For all the people saying that 4chan created most of the present internet, no. That was SomethingAwful. SomethingAwful established most internet culture/humor post USENET, often by purging some group of malcontents.
The Anime forum gets moderated? 4chan is born. FYAD occupies Traditional Games and just posts image macros of nerds being shoved into lockers that clearly have to have been stockpiled for over two months? Warhammer Wednesdays. Don't Post Porn Here and The File Cabinet get closed? 4chan swells. 4chan then got knock-offs of every SA subforum before growing some of its own terrible, terrible boards. Crackhead Clubhouse gets told to stop sourcing drugs? I'm not mentioning it, but it was stupid and involved Ron Paul and blackmail.
LF, the subforum specifically made to quarantine Ron Paul people was taken over by Maoists during the financial crash. When Slashie was banned she and her following left for Tumblr and caused it to become hell on earth before schisming due to half of them being TERFs and the other half being LGBT. LF survived both the thread about defense contractor and moderator Grover's home renovations, as well as the creation and deletion of [GOON PROJECT] Let's Kill The President Of The United States! but was destroyed by FYAD, the site's trolling/weird literature board.
Gamergate started a month after Games started banning people for being creeps in OPs. Let's Plays started on SA.
Then Ralp was made mod of GBS, nuked GBS and declared that GBS 2.0 would be a radical experiment in Free Speech, like the internet of old, but without piracy, porn, or internet radio. SA lost half it's all-time membership in the month that followed. With the death of GBS, FYAD was reduced to a shell of its former self.
So basically, don't be Ralp. Freeze Peach has been tried multiple times by the greatest forum on the internet and it has never worked once, except for the LF Base Area, that owned.
I’m pretty sure Free Speech is a fig leaf. Reddit has banned many major and minor subreddits for doing the exact same thing the_ronald has been doing. They could totally ban it for doxxing, and they could claim they’re doing the same thing as when they banned /r/uncles. Or even closer, /r/uncencorednews (where you could find cherry picked stories about evil muslims)
But they won’t, because it’s become such a big subreddit. /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/shoplifting, etc, they all could be easily pushed aside. This one is too big to fail now.
I think Feral's earlier post eloquently describes the idea of free speech not just as a government protection, but a social ideal (and notes aptly that there's something a little off about progressives deciding to selectively ignore the coercive dimensions of soft private power). Call me stodgy, but I've been on board with On Liberty pretty much since I first read it.
Anyway, since the comparison with PA's moderation policy came up, I thought it worthwhile to note the following: it is fully consistent to like and support PA's anti-racist moderation policy without wanting racist subreddits banned. I am not particularly interested in chatting with racists, dealing with biotruths and conspiracy theories, reading around slurs, or etc. etc. Hence I would prefer this space be curated to support other conversations. That's a way of supporting the existence of those conversations, and of a form of dialogue which otherwise could not exist--internet moderation-free entropy was exciting in the 90s, but seems like a dead end nowadays. Regardless, wanting a space where these conversations can happen doesn't mean wanting every space to be a space where these conversations happen. There can be other conversations, in other places, including ones I find gross and valueless. As such, despite having no interest in importing that kind of moderation policy here, I still generally support the existence of sites like Stormfront, or the gross subreddits, provided the usual caveats about direct and imminent (not speculative and far off) threats of violence.
The highlighted part is the core problem with the argument. Hate speech is not "gross", "valueless", "distasteful", "unpopular", or any number of adjectives that we seem to reach for every time the subject comes up (well, yes, it is many of those things, but the words serve to ultimately obscure, rather than reveal.) The reality is that hate speech is a form of violence, which has real and lasting negative impact on the people it targets. And given that, it is unacceptable to have "spaces" for hate speech, just as it would be unacceptable to have spaces for people to physically assault people based on their identity. This was a pretty good explanation I found elsewhere:
No one in America has ever argued for total free speech legality. Nobody wants it to be legal for a random person to come to knock on your door and say, "I'm a police officer - let me in; here's my warrant" (*shows fake warrant*) and case your house for a burglary later. Nobody wants it to be legal for someone to say, "I'm a doctor; I have a cure for your grandmother's cancer; pay me $10,000 for these pills and she'll be fine." Nobody wants it to be legal for someone to stand over you, looming, and say, "put your wallet in the bag or I'll shoot you." The argument of "of course I was never going to shoot that person; I was just talking!" will not be usable as a defense.
We have laws against many kinds of speech. We understand them so well that we don't even think of those as "free speech" issues.
What we haven't done, is agreed that actively inciting hate and promoting discrimination is in the same group of harms as the above, because there's not an easily identified single victim. We've always had problems with laws that protect abstract groups -- environmental laws, civil rights, safety and accessibility requirements. What we need is an awareness that being hateful in public is a harmful action, just like waving a knife around in public is not acceptable, and saying "look, it's not crowded in here; people can move out of the way if they don't want to be hit" is not a reasonable claim.
Words aren’t violence. Equating them with violence is massively unhelpful.
If you’re going to push the Words Are Violence paradigm you need to drastically rework... well... pretty much everything in society and most of our laws.
I won’t wish you good luck with that. That’s some sci-fi dystopia nonsense.
Words aren’t violence. Equating them with violence is massively unhelpful.
If you’re going to push the Words Are Violence paradigm you need to drastically rework... well... pretty much everything in society and most of our laws.
I won’t wish you good luck with that. That’s some sci-fi dystopia nonsense.
If words aren't violence, then why do we see minorities and other dispossessed groups exhibiting actual physical injury from the effects of bigotry?
Chronic emotional stress is known to have negative physical and mental health effects. Racism and racial discrimination create a unique environment of pervasive, additional stress for people of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. These repeated traumatic interactions can result in reduced self-esteem and internalized hatred as they’re forced into conservative and apologetic thinking.
In a University of Arizona study on emotional and physical stress from perceived racism, 18.2 percent and 9.8 percent of black participants reported emotional and physical stress, respectively. The rates of stress were significantly lower among white participants, with 3.5 percent and 1.6 percent reporting emotional and physical stress, respectively.
The actual dystopia is what dispossessed groups face every day, where they are expected to just accept being injured as the "price of free speech".
Words aren’t violence. Equating them with violence is massively unhelpful.
If you’re going to push the Words Are Violence paradigm you need to drastically rework... well... pretty much everything in society and most of our laws.
I won’t wish you good luck with that. That’s some sci-fi dystopia nonsense.
If words aren't violence, then why do we see minorities and other dispossessed groups exhibiting actual physical injury from the effects of bigotry?
