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Reddit CEO Confirms "Obvious Racism" is Not Against Reddit Rules
Hexmage-PA
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Registered User regular
Gizmodo: Reddit CEO Confirms Racial Slurs are Just Fine on His Site
I've never used Reddit, but I know people that have. While many other online services have rules against hate speech, Reddit continues to pride itself on being a bastion for "free speech".
I personally am surprised Huffman answered the question at all. Easier to ignore it and say "we're committed to free speech" than to affirmatively declare that "obvious, open racism" is not against Reddit's rules.
Between this and The Simpsons' recent fourth wall breaking condemnation of "political correctness" in response to "The Problem with Apu" I'm afraid this may be a signal of increasing mainstream resistance to progressive ideology.
In the midst of Mark Zuckerberg’s hours-long testimony before the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees, Reddit dropped its 2017 transparency report. It contained a list of nearly 1,000 user accounts the company believed were involved with the Russia-backed Internet Research Agency—and unlike other social media companies, Reddit has also preserved those banned accounts’ posts for review by any user. But the more alarming admission was made by CEO Steve Huffman in the comments below.
“I need clarification on something,” a user asked “Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against reddits rules or not?”
Huffman replied from his Reddit account, “It’s not."
“On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behavior from beliefs. This means on Reddit there will be people with beliefs different from your own, sometimes extremely so. When users actions conflict with our content policies, we take action,” Huffman added, though the clarification seems largely academic, since the means of determining a user’s beliefs is almost entirely reliant on their behavior in posts and comments.
I've never used Reddit, but I know people that have. While many other online services have rules against hate speech, Reddit continues to pride itself on being a bastion for "free speech".
I personally am surprised Huffman answered the question at all. Easier to ignore it and say "we're committed to free speech" than to affirmatively declare that "obvious, open racism" is not against Reddit's rules.
Between this and The Simpsons' recent fourth wall breaking condemnation of "political correctness" in response to "The Problem with Apu" I'm afraid this may be a signal of increasing mainstream resistance to progressive ideology.
Hexmage-PA on
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they're a bunch of white guys who don't give a shit about anyone else and thus have no concept of how open racism could be bad because it isn't bad to them, directly.
Yeah, the whole thing with The Simpsons is the usual whining from a certain sort of goose comedian who is upset that people hold them accountable for using soft bigotry in their routine. And Reddit is once again showing that they don't really care about the free speech of those people targeted.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
In theory, all speech is equal. In practice, one's speech is only as equal as the speaker.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Somehow that makes it seem worse.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
But speech also has consequences, and reddit isn't a town square. If this policy causes users and/or advertisers to choose not to use their platform, well, that's cool too.
Yes but why should people who aren't racists subsidize those who are?
I'm all for a campaign of EVERY advertiser to leave Reddit if they keep supporting racism.
I'm fine with it too, but I'm not a free speech absolutist when it comes to non-government platforms. I'm not going to advocate for legislation that allows the government to silence you from saying shitty things, but I'm not going to stand idly by if you do that in my living room - if Reddit banned such expression, I'd not be too bothered. Their platform, their prerogative.
You’re mixing up the legal protection of a right to free speech with the general principal that free speech is a social positive.
When tech libertarian types talk about free speech, they aren’t just talking about the government stepping in or not. They’re talking about a social principle of not using pressure or influence against ideas.
Free speech is an ideal (one I’ll admit that I’m a lot less enamored with than I was 15 years ago) that goes beyond government intervention and legal issues.
They're not required to, no. But they can certainly choose to allow free speech.
That's what I'm saying? Just from the opposite direction, maybe. They're absolutely permitted to respect absolute free speech, knowing that their platform will likely (and absolutely currently does) host objectionable views. That decision will have consequences, good or bad. And that's totally okay.
While of course ignoring those ideas and the people spouting them doing just that.
I'm not sure what you mean by this?
Here's the thing - when you have an environment where minorities, women, and other marginalized groups routinely are forced to choose between speaking and becoming targets for abuse, or staying quiet to stay safe, I find it very hard to call the speech there "free". And no, it's not about "not using pressure or influence against ideas", but about evading responsibility for the ones they hold.
Subreddits that espouse bigotry don't get ads, to placate the advertisers. They literally freeload off of the decent subreddits.
oh!
