In this case, yes. For one, the original title has them. Secondly, as stated in the article, Reddit denies the allegations:
> [...] admin u/landoflobsters explains that it was not the company’s intention to remove any mention of Knight’s name, but that there had been “overzealous automaton” when it came to preventing doxxing and harassment. The admin explained that an internal error had led to the suspension of a moderator who had posted Knight’s name, and that the company had “communicated clearly” with the affected party as they resolved the situation.
A now fixed error would not count as censorship. He might be lying, but there's enough reasonable doubt to allow for quotes IMO.
On a side note, though, it's funny that the article choose to put quotes around “communicated clearly” as well.
I moderate a reddit community with ~200k users, and if I didn't use strict filtering along with a slew of Automoderator rules I'd spend half of my day removing spam, shitposts, and submissions that break our posting rules. A few posts a day get caught by mistake, but it's a lot easier to free those posts than it is to remove the dozens of bad ones that would have made it through otherwise. I think it's at least plausible that the same type of thing happens at a site-wide level.
The post was removed after a few hours, not immediately. It was also removed because Challenor was referenced at the bottom of the article, not because of anything in the Reddit post itself
Reddit needs to fire their entire PR team and just start communicating directly and frankly. The community would be a lot less upset without all the PR speak.
That's mismanagement that doesn't even see it's mismanagement.
A policy problem that affects a person in leadership affects everyone in the group. They should have communicated with the affected parties and it sounds like they left it to the moderator to sort everybody else out.
It seems like online companies go through all sorts of contortions to avoid saying what they need to say with respect to content moderation:
> We will try to moderate our platform fairly, but we reserve the absolute right to do so arbitrarily and capriciously. Users are not entitled to any explanation or recourse.
That should be the extent of any social media platform's content policy. I think we'd all be better off setting expectations properly and honestly.
I agree. As long as they own the website, they will own the ability to censor. In the beginning, there wasn't a need to censor. In fact, anti-censorship views were held by both the admins and the users [0].
>Cries to censor it would sound out, to be almost inevitably beaten back by cries of "free speech!" The idea of free speech is sacred to many Reddit users, a product of the free-wheeling online message board culture from which Reddit springs.
>Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.
You're mistaking the argument here. The argument is that a private company exercising censorship isn't violating a US person's constitutional right to free speech because the two things are different. It doesn't mean its not censorship and it doesn't mean it can't be unethical. It just means that the company has the legal right to censor whatever they want.
Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom.
The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following!
People like to scream "censorship" and social media companies rally behind that and their protection from liability. Arguments are made that making editorial decisions about what gets purchased is a moral or legal risk. That's a bunk argument, because social platforms have no problem at all promoting dangerous, wrong or even illegal content to maximize engagement. Let's be real here -- for all of the weighty principles brought up here, a significant chunk of reddit engagement is porn.
> People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following
Those people have always existed. When I was a kid in the 80's, supermarkets carried tabloid newspapers with headlines like "Boy born with head of a bat" or "leading telekinetics agree that world will end in six days". The difference now is that while most of us just shook our heads and dismissed those tabloid newspapers, nobody was pressuring the supermarkets themselves to ban their sale.
There’s a big difference, “Weekly World News” was in the grocery aisle between Archie comics and celebrity gossip. It was a fun distraction. Similarly, crazy public access programs were on a specific channel for the purpose of allowing local viewpoints.
Editorial standards in the normal media didn’t allow for the type of propaganda that is mainstream today. The NY Times didn’t write about Bigfoot, because it’s silly and would detract from their reputation. Who would take a publication talking about batboy seriously?
Reddit/Twitter/Facebook specifically denies accountability for anything - they hijack the credibility of organizations AND you to drive engagement, period. If the content is gross, it’s not “their fault”.
The difference is that in the 80s the few people that believed this nonsense were unable to instantly find hundreds or thousands or millions of equally deluded people to reinforce and amplify their beliefs and subsequently amplify the harm they can cause.
There was a lot of that silly content in 1980s and 1990s BBS's, as well as on Usenet and the early Web. People could definitely find an audience for it. What we didn't have was "social" media and its pervasive matching of online with IRL identity and social ties.
So when deluded people read something outlandish online, they're now left free to assume that some halfway-trustworthy real-world entity must be endorsing those claims. There's no expectation of critical thinking or skeptical debate about what we see online because real-world norms are very different, and it all gets conflated as "what's mainstream".
> Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom. The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following!
"You know, a free press is not freedom for the thought you love, but rather for the thought you hate the most. People need to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world so they can be free." -Larry Flynt
> Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.
These people would deliberately enable corporations to restrict your freedoms, and are simply seeking justification after the fact for it by hiding in the letter of the law, and ignoring its spirit. This goes against the fundamental values of the West and goes against what anyone who ever wrote a free speech law would have intended.
Reddit is one of the public squares of the internet. The only content that should be banned sitewide should be content that is expressly illegal in the countries that host their servers. That's it. Subreddit moderators should have a much firmer hand, because if you don't like a sub, you can create another one. The site as a platform, which was created expressly to be a bastion of free speech originally, should not be in the business of banning people for their ideas.
Reddit instead picks and chooses what people can say and think, and can't even hide behind 'obscenity' as they allow plenty of porn but don't allow anyone who doesn't abide by their strange new set of ill-defined postmodern values. Can we get a list of the concepts that fall into their new wrongthink? Hardly.
I'd prefer they just state their policy aloud, in clear terms, rather than couching it. Just say you can't advocate for or even argue in favour of white people, for men, for heterosexual cisgendered people on the platform. Just be honest and say it like it is. It would be much less insulting and much easier to deal with conceptually if there was even a shred of honour in their approach.
So now we've reached the point where we're arguing over the semantic meaning of the word "censorship." While we're here, can you please inform us which word we are allowed to use to describe what reddit is doing?
"moderation", "anti-harassment protection" ( I think that one was used for justifying action against a specific subreddit ), of course reddit would not use a term as bad as "censorship" knowing how much it would cost them.
However, I really feel to clarify that I feel that reddit is in the wrong in endorsing the action of an admin that was clearly censoring mention of their name from the news.
This is a little more nuanced than you imply. In the end, it seems they fixed the automod rule, but sub's are still actively blacking out as we speak. We'll see how far it goes, I guess!