Chronic emotional stress is known to have negative physical and mental health effects. Racism and racial discrimination create a unique environment of pervasive, additional stress for people of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. These repeated traumatic interactions can result in reduced self-esteem and internalized hatred as they’re forced into conservative and apologetic thinking.
In a University of Arizona study on emotional and physical stress from perceived racism, 18.2 percent and 9.8 percent of black participants reported emotional and physical stress, respectively. The rates of stress were significantly lower among white participants, with 3.5 percent and 1.6 percent reporting emotional and physical stress, respectively.
The actual dystopia is what dispossessed groups face every day, where they are expected to just accept being injured as the "price of free speech".
What you posted doesn’t back up your thesis. Are you attempting to expand the definition of violence to causing stress? Does my manager commit violence on me with a difficult deadline? Do media outlets commit violence on me with worrying headlines? Do I commit violence on anyone I stress knowingly or unknowingly? On anyone who via interactions with me experiences reduced self esteem.
You’re going to get no arguments that racism has effects, but this does nothing for your Words Are Violence thesis.
Ultimately, your argument removes agency from people. Humans choose how to react to words. They are processed and assigned value and meaning, and this varies from person to person. It is one of the few areas of our lives we were ourselves are the true masters. You can call me an asshole, and I can let it hurt me; or I can let it anger me; or I can laugh at it. It’s up to me.
Conversely, when you punch me in the nose I will bleed. No amount of thinking will un-punch my nose. No amount of mental processing will stop the bleeding. If you shoot me, no amount of thinking or hoping or having s great outlook on life will save me.
This is because violence clearly falls under its own category.
Words aren’t violence. Equating them with violence is massively unhelpful.
If you’re going to push the Words Are Violence paradigm you need to drastically rework... well... pretty much everything in society and most of our laws.
I won’t wish you good luck with that. That’s some sci-fi dystopia nonsense.
Are you denying the existence of psychological abuse, or claiming that it is meaningfully different from physical abuse in the harm it can cause?
Words aren’t violence. Equating them with violence is massively unhelpful.
If you’re going to push the Words Are Violence paradigm you need to drastically rework... well... pretty much everything in society and most of our laws.
I won’t wish you good luck with that. That’s some sci-fi dystopia nonsense.
Are you denying the existence of psychological abuse, or claiming that it is meaningfully different from physical abuse in the harm it can cause?
I’m not denying psychological abuse is a thing. That is a substantially different argument from Words Are Violence.
Is this some new popular theory I’ve missed the wagon on?
The OP is basically about reddit's policies about use of racist language on their site, and I'm going to say let's limit discussion to that (and other similar online discussion places) please.
Guys. The thread has a pretty vague OP that encourages people to be 'hey let's just free-associate about free speech', but mod direction has been provided as to the topic at hand. If you can't stick to it, don't post.
Words aren’t violence. Equating them with violence is massively unhelpful.
If you’re going to push the Words Are Violence paradigm you need to drastically rework... well... pretty much everything in society and most of our laws.
I won’t wish you good luck with that. That’s some sci-fi dystopia nonsense.
Are you denying the existence of psychological abuse, or claiming that it is meaningfully different from physical abuse in the harm it can cause?
I’m not denying psychological abuse is a thing. That is a substantially different argument from Words Are Violence.
Is this some new popular theory I’ve missed the wagon on?
Assuming hateful words are, or can be, violence (you can disagree, but for the sake of the argument).
Should Reddit, or any other online platform, act to curb this violence, because it is violence, being committed, either to individuals or to large abstract groups.
If not, why?
The first two questions there aren't related to the topic, so people going on tangents about them will receive a smack on the nose with this rolled up newspaper.
Guys, I know the OP is vague and the thread seems like a place to just free-associate on the topic of free speech and your own personal axes you very much want to grind, but, ironically, your right to free speech here is limited so don't mess about.
Words aren’t violence. Equating them with violence is massively unhelpful.
If you’re going to push the Words Are Violence paradigm you need to drastically rework... well... pretty much everything in society and most of our laws.
I won’t wish you good luck with that. That’s some sci-fi dystopia nonsense.
Are you denying the existence of psychological abuse, or claiming that it is meaningfully different from physical abuse in the harm it can cause?
I’m not denying psychological abuse is a thing. That is a substantially different argument from Words Are Violence.
Is this some new popular theory I’ve missed the wagon on?
Assuming hateful words are, or can be, violence (you can disagree, but for the sake of the argument).
Should Reddit, or any other online platform, act to curb this violence, because it is violence, being committed, either to individuals or to large abstract groups.
If not, why?
edit-
removed off topic questions.
sorry.
Accepting your assumption automatically means losing the argument. Rejecting your assumption means that you're saying that speech should always be limited due to REASONS!.
There's not a lot of space there for quality discussion.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Speech absolutely should always be restricted. It’s currently both Reddit’s and society in general’s policy to restrict any speech they find harmful. Restrictions already exist. Reddit just doesn’t want to restrict racism.
Does any Reddit sized social media platform have a better speech policy?
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The reality is that hate speech is a form of violence, which has real and lasting negative impact on the people it targets. And given that, it is unacceptable to have "spaces" for hate speech, just as it would be unacceptable to have spaces for people to physically assault people based on their identity. This was a pretty good explanation I found elsewhere:
I find it highly plausible that racial stress is a contributor to bad health outcomes, as you and the APA blog claim. But one thing you ignore (and that Frankie points out) is that this would not make it at all unique--part of the reason why I find it plausible is because we already know that a huge range of "social determinants of health" contribute to good or bad health outcomes, often to very high degrees. These determinants include e.g. wealth, workplace autonomy, literacy and education, location and type of housing, being raised in multiparent households, and so on. But especially as that last item makes clear, just the fact that something is a negative social determinant of health does not make the proper response obvious. There might be other things we have to think about when we think about, say, single parenting, other than just the "violence" it does.
In any case, it is even less clear how this point about racism as a determinant of health is supposed to work once we remember we're talking about reddit. The research on racial stress focuses on the bad effects of people being consistently exposed to racism in their daily life--working in with racist coworkers and bosses, e.g., or being afraid of racist police in their neighborhoods. I have no idea what this has to do with racist subreddits. People of color work, live, and travel in the same world as everyone else, for the same reasons, and having to suffer racial stress while doing it is difficult and bad for them. Do people of color regularly visit virulently racist subreddits? Do the ~cumulative effects~ of their ~frequent~ visits impact their health, a la the concerns you posted from the APA? Is there any reason they have to visit those subreddits, as, for instance, they have to visit their worksites, or have to drive past their neighborhood police? The answers here all seem like they're obviously no. So the concern that racial stressors in daily life are bad for people's health has just about zero connection to whether it's important to purge all corners of the internet of locations where racists can chat about their mutual racism.
