good for X" is the tricky part because it's inherently political and manipulative and any way you look at it it is social engineering.
I don't know what you can do and if you can put the genie back into the bottle if 10 years ago someone told me that social media could escalate civil war and genocide I would looked at them weirdly at this point I'm honestly not going to discount the possibility of some sort of butlerian jihad against social media in a decade or two.
Silicon valley (et al.) is now trading in humans, at its core it's essentially a slave market in which companies sell your attention and most importantly your moldable perception of reality to the highest bidder. And at least I personally don't see a way out of it, regulating it to death might be worse since it would grant political institutions control over the same shit that is happening right now and for the most part I rather Coca Cola and Nike molding my beliefs than any given political party and I don't care if their values align with mine or not, at this point I see nice obedient corporate drones being the lesser evil in all this. Any business model that with outlaw the current practices likely won't be sustainable and would be near impossible to enforce, these companies are worth billions because they give anyone with a credit card and and idea the ability to shift what some people think and this isn't going to go away.
Shutting down completely well, I don't use social media other than reddit (and I rotate my reddit accounts) and HN, I don't have Facebook and I don't have a twitter account (I read tweets that are linked but don't log-in), nearly everyone around me uses 3-5 social media platforms daily.
Social media run amok combined with the overgrowing distrust and disillusion in democracy in the west really scares the shit out of me, especially in the US I really cannot rule out major civil disorder to a borderline civil war in some areas, and TBH Europe isn't much better it's just not as well armed. Civil wars don't have to be fought with guns and tanks to be deadly nations can be brought to a halt with enough small scale violence too (just look at France for example).
If you're asking this question, you don't understand the principles of freedom of speech. Read the Aaron Swartz essay linked above, and while you're at it, watch this, from Noam Chomsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-oV42OMQoE.
I think your opinion is extremely myopic and biased, I don't care much of shutting down subreddits to be honest, especially if you get extremists ready to act all up and angry together.
They're still very free to speak have no worry. Also if reddit didn't stop that, they'd be flagged as pro-racist. There was a need for a decision to be made, nothing else.
I strongly and vehemently disagree with your characterization. I think suppression of speech is something that must be pushed back against or it will be tacitly accepted.
Social media is the new public square, and Reddit tried to pretend it is a "platform", while it makes large-scale editorial decisions. /r/chapotraphouse was an extremely far-left, anti-racist subreddit banned in this latest spree. This was not about racism, it was about censorship.
I am a free speech absolutist, just like Aaron (stated as such in the linked article), and just like Noam Chomsky. This absolutism is a liberal viewpoint, and lies at the core of Western democratic civilization.
I have no problem disagreeing and indeed our views are worlds apart.
Social media means moot to me, I think internet has reached its limits long ago and better things are done without this.
Now that reddit is hypocritical about its motto.. very plausible, and I personally, consider reddit as a toy, not a tool, nothing more. And you stated it yourself, both subs you mentionned became too extreme, this was the sole reason behind the removal.
IIUC you're afraid that this is a precedent leading to more and more chatting place shutdowns and a new form of oppression ? Let me say this, we have obese levels of communication channels, the reality lies elsewhere, and if and when people will need to speak for serious matters, they'll have the means.
I am more against this because I believe it is emblematic of a broader societal sway towards the concept that speech can be violence, which is what I disagree with.
Reddit is simply one of many high-profile cases of this ideology finding root and with real effect.
It is the frequent brigading by the Donald sub that makes free speech argument sound hollow. That sub was not banned for supporting president or discussing politics, it was banned because it became nuisance too people who wanted to discuss their own things.
From the aaronsw.com link:
"By laying freedom of speech’s provision on top of our reasonable ability to do so, I suggest that freedom of speech could be taken away if providing it became unreasonable. But I think this is the right choice: if people really, seriously started getting hurt because of freedom of speech, it seems right for people to take the privilege away. But, to be honest, I can’t even imagine how that might be possible."