I don't use reddit so I didn't know
you'd think that'd be a pretty big red flag that something needed to be changed
I'm glad that aside from facebook I don't use all these websites that seem to do their best to cater to the unethical dregs of society
I think if that's what people mean when they post here about free speech they should be clear about that. Freedom of speech is a literal right in our Constitution, if you mean something else, better to say so.
You'd think that! But no, Reddit prefers the utterly hypocritical stance of "we will alllow hate and bigotry under our banner - until it becomes a PR fiasco, at which point the nukes come out."
They've always been intimately connected. Free Speech Absolutists (if that's what the term is now?) don't support free speech because of the Constitution, but rather the Constitution validates the idea and importance of free speech and enshrines it in law to protect it.
Or: we don't protect free speech from the government because it's only bad when the government curtails free speech, but because we recognize free speech is important and that the government has the most power to hurt it if they so desire. This doesn't mean we approve of any other force or group attempting to curtail free speech, but rather that we've set the safeguards we can.
Reddit taking this stance makes sense in this context. They don't just agree with the Legal idea of free speech, they agree with the idea behind the law. It's a good stance, and rare in these days.
"I think you should be exterminated."
"You're an asshole."
"Woah dont stomp on my free speech"
Believe it or not, calling people assholes is also an aspect of free speech! Like racism, not a savory one. But you get to do it.
People trying to rules lawyer things for their benefit is hardly new, and never an excuse to just tear up all the rules.
Calls for entire peoples being exterminated have actually ended in peoples being exterminated.
No race has been shoved in ovens because one called the other an asshole.
This false equivalency literally made me sick.
One, they actually don't, because when push comes to shove and the bigots start causing Reddit PR to reach for the emergency handle of Jack, their rhetoric switches from "we defend free speech" to "Target Acquired. On my mark..."
Two, an environment where the dispossessed have to choose between safety and speech is not one where speech is free.
Yet the most infamous subreddit is guilty of all of that, and they keep it there.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
The party with unquestionable ruling power can't help but find itself constantly nominating white supremacists to high office. That's not a government that should ever have the authority to implement speech codes, even if they were just.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Is this thread about whether we should use the enforcement power of the State to punish some speech?
I think any proposed hate-speech law needs to go further than just "don't use racial slurs." Canada's hate speech law, for example, specifically criminalizes anything that "advocates or promotes genocide" of any "identifiable group."
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
We've had a very long battle about free speech outside of that and what it means. There's a lot of people who try to brandish it as "if you disagree with me you're denying me my free speech!" which is the silliest most baby interpretation ever. There's another branch of people who think the concept of free speech entitles them to violate the rules of communities and services they sign up for, despite agreeing to adhere to those rules at the time of signing up.
As a pure ideal, 'free speech' is childish and paradoxical. The fact of the matter is, everyone has a line they draw on what they want people allowed to be said. Everyone will or likely already has said 'no' to some sort of speech. Some are against the right of assembly, some are against young people exercising speech, some are against hate speech, some are against violent threats (yes, I say some, because there are lunatics who eat that shit up). Nobody should ever declare to be a free speech purist because that doesn't exist.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
On Reddit, this is how it goes.
"I think you should be exterminated." (+275)
[*] (-146)
"Woah dont stomp on my free speech" (+892)
They've also threatened to take action against people who point out to advertisers that their ads are appearing next to posts in the more explicitly violent or hateful subreddits. Between things like that and the fact that they had a really open neo-Nazi subreddit operating openly with a six-figure subscriber count for years with minimal enforcement against just about anything there, I'm having a hard time being convinced it's free speech absolutism on their part as much as actively sympathizing with extreme-right stuff.
Governments that stifle free speech and expression are the ones that end up going down this road. Hitler didn`t slaughter my people because some people on the internet used a few slurs, it was a government fronted effort from a government that actively suppressed and destroyed contrary voices. That`s how you end up with genocide.
I can comfortably say people making oven jokes at me won`t cause a 2nd Holocaust. Cracking down on speech and destroying the avenues for people to say what they want to say, on the other hand, can lead to a situation where the speech we constrain is at the behest of a government that does not serve us or our interests. That can lead to genocide.
So, not allowing neo nazis to propogate hate speech will lead to genocide?
I'm sorry what?