Lol as much as this is a fun larp, and reddit did take too long to ban them, I'm not partial to taking random twitter/mastodon/<insert social media> discourse as gospel. I think it's goofy when conservatives do it, and I think it's goofy here.
Can't speak for the boat story, but after fatpeoplehate was banned, there was a study that showed that many shitters left/changed their behavior
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zm3ez3/study-finds-that-banning-trolls-works-to-some-degree
Yeah I'm not arguing that deplatforming doesn't work, I just think the highly improbable boat story is silly to even address.
Yeah they're exactly right that it's a whackamole game, but that doesn't mean that doing it is pointless or ineffective.
The number one enemy of fascism is vigilance. Can't get a foothold when everyone's got the spray gun to shoo you off.
It's that Nazi Bar story at scale, you're always gonna need to be ready to get the bat and "I mean it." out, but the second you slip, they'll become a rooted infestation that grows and grows until they feel comfortable bringing out the real bad folks and stuff in your face.
As someone who owns a dog that is way too good at killing moles (and bringing them through the dog door as a trophy), after a while, there are no more moles around to kill.
It is whackamole, but every time you smash a mole, the next ones are much smaller and spread farther apart.
The number one enemy of fascism is vigilance.
The number one enemy of Fascism is satisfying the basic needs of the population. Not censorship.
Thry allowed the jailbait subreddit for years, nearly subreddit of the year at one point. It was a subheader for reddit on google even. Big news report? Now its gone.
They allowed Fatpeoplehate for years. One of the most active subs on the site, and absolutely poisoned the rest of it with their rhetoric. Then they went after some imgur staff and got banned with the quickness... and a few months later you could host your images on reddit. The lines there aren't too difficult to read between.
The_Donald was allowed to be shit for years, but once Trump was on his way out, then they banned it.
reddit operates reactively, not proactively.
Cause companies like twitter, facebook, and reddit love right wing extremists.
They post a lot, click lots of ads, and are heavily engaged. Far more than any left winger.
They are the honey pot from which the money flows. So they get the special treatment and protection.
Which is why its so funny when they cry about persecution and victimhood. Cause anyone else doing what they do online would have not only been banned years ago, they'd probably get regular visits from police and possibly even arrested for things like "Terroristic threats"
The only time they face any punishment whatsoever is when they go ridiculously overboard, like actively planning an attack on the fucking capitol building and the attempted assassination of political leaders they disagree with.. and even then, its a slap on the wrist compared to what any other group of people who tried to do the same would face
Reddit had a sub called r/sexwithdogs for a while too. It was exactly that, I thought it was a joke and clicked it once. It was not.
sexyabortions was one
also a hell of a lot of subreddits having to do with black people. the subreddit for hating fat people was banned before the subreddit for hating black people if you can believe that
I work at a web hosting company and we'd get requests from "da guberment". They were usually warrants and asking us to transfer data.
Never ever did they go, "Keep that racist white power pushing for violence website up and available to the public". Without legal action, a govt can't demand a private company what to do.
Not saying they haven't tried, but we have the lawyers give us the direction to take.
Thats not the kind of thing right-wing fanboi spez was talking about. He was talking about sleaze like miller and bannon and the rest of the gruesome fearwraiths that made up dipshit don’s legendary administation of heroos pressuring him to keep the pepe taps open.
Spez is absolutely complicit in the rise of the far right, regardless of whether this unsubstantiated claim is true or not
All tech bros are IMO.
I wouldn’t call this a smoking gun; further down the thread on Bluesky, they say that they took this story to several reporters and none of them wanted to use it as a story, by their own admission because they didn’t really have much to prove a half remembered conversation.
All that said, none of it would surprise me if it was true and I remember it being speculated on at the time. I think it’s way more likely that one of Trump’s cronies would have exerted that pressure on reddit rather than Trump himself, just because reddit never seemed to hold a candle to Twitter for him.
They should have had the balls to do the right thing anyway. But even legitimate news companies showed zero moral fiber so expecting more from an unprofitable internet startup is a fool’s errand.
Regardless, the time to act was way before that POS got into office. The Donald was a dumpster fire years before the election.
Oh, for sure. But the reddit admins have a long history of being way friendlier to chuds than they have to be, so lacking any evidence to the contrary I tend to default to ‘they just want it that way.’
They should have had the balls to do the right thing anyway
What's the "right thing" here? Publishing an unconfirmed claim without any evidence?
The whole "The_Donald was a FBI honeypot" is a pretty strongly persistent urban legend. And obviously false. Surprises me how many people thought that was legitimate.
Ask yourself: Shouldn't there have been results sooner? Would FBI (or whoever) have left an obviously dangerous forum open for honeypot purposes for years and years? If this really was a honeypot operation, wouldn't they have made arrests as soon as they could? And if this really was the case, shouldn't we have the details by now (FOIA requests or whatever)?
Of course not. US law enforcement would have immediately involved themselves if there were any credible threats posted there. But they don't really do much about festering pits of far-right radicalisation. It was left open with the full approval of Reddit admins. Can't really claim ignorance on their part either.
The Honey pot conspiracy is fake. But Hillary Clinton did use her influence to prop up Trump early in the election thinking that he would be the easiest candidate to face. And I can see reddit being a part of that plan.
Hillary was hardly alone in that. Can't find the exact video, but the point of the video that Jimmy Kimmel platformed Trump, with the guise that the show was "apoliticial". The video argued that that was not the case. The broader argument: "If you're atheistic, you denounce the existence of gods. If you're polytheistic, you acknowledge the existence of multiple gods. Now, if you acknowledge the views of all political candidates going your way, you are not apolitical. You're polypolitical."
Thank you for your wisdom Ms. Tightpussy.
Who is this guy?
Spez? You might have heard about him around here
Permanently Deleted
In today's screencap: failure to recognize the weapon being deployed against your enemy can easily be deployed against you.