IMHO, this "safety" argument makes up a large part of the argument made by many proponents of modern authoritarianism. This makes me think that Aaron may have supported many of the modern restrictions on free speech, but I certainly don't speak for him. IMHO, many people (particularly in the West) not only "imagine" that it "might" be possible, but actively believe that it is a reality that is already happening. IMHO it is irrelevant whether people get "seriously hurt" because it is a ridiculous metric to optimise for. People get "really, seriously hurt" on a daily basis by: access to sugar, access to alcohol, access to tobacco, the right to bear arms, vehicles.
How so ? I can't recall any major free speech issues on HN. Being downvoted and having your comment hidden is not exactly something HN can do much about, seeing that it is up to the users.
The quality remains relatively high on HN though. I'm pretty sure it's the only website I've used consistently (ie almost every day) for ten years.
I know some political posts (and definitely trash/advertising) get cut and not everything (as defined by "free speech") gets through, but on a personal level for me (and I'm sure many others) I think the moderation works.
I like HN. I am not saying it is heavily moderated to make them stop moderating it.
But the fact is, it is what it is precisely because a lot effort goes into moderating it. Acting like HN it's some kind of free speech place is absurd.
Claiming that HN is good and then going into outrage because another site applied significantly looser restrictions is dishonest. For that matter, trying to pretend the Donald or incels subs were merely normal subs merely discussing conservative policies is outright lie.
While that may be true the HN moderation team does a great job of being balanced and removing all politically charged content and flamebait irrespective of the political views of the poster. They don't have an axe to grind.
It's a very different situation to Reddit where left-leaning political extremism (/r/LateStageCapitalism) is tolerated, but subreddits like t_D are banned.
I don’t want to disagree with you but note that those articles are 15 years apart. I think public opinion inside and outside of tech on “free speech” has changed quite a bit over that time. For example I feel like there used to be more of a libertarian bent in tech then as opposed to now.
Is this perhaps an unfair comparison to make considering the general change in opinion over that time?
Freedom of speech is not a small issue. It lies at the core of our civilization, and is unambiguously one of the few things that made "the West" prosper. Aaron makes a very cogent and clear argument for free speech, and its enduring importance.
To arbitrate rights based on public opinion is idiotic and dangerous. This is why we have a constitution.
Of course, Reddit has the right to do this, as a private company, but that's not an argument for doing it.
Can we all agree reddit is effectively run from the top down, that moderation at the subreddit level is a joke, that they are even more two faced than Twitter, and that (worse) they’re doing a terrible job of covering it up?
Reddit is really good at getting people to remove content for free. That's the distinction IMO. They give mods power to remove things they don't like in exchange for removing or reporting illegal stuff that would otherwise be impossible (?) for reddit to cost effectively manage.
If I remember correctly, he had written a quite modern webserver in Python for its time et it became the basis of Reddit, or something like that. Anyway, I've always associated Aaron to Reddit, from the start.
To the extent that this is a history rewrite, it's not a new one: them not referring to him as a co-founder (and getting some flak for it) was going on more than ten years ago while Aaron was still alive to participate in the discussions.
I hope we get a good alternative to Reddit. Their governance issues aside, their disdain for web and open systems have made me not use the platform anymore. It has been sad to see the platform become worse.
reddit morphed from a fun place to visit to an absolute cesspool of the internet. With popularity came the idiot masses, and like locust they decimated the comments section and post so much inane content it’s no longer possible to find anything worthwhile. That in itself would be enough to bring a site like reddit down, but then the management also made two crucial mistakes: first, they redesigned the site and made it completely unusable (especially on mobile), and then they decided to push social agenda and turned the site from a neutral, user content centric, free-speech oriented site to a left-wing sjw haven, which served to further lower quality of content and comments.
So it’s not surprising at all that the same people who think they have the right to push social agenda they consider “correct”, also choose to remove the name of a “notorious” co-founder from the records. Personally I find the behavior of reddit’s management abhorrent and want nothing to do with them or anything they have a hand in.
