[vectorpush]

Who cares? Reddit is a private company, they can set their own standards for moderation. For several years now I've seen this non-stop obsession with lambasting reddit as a shit-hole and a left-wing echo-chamber and a shit company run by amateurs and SJWs.

Who cares? The overwhelming majority of redditors subsist on photos of animals and drawings of video game characters. Just leave if reddit isn't friendly to your particular proclivities. If you hate fat people, liberals, feminists and BLM activists there are many places on the internet where you can find common cause.

[rkangel]

Reddit has traditionally been a place where free speech is prized above all else. That they might 'censor' the alt right is symbolic. What it is symbolic of is in question though, pick one of:

1) The alt right has become so hateful that regardless of your approach to free speech that allowing it to propagate is unacceptable

2) Societies view of free speech has changed in the face of things like the alt right.

3) The expected role of sites like Reddit has changed as those platforms are used to spread hate speech, false news etc.

[vectorpush]

I could be wrong, but IMO, it most likely comes down to the fact that the admins happen to be human beings and these particular communities are just starting to grate on their nerves. Pages and pages of highly upvoted direct attacks rattled the CEO to the point where he thought it wasn't a completely insane idea to abuse his developer privileges to silently alter user content in an attempt to troll his critics. That is a pretty telling sign of frustration.

Whenever the admins make any changes, a certain sub-section of the site goes completely insane and spams the site with tons of threads about how the site is fucking terrible and how the admins are fucking idiots with the common thread among these rabblerousers being that they always happen to hate a particular group that is ruining the site and destroying the indomitable reddit free speech ethos.

[joesmo]

You're thinking of 4chan. Reddit has never been that--it's been moderated for many years.

[Bartweiss]

It's always been complicated, though. Alexis Ohanion has repeatedly talked about the importance of Reddit as a censorship-free platform and talked up the company as embodying unfettered free speech.

Obviously that's not true, but major figures at the company have said it from the early days up through very recently. And the difference between moderation (in the "no spam, no personal threats, communities enforce their own rules" sense) and administrative speech restrictions is a big and challenging one.

So no, Reddit has never quite been that, but it's been one of their selling points regardless.

[basch]

Reddit was founded upon values of free speech, at least that is what people were told at the time, even if it wasnt true in the back rooms.

I think the biggest concern is when platforms start to police illegal speech, and countries make political dissent illegal.

[vectorpush]

Personally, I've always viewed reddit's approach to moderation as non-interventionist and not as something that necessarily enshrined the ideals of free-speech. That is to say, it all seemed more of a growth-hack than anything else; outsource moderation to individual communities and set a policy of non-intervention so that when people complain to the admins they can say something like "subreddits are owned and operated by users, don't complain to us", this formula scaled very nicely and reddit exploded into the behemoth it is today.

But now that reddit has become something of a cultural focal point on the internet, it's started to draw attention from the media at large and suddenly the operators felt a little embarrassed that they had to defend subreddits such as /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/jailbat, /r/niggers etc. So I imagine they just said "fuck it, it's more trouble than it's worth", and despite a month or two of banhammer-whack-a-mole with fuck-stupid-dictator-sjw-cunt-ellen-mao subreddits, the site continued to flourish, and all the free-speech purists finally woke up to the startling truth that reddit.com was really just an internet startup and not a platform to empower the oppressed masses...

Until they banned another subreddit.

[xnemdncn]

>Who cares? Reddit is a private company, they can set their own standards for moderation.

Except it's not that simple. There's a substantial amount of judicial precedent that you can't refuse service to customers just because you disagree with their ideology or background, otherwise it would be okay to refuse service to supporters of gay marriage for example.

It's appalling that you would even suggest that.

[psychometry]

There is literally no "judicial precedent" for a website owner being disallowed from moderating user-submitted content. What are you talking about?

[Alex3917]

There actually are lots of safe harbor protections for common carriers. Lack of editorial oversight is why sites like YouTube can qualify for these protections, but sites like Gawker wouldn't be able to. (Even though they ultimately got shut down for ignoring a court order or whatever.)

[ceejayoz]

YouTube still takes down videos, comments, channels, etc., and restricts others by age/country/etc.

[Bartweiss]

Sure, but that's within safe harbor rules. If they went and moderated content and comments in a non-reactive way, say by banning commenters whose opinions they found incorrect, that would be legal but could jeopardize their safe harbor status.

[ebrenes]

YouTube completely censors material, here's a list of the actions they've undertaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube

And as it states there, they also have censorship based on their terms of service, where they prohibit the posting of videos which violate copyrights or depict pornography, illegal acts, gratuitous violence, or hate speech.

[vertex-four]

Banning hate speech is, broadly, not equivalent to refusing to make a cake or give someone a room in a hotel. It's appalling that you'd even suggest that.

[Declanomous]

Your poor understanding of the law is appalling.

Reddit isn't refusing to service people because of their ideology or background, they are limiting certain kinds of speech. A private organization is entirely allowed to limit certain kinds of speech.

[jeremysmyth]

...judicial precedent that you can't refuse service to customers just because you disagree with their ideology or background, otherwise it would be okay to refuse service to supporters of gay marriage for example

Way overbroad interpretation. The Civil Rights Act prohibits refusal of some kinds of service based on race, color, religion or national origin, and it's pretty much the only national law (in the US) that's relevant here (I'm not counting the 14th amendment or more specific laws e.g. for disabilities).

Notably, there's no federal law protecting supporters of gay marriage. They're state-specific laws, and not at all universal.

[ceejayoz]

> There's a substantial amount of judicial precedent that you can't refuse service to customers just because you disagree with their ideology or background, otherwise it would be okay to refuse service to supporters of gay marriage for example.

Ideology isn't a protected class. Sexual orientation is, at least in some states.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

[danielahn]

Hating liberals isn't a protected class.

Regardless, you are not refusing anyone service - you are not banning people from your platform, you are designating your platform as something not be used for certain purposes.

[d_e_solomon]

Would you cite the judicial precedent that you're relying on? Heart of Atlanta was based on the commerce cause and the civil rights act. I can't think of anything else that would apply.

[kreneskyp]

It's not discrimination to enforce site wide rules against harassment, racism, and brigading (coordinated upvoting). Just because only a few communities are breaking the rules doesn't make it discrimination. Racists and bigots aren't a protected class.

[walrus01]

alt-right assholes can learn how to run their own httpd and forum software... Nothing but technical knowledge of how to do so properly is stopping people from renting a $150/mo dedicated server and setting it up.