I find it highly plausible that racial stress is a contributor to bad health outcomes, as you and the APA blog claim. But one thing you ignore (and that Frankie points out) is that this would not make it at all unique--part of the reason why I find it plausible is because we already know that a huge range of "social determinants of health" contribute to good or bad health outcomes, often to very high degrees. These determinants include e.g. wealth, workplace autonomy, literacy and education, location and type of housing, being raised in multiparent households, and so on. But especially as that last item makes clear, just the fact that something is a negative social determinant of health does not make the proper response obvious. There might be other things we have to think about when we think about, say, single parenting, other than just the "violence" it does.
In any case, it is even less clear how this point about racism as a determinant of health is supposed to work once we remember we're talking about reddit. The research on racial stress focuses on the bad effects of people being consistently exposed to racism in their daily life--working in with racist coworkers and bosses, e.g., or being afraid of racist police in their neighborhoods. I have no idea what this has to do with racist subreddits. People of color work, live, and travel in the same world as everyone else, for the same reasons, and having to suffer racial stress while doing it is difficult and bad for them. Do people of color regularly visit virulently racist subreddits? Do the ~cumulative effects~ of their ~frequent~ visits impact their health, a la the concerns you posted from the APA? Is there any reason they have to visit those subreddits, as, for instance, they have to visit their worksites, or have to drive past their neighborhood police? The answers here all seem like they're obviously no. So the concern that racial stressors in daily life are bad for people's health has just about zero connection to whether it's important to purge all corners of the internet of locations where racists can chat about their mutual racism.
Reddit isn't supposed to be StormFront, and minorities should be able to go to any site they please without being oppressed by racists. Not to mention Reddit is contributing harshly on its reputation in the real world since it looks like the people who run the show are racists, even if they are being apathetic about racism.
Racism can affect people in various angles negatively (self esteem, being othered etc), it's not a net good for society to let prosper anywhere.
Mmm, yes, it's the people of color, the targets of hate, who should have to change where they want to go so as to not become uncomfortable with the speech allowed by a website they want to hang out on. Surely that is the most reasonable option, and won't at all seem like yet another giant middle finger where we're going to protect the people who think the existence of those minorities is, in and of itself, heinous. The onus, as usual, is on them to not get upset that the website is propping up those who would have them wiped from the face of the earth.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Mmm, yes, it's the people of color, the targets of hate, who should have to change where they want to go so as to not become uncomfortable with the speech allowed by a website they want to hang out on. Surely that is the most reasonable option, and won't at all seem like yet another giant middle finger where we're going to protect the people who think the existence of those minorities is, in and of itself, heinous. The onus, as usual, is on them to not get upset that the website is propping up those who would have them wiped from the face of the earth.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Also not to mention when you allow hate and racism in subcommunities and the like, that shit starts seeping into the community at large and lots of toxic shit comes out. And then discussion turn into shit slinging matches between the shitstains and the community at large.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
One of the things brought up at the Facebook hearings is the tech monopolies.
Is there a place that does what Facebook does if you don't like their policies?
Is there a place that does what Reddit does if you don't like their policies?
The answer is usually no.
???? The answer is unquestionably "yes". I use reddit extensively, but it's basically just another internet forum where you post topics and people respond in a thread-like fashion. I've never found a subreddit on a topic that didn't have an alternate internet forum with substantially the same discussions going on somewhere else, and in many cases reddit isn't the first choice to go to for meaningful discussion. So there are absolutely viable alternatives to reddit.
Facebook has a more unique platform and higher market penetration, admittedly, but they're also hardly the only social media game in town.
One of the things brought up at the Facebook hearings is the tech monopolies.
Is there a place that does what Facebook does if you don't like their policies?
Is there a place that does what Reddit does if you don't like their policies?
The answer is usually no.
???? The answer is unquestionably "yes". I use reddit extensively, but it's basically just another internet forum where you post topics and people respond in a thread-like fashion. I've never found a subreddit on a topic that didn't have an alternate internet forum with substantially the same discussions going on somewhere else, and in many cases reddit isn't the first choice to go to for meaningful discussion. So there are absolutely viable alternatives to reddit.
Facebook has a more unique platform and higher market penetration, admittedly, but they're also hardly the only social media game in town.
Isn't this like saying a black person doesn't have to go to a restaurant where the people are racist towards the person because the person can just go to one where they aren't?
While people of color don't generally go to the Nazi subreddits, that stuff seeps out into the rest of Reddit. I used to post on Reddit but I got tired of getting dogpiled on random, apparently non-Nazi forums, for expressing anti-racist views, or even saying something positive about a person who is a minority (seriously, you can't mention a Muslim person without getting swamped by racists, even if it's not relevant, like talking about a person in the news for unrelated reasons who happens to be Muslim.)
So it's not that black people are foolishly going into the "I hate black people subreddit" and getting unhappy. They are going to the "I love knitting" subreddit and getting downvoted and abused for doing something like knitting a Barack Obama doll and posting a picture of it.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Mmm, yes, it's the people of color, the targets of hate, who should have to change where they want to go so as to not become uncomfortable with the speech allowed by a website they want to hang out on. Surely that is the most reasonable option, and won't at all seem like yet another giant middle finger where we're going to protect the people who think the existence of those minorities is, in and of itself, heinous. The onus, as usual, is on them to not get upset that the website is propping up those who would have them wiped from the face of the earth.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Perhaps if I use "I" language it will be harder for you to grandstand quite so hard. So, take the example of r/AganistGayMarriage/, whose current front page is populated by such gems as:
"Debunked: "Homosexuality is healthy""
"European politican speaks out against sodomite promotion in our society"
"Lesbian Couple Convicted Of Murdering 2-Year-Old Son, Abusing Other Children"
etc. etc. etc.
I find it utterly bizarre to suggest that r/AganistGayMarriage is somewhere I "want to go," and so that our only choices are either taking it down or (unfairly) requiring me, the victim, to change my behavior. I have no interest in going there, for obvious reasons, and not going there doesn't sacrifice any of my interests. But okay--suppose I did go there regularly, and found it very distressing. I would think the very first question would be: "why the fuck are you visiting AganistGayMarriage every day?" There's a pretty obvious fix, here.
Subreddits are very obviously unlike workplaces insofar as visiting them really is a voluntary act oriented around optional common-interest discussion. Not going to a disgusting subreddit is not a meaningful burden.