Shows people can hold grudges for decades, grudges that even death won’t heal. And of course it’s disappointing that two “liberal champions” were always so eager to distance themselves from one of the few true victims of “the system”.
For what its worth, Spez was caught abusing his admin access to secretly edit comments in the past, including other people's comments who he disagreed with politically. I would doubt any comment posted on reddit where Spez has stake in, as he might have just changed the story sometime down the line.
This is a very misleading characterization of what happened.
It was not secret, it was on one occasion, and it was to make a light-hearted joke at the expense of /r/The_Donald users who were calling him a paedophile.
It was a massive error of judgement, but you have tried to make out it was some kind of on-going political subterfuge.
But that may have well just been the first incident where he was caught red handed. Who knows how many other incidents he got away with? I have no faith in the integrity of reddit administration, especially Spez. The fact that he wasn't fired immediately means reddit staff does not take these issues seriously.
Again, you say "caught red handed" like it was something he was doing secretly. What he did was change every instance of "fuck /u/spez" to "fuck the /r/the_donald mods".
He did this because he lost patience in the face of mass online harassment. He immediately apologized.
I just wanted to make clear to anybody passing by - who wants to know what actually happened - that the narrative you are pushing is not supported by evidence. Of course, if you are prepared to "who knows" something without evidence, then in the world of digital information you can suppose practically anything.
I don't know what you mean by "the narrative you are pushing". The only narrative is that the CEO of reddit did something that seriously caused me to lose faith in the site and went completely unpunished. You may feel that the event was inconsequential, but not everyone feels the same.
I am poorly adjusted, if that makes me insane, then I take it as a compliment.
"The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted." - Aldous Huxley
It would take a staggering level of immaturity to find solace in the assertion that your adversarial opinions have value because they are in and of themselves adversarial.
Clearly you were someone who needs to simplify the dull anarchic complexity of life into simple terms in order to make swift overarching proclamations to make themselves feel like they have some power over it.
> There is no way they'll be able to stop the upcoming revolution.
As someone who grew up poor in America, these talks about “revolution” have always perplexed me.
We have one of the highest median incomes in the world, and we live in a country that pushes much of the world forward in terms of technological progress.
People have always flocked to America for opportunity, and if we cut welfare so we can expand immigration again, I guarantee there will be another giant influx.
This country allows people of virtually all income levels access to an abundance of food and pleasures through our capitalist system. Grocery stores with packed shelves aren’t something you should take for granted.
Revolution isn’t the path to become like Sweden. It’s the path to become like the USSR.
For a country with abundance and happiness, there is large incarceration rates, inequality, protests, some escalating to riots, politically motivated murders of protesters and recently attempts to devalue voting process.
I am not saying who is right or that America is not superpower anymore. But the way it was getting dysfunctional is worrying.
Did you know that other countries have grocery stores too?
> People have always flocked to America for opportunity, and if we cut welfare so we can expand immigration again, I guarantee there will be another giant influx.
I'm sitting here crying at my computer screen. Everything the early pioneers of the internet fought for, freedom of speech, lack of censorship, open discussion of radical ideas, is being destroyed. The destruction of Aaron's legacy is just the latest in a long list of final straws that is eroding my trust and hope for the future. Dark day today indeed.
Build something worthy of your ideals. Join a group that's pushing in a direction you can agree with and contribute in any way you can.
Legacies exist to be destroyed because popularity and money create change from both inside and out, and it takes a very rare human will to resist selling out one's ideals in the face of amounts of money one has only ever dreamed about.
The ideals aren't dead, the old places built upon them are dying under weight of mainstream popularity. Find or make a new underground.
It was a long time ago, though, so I might be misremembering. In any case, I'm fairly certain Swartz did join after the fact, but I'm not sure if he joined with the title of co-founder or not.