[themeek]

Not quite.

I wanted to get a picture of whether the socketpuppeting that is done on reddit was colored by particular objectives - whether US and partner sockpuppeting is allowed where adversary sockpuppeting is not - and whether censorship of certain types of content was performed on the behest of partnerships.

Basically, an overall clarification about the policies, the technologies and the coded language for reddit's stance on sockpuppeting and content curation.

[pavel_lishin]

If the actual case was "yes, we will allow US sockpuppeting, and forbid Russian/Chinese sockpuppeting", would you actually have expected an honest answer?

This is sort of a corporate equivalent of "are you still beating your wife", isn't it?

[themeek]

This is 100% absolutely the case.

But it's important to ask hard questions and get denials: even when they are blatant lies it makes the organization responsible for the lies (and any associated fallout) and it puts pressure 'upstream' for more comprehensive public discussion and justification.

It also has the virtue of being public, where other redditors and HN folk can peruse it and maybe become interested in the topic.

I'm not wholey against or for any 'side'. I'm actually pretty confused and can see good reasons abound on all sides and my guess is that solutions, whatever they are to whatever challenges are percieved, are probably pretty complicated.

But I believe in public deliberation and awareness: the more people who participate in these discussions I think the better. Finally widespread awareness of sockpuppeting and other means of content curation - no matter who the perpetrator - weakens sockpuppeting as a tactic. So I think it's also important to publicly challenge social media CEOs to speak publicly about these challenges for this reason.