Equal protection laws don't say a restaurant can't have people in it who are racist, or say racist things. They say a public business can't refuse to serve a person based on race.
There's a distinction there for a reason. And that reason is that racists, for better or worse, have free speech rights too.
The reality is that hate speech is a form of violence, which has real and lasting negative impact on the people it targets. And given that, it is unacceptable to have "spaces" for hate speech, just as it would be unacceptable to have spaces for people to physically assault people based on their identity. This was a pretty good explanation I found elsewhere:
I find it highly plausible that racial stress is a contributor to bad health outcomes, as you and the APA blog claim. But one thing you ignore (and that Frankie points out) is that this would not make it at all unique--part of the reason why I find it plausible is because we already know that a huge range of "social determinants of health" contribute to good or bad health outcomes, often to very high degrees. These determinants include e.g. wealth, workplace autonomy, literacy and education, location and type of housing, being raised in multiparent households, and so on. But especially as that last item makes clear, just the fact that something is a negative social determinant of health does not make the proper response obvious. There might be other things we have to think about when we think about, say, single parenting, other than just the "violence" it does.
In any case, it is even less clear how this point about racism as a determinant of health is supposed to work once we remember we're talking about reddit. The research on racial stress focuses on the bad effects of people being consistently exposed to racism in their daily life--working in with racist coworkers and bosses, e.g., or being afraid of racist police in their neighborhoods. I have no idea what this has to do with racist subreddits. People of color work, live, and travel in the same world as everyone else, for the same reasons, and having to suffer racial stress while doing it is difficult and bad for them. Do people of color regularly visit virulently racist subreddits? Do the ~cumulative effects~ of their ~frequent~ visits impact their health, a la the concerns you posted from the APA? Is there any reason they have to visit those subreddits, as, for instance, they have to visit their worksites, or have to drive past their neighborhood police? The answers here all seem like they're obviously no. So the concern that racial stressors in daily life are bad for people's health has just about zero connection to whether it's important to purge all corners of the internet of locations where racists can chat about their mutual racism.
Because bigots don't just stay in their corner. The whole reason that Reddit giving bigots a home is a big deal is twofold:
One, as gets demonstrated on a routine basis on Reddit, bigotry spills out of these spaces. The bigotry subreddits routinely push their bigotry into other subreddits, which is in large part why Reddit has developed the reputation it holds today. Bigots aren't just gathering in these places to be with the likeminded, but are organizing to take action outside of them to further these beliefs. And as they push out, this exposes the people whom they are targeting to their bigotry - which is the point of doing so.
Two, these places serve to indoctrinate and normalize bigotry. Look at how much commentary there is on "well, it's the internet/Reddit, what did you expect?" in regard to the support of bigotry on Reddit - this is what normalization looks like, because we don't treat these spaces as abnormal and thus something to be excised. Tube has a nuke on sight policy regarding bigotry here because he doesn't want it normalized. And normalization of bigotry and the resulting feelings of exclusion and othering also cause stress to those targeted, and push them out of the space, as we've seen with Reddit.
Also, Frankie's argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny. To flip the thesis around, there are numerous ways that I can be physically injured - and yet we don't dismiss injury due to violence perpetrated by another, but single it out for specific sanction. Why shouldn't we apply the same idea to stress applied to minorities via bigotry perpetrated by others, especially given that it causes not just mental harm but physical as well? Again, this is why Reddit refusing to tackle bigotry is such a problem - it has been the largest white supremacy website by both traffic and membership, and even today serves as an incubator for hate, which then spills out to the rest of the world - and then we have to clean up the aftermath.
Equal protection laws don't say a restaurant can't have people in it who are racist, or say racist things. They say a public business can't refuse to serve a person based on race.
There's a distinction there for a reason. And that reason is that racists, for better or worse, have free speech rights too.
The law allows a restaurant to kick out people who are being racist. I would have a problem with a restaurant that doesn't kick out people loudly being racists out of concern for the other customers. That the people who have a problem with the racism can go to a different restaurant with different rules doesn't strike me as justifying the first restaurants decision to allow the racism.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Just removed myself from Reddit and I won't be going back.
I refuse to allow my activities to fund the white supremacist portions of the website they have no problem with.
I hate the term "normalized". It seems to presume that racism isn't normal, or is some new feature creeping into our society. It's not. It was THE "norm" in most of this country, for most of its existence, and still is in large swathes. The fact is that we're fighting to de-normalize it, as it and it's adherents fight to keep it acceptable and normal.
Maybe that's obvious and unimportant to those using the term, or it's an intentional disconnect that I'm missing...
Mmm, yes, it's the people of color, the targets of hate, who should have to change where they want to go so as to not become uncomfortable with the speech allowed by a website they want to hang out on. Surely that is the most reasonable option, and won't at all seem like yet another giant middle finger where we're going to protect the people who think the existence of those minorities is, in and of itself, heinous. The onus, as usual, is on them to not get upset that the website is propping up those who would have them wiped from the face of the earth.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Perhaps if I use "I" language it will be harder for you to grandstand quite so hard. So, take the example of r/AganistGayMarriage/, whose current front page is populated by such gems as:
"Debunked: "Homosexuality is healthy""
"European politican speaks out against sodomite promotion in our society"
"Lesbian Couple Convicted Of Murdering 2-Year-Old Son, Abusing Other Children"
etc. etc. etc.
I find it utterly bizarre to suggest that r/AganistGayMarriage is somewhere I "want to go," and so that our only choices are either leaving it up or (unfairly) requiring me, the victim, to change my behavior. I have no interest in going there, for obvious reasons, and not going there doesn't sacrifice any of my interests. But okay--suppose I did go there regularly, and found it very distressing. I would think the very first question would be: "why the fuck are you visiting AganistGayMarriage every day?" There's a pretty obvious fix, here.
Subreddits are very obviously unlike workplaces insofar as visiting them really is a voluntary act oriented around optional common-interest discussion. Not going to a disgusting subreddit is not a meaningful burden.
Yes, perhaps if you make it about your personal experience then I will find it harder to point out that you're blaming the minority populace for feeling that a website supporting racists over them is moronic, immoral, and possibly racist itself. I find it supremely amusing that you want to finger wag at anyone here for "grandstanding".
Anyway, I'm not the arbiter of why someone would want to go to a certain subreddit. Maybe they want to see what is being said about minorities. I certainly feel you feel differently, and think they should just shut up and sit down, and stay in their own lanes, while the website they want to be on subsidizes the existence of discussion regarding their being killed en masse. Maybe they want to track down where something else they've seen on Reddit has come from. As was pointed out above, subreddits aren't sealed off clean-rooms. The users of those subs are not banned from posting in other subreddits. They can take the bullshit they learn, or are fed, on /r/imaracistdouchebag and soft pedal it in another sub where they're maybe just asking questions.
I find it utterly bizarre that anyone would think that's a good way for things to operate, but here we are.
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
edited April 2018
Speech that encourages violence should ALWAYS be made illegal. Racism by it's very nature is about inciting violence. Nazism is steeped in violence with a history of genocide and IMO should be made illegal as a political party in the USA, and any Nazi speech should be shut down and made illegal as well. Free Speech doesn't extend to inciting violence, and one of the things I will never understand about this world is how people believe violent racist Nazi speech is free speech and should be protected and allowed in a civil community
Mmm, yes, it's the people of color, the targets of hate, who should have to change where they want to go so as to not become uncomfortable with the speech allowed by a website they want to hang out on. Surely that is the most reasonable option, and won't at all seem like yet another giant middle finger where we're going to protect the people who think the existence of those minorities is, in and of itself, heinous. The onus, as usual, is on them to not get upset that the website is propping up those who would have them wiped from the face of the earth.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Perhaps if I use "I" language it will be harder for you to grandstand quite so hard. So, take the example of r/AganistGayMarriage/, whose current front page is populated by such gems as:
"Debunked: "Homosexuality is healthy""
"European politican speaks out against sodomite promotion in our society"
"Lesbian Couple Convicted Of Murdering 2-Year-Old Son, Abusing Other Children"
etc. etc. etc.
I find it utterly bizarre to suggest that r/AganistGayMarriage is somewhere I "want to go," and so that our only choices are either leaving it up or (unfairly) requiring me, the victim, to change my behavior. I have no interest in going there, for obvious reasons, and not going there doesn't sacrifice any of my interests. But okay--suppose I did go there regularly, and found it very distressing. I would think the very first question would be: "why the fuck are you visiting AganistGayMarriage every day?" There's a pretty obvious fix, here.
Subreddits are very obviously unlike workplaces insofar as visiting them really is a voluntary act oriented around optional common-interest discussion. Not going to a disgusting subreddit is not a meaningful burden.
Because (as several people have pointed out), a hate subreddit is very much unlike Vegas - what happens there rarely stays there. Just because you choose to not visit r/AgainstGayMarriage doesn't mean that you've cut off your exposure, because the people in these sorts of subreddits routinely push out into other, more mainstreamed subreddits.
There's a reason that bigotry on Reddit is routinely likened to toxic waste - it behaves much the same:
* It harms people,
* It damages the value of spaces it contaminates,
* Containment is expensive and prone to failure, and
* Ultimately, the best solution is to not produce it in the first place.
I hate the term "normalized". It seems to presume that racism isn't normal, or is some new feature creeping into our society. It's not. It was THE "norm" in most of this country, for most of its existence, and still is in large swathes. The fact is that we're fighting to de-normalize it, as it and it's adherents fight to keep it acceptable and normal.
Maybe that's obvious and unimportant to those using the term, or it's an intentional disconnect that I'm missing...
The point is that racism shouldn't be treated as normal, and the fact that it is treated as such is due to (as you note) specific pressures to normalize it. Again, this is part of why the statement in the OP is so important - nothing normalizes bigotry in a space like the person in charge saying "racism is A-OK here."
I think Reddit and other internet platforms that allow expression/speech (this extends to Youtube, Facebook, etc. along with any website or service that allows public posting and/or commenting) have not fully grappled with the interaction between the content of expression/speech and the formal and informal structures of expression/speech.
The content of speech shapes the structures of speech and vice versa. It's usually pretty obvious how the formal and informal structures of speech (like mod rules, grammatical construction, and idiom/convention/memes/etc) shape the content of speech but it's less obvious to many people how the content of speech shapes the structures of speech. Several people here have pointed to the suppression of speech by racist, harmful speech (for example, how racial minorities might avoid a forum full of openly racist speech). However, rather than frame such suppression as an exercise of epistemological power (who is and is not allowed to create group knowledge and norms), I've found that many internet libertarians frame the phenomenon as one of choice ("People choose to go to different sites/participate in different conversations"). The choice framing conveniently relocates speech suppression to the mind/body of the suppressed minority, rather than the racist/bigoted speech and speaker, while simultaneously absolving the racist speaker of responsibility (since it is the supposedly free choice of the other to not speak or speak elsewhere).
There are shades of this within the current Facebook privacy scandal. Facebook chose to commodify individual user's speech for private financial gain. Rather than take responsibility for the harm Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook created by the structural choices they made, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have tried to blame bad third party actors and the unforeseeable consequences of the technology. By actively removing moderation and judgment from advertising choices and promoted content, Facebook essentially ceded the public square to the worst actors during a critical moment in our nation's history. This error and the harm flowing from it cannot be erased by a few mock sincere promises to Congress to look into the problem and do better in the future. All of the tech companies creating public platforms, Reddit among them, should actively and openly participate in a public debate about the formal and informal structures of speech that should be universally adopted to foster the kind of dialogue and speech that will serve the public good.
Making no choice is making a choice. Tech companies cannot dodge responsibility by handwaving away the consequences of their inaction/action.
Mmm, yes, it's the people of color, the targets of hate, who should have to change where they want to go so as to not become uncomfortable with the speech allowed by a website they want to hang out on. Surely that is the most reasonable option, and won't at all seem like yet another giant middle finger where we're going to protect the people who think the existence of those minorities is, in and of itself, heinous. The onus, as usual, is on them to not get upset that the website is propping up those who would have them wiped from the face of the earth.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Perhaps if I use "I" language it will be harder for you to grandstand quite so hard. So, take the example of r/AganistGayMarriage/, whose current front page is populated by such gems as:
"Debunked: "Homosexuality is healthy""
"European politican speaks out against sodomite promotion in our society"
"Lesbian Couple Convicted Of Murdering 2-Year-Old Son, Abusing Other Children"
etc. etc. etc.
I find it utterly bizarre to suggest that r/AganistGayMarriage is somewhere I "want to go," and so that our only choices are either leaving it up or (unfairly) requiring me, the victim, to change my behavior. I have no interest in going there, for obvious reasons, and not going there doesn't sacrifice any of my interests. But okay--suppose I did go there regularly, and found it very distressing. I would think the very first question would be: "why the fuck are you visiting AganistGayMarriage every day?" There's a pretty obvious fix, here.
Subreddits are very obviously unlike workplaces insofar as visiting them really is a voluntary act oriented around optional common-interest discussion. Not going to a disgusting subreddit is not a meaningful burden.
Because (as several people have pointed out), a hate subreddit is very much unlike Vegas - what happens there rarely stays there. Just because you choose to not visit r/AgainstGayMarriage doesn't mean that you've cut off your exposure, because the people in these sorts of subreddits routinely push out into other, more mainstreamed subreddits.
The people in those sorts of subreddits exist in our society, and push out into it everywhere. So what is your solution?
Under the founding principles of the U.S. , at least, their views can't be rendered illegal to express, nor can they be punished for holding them. Therefore a private company (e.g. reddit) cannot be legally compelled to get rid of them or actively exclude them.
Like, I think we all agree that racism is bad, racists are assholes and worse, but there's no tools we can give the government to curtail their freedom of expression that won't/can't be used to also curtail freedom of expression of progressive views as well.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Mmm, yes, it's the people of color, the targets of hate, who should have to change where they want to go so as to not become uncomfortable with the speech allowed by a website they want to hang out on. Surely that is the most reasonable option, and won't at all seem like yet another giant middle finger where we're going to protect the people who think the existence of those minorities is, in and of itself, heinous. The onus, as usual, is on them to not get upset that the website is propping up those who would have them wiped from the face of the earth.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Perhaps if I use "I" language it will be harder for you to grandstand quite so hard. So, take the example of r/AganistGayMarriage/, whose current front page is populated by such gems as:
"Debunked: "Homosexuality is healthy""
"European politican speaks out against sodomite promotion in our society"
"Lesbian Couple Convicted Of Murdering 2-Year-Old Son, Abusing Other Children"
etc. etc. etc.
I find it utterly bizarre to suggest that r/AganistGayMarriage is somewhere I "want to go," and so that our only choices are either leaving it up or (unfairly) requiring me, the victim, to change my behavior. I have no interest in going there, for obvious reasons, and not going there doesn't sacrifice any of my interests. But okay--suppose I did go there regularly, and found it very distressing. I would think the very first question would be: "why the fuck are you visiting AganistGayMarriage every day?" There's a pretty obvious fix, here.
Subreddits are very obviously unlike workplaces insofar as visiting them really is a voluntary act oriented around optional common-interest discussion. Not going to a disgusting subreddit is not a meaningful burden.
Yes, perhaps if you make it about your personal experience then I will find it harder to point out that you're blaming the minority populace for feeling that a website supporting racists over them is moronic, immoral, and possibly racist itself. I find it supremely amusing that you want to finger wag at anyone here for "grandstanding".
Anyway, I'm not the arbiter of why someone would want to go to a certain subreddit. Maybe they want to see what is being said about minorities. I certainly feel you feel differently, and think they should just shut up and sit down, and stay in their own lanes, while the website they want to be on subsidizes the existence of discussion regarding their being killed en masse. Maybe they want to track down where something else they've seen on Reddit has come from. As was pointed out above, subreddits aren't sealed off clean-rooms. The users of those subs are not banned from posting in other subreddits. They can take the bullshit they learn, or are fed, on /r/imaracistdouchebag and soft pedal it in another sub where they're maybe just asking questions.
I find it utterly bizarre that anyone would think that's a good way for things to operate, but here we are.
This post is heavy on rhetoric and light on substance. For instance, I don't see the existence of r/AganistGayMarriage as reddit "supporting homophobes over me"--a phrasing that prejudges the very issue at hand, namely whether I have some kind of right or interest to get that forum shut down. Reddit is only supporting them over me if we already assume that my request that they be shut down is reasonable.
Suppose I went to my local community center or event space and wandered into a meeting of the local Republican Party chapter. Suppose they're talking about how they want to end food stamps, or amend the constitution to forbid affirmative action and abortion, and I get really upset. So what? That's a meeting space dedicated to Republican ideas, for Republicans. If I claimed aggrieved status in the interaction I would be being ridiculous. If hearing that stuff is too upsetting for you to handle, then yeah, it's fully appropriate to "stay in your own lane."
If there's so much cross-forum raiding that reddit can't sustain wholesome knitting subforums or whatever, I find it understandable why they would get rid of the unmanageable racist subreddits. I don't know enough about reddit culture to say (thought I suspect that I would have different standards here). Whatever. What I disagree with is that the idea of a safe space for me (whatever that comes out to) implies a right to make ~every~ space safe, even the ones I'd never go to, on the grounds that their existence and the people populating them offend me, or on the grounds that people discussing those dangerous ideas might even go out into the world and advocate for them. Sometimes it can be nebulous what a culture of free speech really amounts to, but if there's anything that's incompatible with it, it's that.
Mmm, yes, it's the people of color, the targets of hate, who should have to change where they want to go so as to not become uncomfortable with the speech allowed by a website they want to hang out on. Surely that is the most reasonable option, and won't at all seem like yet another giant middle finger where we're going to protect the people who think the existence of those minorities is, in and of itself, heinous. The onus, as usual, is on them to not get upset that the website is propping up those who would have them wiped from the face of the earth.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Perhaps if I use "I" language it will be harder for you to grandstand quite so hard. So, take the example of r/AganistGayMarriage/, whose current front page is populated by such gems as:
"Debunked: "Homosexuality is healthy""
"European politican speaks out against sodomite promotion in our society"
"Lesbian Couple Convicted Of Murdering 2-Year-Old Son, Abusing Other Children"
etc. etc. etc.
I find it utterly bizarre to suggest that r/AganistGayMarriage is somewhere I "want to go," and so that our only choices are either leaving it up or (unfairly) requiring me, the victim, to change my behavior. I have no interest in going there, for obvious reasons, and not going there doesn't sacrifice any of my interests. But okay--suppose I did go there regularly, and found it very distressing. I would think the very first question would be: "why the fuck are you visiting AganistGayMarriage every day?" There's a pretty obvious fix, here.
Subreddits are very obviously unlike workplaces insofar as visiting them really is a voluntary act oriented around optional common-interest discussion. Not going to a disgusting subreddit is not a meaningful burden.
Because (as several people have pointed out), a hate subreddit is very much unlike Vegas - what happens there rarely stays there. Just because you choose to not visit r/AgainstGayMarriage doesn't mean that you've cut off your exposure, because the people in these sorts of subreddits routinely push out into other, more mainstreamed subreddits.
The people in those sorts of subreddits exist in our society, and push out into it everywhere. So what is your solution?
Under the founding principles of the U.S. , at least, their views can't be rendered illegal to express, nor can they be punished for holding them. Therefore a private company (e.g. reddit) cannot be legally compelled to get rid of them or actively exclude them.
Like, I think we all agree that racism is bad, racists are assholes and worse, but there's no tools we can give the government to curtail their freedom of expression that won't/can't be used to also curtail freedom of expression of progressive views as well.
This is demonstrably false, as indicated by the number of democracies that have anti-hate speech laws on the books.
And while currently the government cannot do anything to punish individuals for having racist views, everyone else certainly can. That's what boycotts, advertisers pulling out, public shaming, etc. is about.
Mmm, yes, it's the people of color, the targets of hate, who should have to change where they want to go so as to not become uncomfortable with the speech allowed by a website they want to hang out on. Surely that is the most reasonable option, and won't at all seem like yet another giant middle finger where we're going to protect the people who think the existence of those minorities is, in and of itself, heinous. The onus, as usual, is on them to not get upset that the website is propping up those who would have them wiped from the face of the earth.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Perhaps if I use "I" language it will be harder for you to grandstand quite so hard. So, take the example of r/AganistGayMarriage/, whose current front page is populated by such gems as:
"Debunked: "Homosexuality is healthy""
"European politican speaks out against sodomite promotion in our society"
"Lesbian Couple Convicted Of Murdering 2-Year-Old Son, Abusing Other Children"
etc. etc. etc.
I find it utterly bizarre to suggest that r/AganistGayMarriage is somewhere I "want to go," and so that our only choices are either leaving it up or (unfairly) requiring me, the victim, to change my behavior. I have no interest in going there, for obvious reasons, and not going there doesn't sacrifice any of my interests. But okay--suppose I did go there regularly, and found it very distressing. I would think the very first question would be: "why the fuck are you visiting AganistGayMarriage every day?" There's a pretty obvious fix, here.
Subreddits are very obviously unlike workplaces insofar as visiting them really is a voluntary act oriented around optional common-interest discussion. Not going to a disgusting subreddit is not a meaningful burden.
Because (as several people have pointed out), a hate subreddit is very much unlike Vegas - what happens there rarely stays there. Just because you choose to not visit r/AgainstGayMarriage doesn't mean that you've cut off your exposure, because the people in these sorts of subreddits routinely push out into other, more mainstreamed subreddits.
The people in those sorts of subreddits exist in our society, and push out into it everywhere. So what is your solution?
Under the founding principles of the U.S. , at least, their views can't be rendered illegal to express, nor can they be punished for holding them. Therefore a private company (e.g. reddit) cannot be legally compelled to get rid of them or actively exclude them.
Like, I think we all agree that racism is bad, racists are assholes and worse, but there's no tools we can give the government to curtail their freedom of expression that won't/can't be used to also curtail freedom of expression of progressive views as well.
Right, and the mods have stated this isn't about what solutions we can have the government provide to this issue.
So it's on users of Reddit to make it known that they do not wish to tolerate supporting a website that allows that discussion and content to be present on its servers. They should, if they feel that way, make it known that they are opposed to their being shown ads that the users of the racist subs won't see so as to subsidize those racist subs.
The idea is to push the idea as far to the fringe as is possible. To make it known that racism and the support of the use of violence toward minorities is such an unacceptable idea that we won't be having that kind of conversation on Reddit.
Will there still be a Stormfront? Probably, yup, but that does not mean that Reddit needs to have their own subs full of similar bullshit.
Basically: perfect should not be the enemy of good. Just because we can't wipe out racism on the Internet in one fell swoop doesn't mean we should not try to remove it from discourse when and where we can.
Forcing racists to go to places like Stormfront is beneficial because it gives them a much smaller platform and puts the cost of having the forums on them. Stormfront itself has fallen on hard financial times.
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WoW
Dear Satan.....
LF, the subforum specifically made to quarantine Ron Paul people was taken over by Maoists during the financial crash. When Slashie was banned she and her following left for Tumblr and caused it to become hell on earth before schisming due to half of them being TERFs and the other half being LGBT. LF survived both the thread about defense contractor and moderator Grover's home renovations, as well as the creation and deletion of [GOON PROJECT] Let's Kill The President Of The United States! but was destroyed by FYAD, the site's trolling/weird literature board.
Gamergate started a month after Games started banning people for being creeps in OPs. Let's Plays started on SA.
Then Ralp was made mod of GBS, nuked GBS and declared that GBS 2.0 would be a radical experiment in Free Speech, like the internet of old, but without piracy, porn, or internet radio. SA lost half it's all-time membership in the month that followed. With the death of GBS, FYAD was reduced to a shell of its former self.
So basically, don't be Ralp. Freeze Peach has been tried multiple times by the greatest forum on the internet and it has never worked once, except for the LF Base Area, that owned.
But they won’t, because it’s become such a big subreddit. /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/shoplifting, etc, they all could be easily pushed aside. This one is too big to fail now.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
The highlighted part is the core problem with the argument. Hate speech is not "gross", "valueless", "distasteful", "unpopular", or any number of adjectives that we seem to reach for every time the subject comes up (well, yes, it is many of those things, but the words serve to ultimately obscure, rather than reveal.) The reality is that hate speech is a form of violence, which has real and lasting negative impact on the people it targets. And given that, it is unacceptable to have "spaces" for hate speech, just as it would be unacceptable to have spaces for people to physically assault people based on their identity. This was a pretty good explanation I found elsewhere:
If you’re going to push the Words Are Violence paradigm you need to drastically rework... well... pretty much everything in society and most of our laws.
I won’t wish you good luck with that. That’s some sci-fi dystopia nonsense.
If words aren't violence, then why do we see minorities and other dispossessed groups exhibiting actual physical injury from the effects of bigotry?
The actual dystopia is what dispossessed groups face every day, where they are expected to just accept being injured as the "price of free speech".
What you posted doesn’t back up your thesis. Are you attempting to expand the definition of violence to causing stress? Does my manager commit violence on me with a difficult deadline? Do media outlets commit violence on me with worrying headlines? Do I commit violence on anyone I stress knowingly or unknowingly? On anyone who via interactions with me experiences reduced self esteem.
You’re going to get no arguments that racism has effects, but this does nothing for your Words Are Violence thesis.
Ultimately, your argument removes agency from people. Humans choose how to react to words. They are processed and assigned value and meaning, and this varies from person to person. It is one of the few areas of our lives we were ourselves are the true masters. You can call me an asshole, and I can let it hurt me; or I can let it anger me; or I can laugh at it. It’s up to me.
Conversely, when you punch me in the nose I will bleed. No amount of thinking will un-punch my nose. No amount of mental processing will stop the bleeding. If you shoot me, no amount of thinking or hoping or having s great outlook on life will save me.
This is because violence clearly falls under its own category.
I’m not denying psychological abuse is a thing. That is a substantially different argument from Words Are Violence.
Is this some new popular theory I’ve missed the wagon on?
Guys. The thread has a pretty vague OP that encourages people to be 'hey let's just free-associate about free speech', but mod direction has been provided as to the topic at hand. If you can't stick to it, don't post.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Should Reddit, or any other online platform, act to curb this violence, because it is violence, being committed, either to individuals or to large abstract groups.
If not, why?
edit-
removed off topic questions.
sorry.
Guys, I know the OP is vague and the thread seems like a place to just free-associate on the topic of free speech and your own personal axes you very much want to grind, but, ironically, your right to free speech here is limited so don't mess about.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Accepting your assumption automatically means losing the argument. Rejecting your assumption means that you're saying that speech should always be limited due to REASONS!.
There's not a lot of space there for quality discussion.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Twitter doesn't. Not sure about Facebook. The Chinese ones have government censors I guess?
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
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PSN: AbEntropy
There's a difference between having a policy and finding it difficult to enforce and just being "Ahh Nazis? Nah they ain't hurting anybody."
I find it highly plausible that racial stress is a contributor to bad health outcomes, as you and the APA blog claim. But one thing you ignore (and that Frankie points out) is that this would not make it at all unique--part of the reason why I find it plausible is because we already know that a huge range of "social determinants of health" contribute to good or bad health outcomes, often to very high degrees. These determinants include e.g. wealth, workplace autonomy, literacy and education, location and type of housing, being raised in multiparent households, and so on. But especially as that last item makes clear, just the fact that something is a negative social determinant of health does not make the proper response obvious. There might be other things we have to think about when we think about, say, single parenting, other than just the "violence" it does.
In any case, it is even less clear how this point about racism as a determinant of health is supposed to work once we remember we're talking about reddit. The research on racial stress focuses on the bad effects of people being consistently exposed to racism in their daily life--working in with racist coworkers and bosses, e.g., or being afraid of racist police in their neighborhoods. I have no idea what this has to do with racist subreddits. People of color work, live, and travel in the same world as everyone else, for the same reasons, and having to suffer racial stress while doing it is difficult and bad for them. Do people of color regularly visit virulently racist subreddits? Do the ~cumulative effects~ of their ~frequent~ visits impact their health, a la the concerns you posted from the APA? Is there any reason they have to visit those subreddits, as, for instance, they have to visit their worksites, or have to drive past their neighborhood police? The answers here all seem like they're obviously no. So the concern that racial stressors in daily life are bad for people's health has just about zero connection to whether it's important to purge all corners of the internet of locations where racists can chat about their mutual racism.
Reddit isn't supposed to be StormFront, and minorities should be able to go to any site they please without being oppressed by racists. Not to mention Reddit is contributing harshly on its reputation in the real world since it looks like the people who run the show are racists, even if they are being apathetic about racism.
Racism can affect people in various angles negatively (self esteem, being othered etc), it's not a net good for society to let prosper anywhere.
Also, why draw the line at "they don't have to visit that website or subforum"? I mean, unemployment is low right now. Should be easy to find a new job if their current co-workers are racists. They could find a new job, so they wouldn't have to visit their current worksite. Again, it should be on them to avoid the racism; not on the people who have control over curtailing it, right? Easy peasy.
Also not to mention when you allow hate and racism in subcommunities and the like, that shit starts seeping into the community at large and lots of toxic shit comes out. And then discussion turn into shit slinging matches between the shitstains and the community at large.
Facebook has a more unique platform and higher market penetration, admittedly, but they're also hardly the only social media game in town.
Isn't this like saying a black person doesn't have to go to a restaurant where the people are racist towards the person because the person can just go to one where they aren't?
So it's not that black people are foolishly going into the "I hate black people subreddit" and getting unhappy. They are going to the "I love knitting" subreddit and getting downvoted and abused for doing something like knitting a Barack Obama doll and posting a picture of it.
Perhaps if I use "I" language it will be harder for you to grandstand quite so hard. So, take the example of r/AganistGayMarriage/, whose current front page is populated by such gems as:
"Debunked: "Homosexuality is healthy""
"European politican speaks out against sodomite promotion in our society"
"Lesbian Couple Convicted Of Murdering 2-Year-Old Son, Abusing Other Children"
etc. etc. etc.
I find it utterly bizarre to suggest that r/AganistGayMarriage is somewhere I "want to go," and so that our only choices are either taking it down or (unfairly) requiring me, the victim, to change my behavior. I have no interest in going there, for obvious reasons, and not going there doesn't sacrifice any of my interests. But okay--suppose I did go there regularly, and found it very distressing. I would think the very first question would be: "why the fuck are you visiting AganistGayMarriage every day?" There's a pretty obvious fix, here.
Subreddits are very obviously unlike workplaces insofar as visiting them really is a voluntary act oriented around optional common-interest discussion. Not going to a disgusting subreddit is not a meaningful burden.
There's a distinction there for a reason. And that reason is that racists, for better or worse, have free speech rights too.
Because bigots don't just stay in their corner. The whole reason that Reddit giving bigots a home is a big deal is twofold:
One, as gets demonstrated on a routine basis on Reddit, bigotry spills out of these spaces. The bigotry subreddits routinely push their bigotry into other subreddits, which is in large part why Reddit has developed the reputation it holds today. Bigots aren't just gathering in these places to be with the likeminded, but are organizing to take action outside of them to further these beliefs. And as they push out, this exposes the people whom they are targeting to their bigotry - which is the point of doing so.
Two, these places serve to indoctrinate and normalize bigotry. Look at how much commentary there is on "well, it's the internet/Reddit, what did you expect?" in regard to the support of bigotry on Reddit - this is what normalization looks like, because we don't treat these spaces as abnormal and thus something to be excised. Tube has a nuke on sight policy regarding bigotry here because he doesn't want it normalized. And normalization of bigotry and the resulting feelings of exclusion and othering also cause stress to those targeted, and push them out of the space, as we've seen with Reddit.
Also, Frankie's argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny. To flip the thesis around, there are numerous ways that I can be physically injured - and yet we don't dismiss injury due to violence perpetrated by another, but single it out for specific sanction. Why shouldn't we apply the same idea to stress applied to minorities via bigotry perpetrated by others, especially given that it causes not just mental harm but physical as well? Again, this is why Reddit refusing to tackle bigotry is such a problem - it has been the largest white supremacy website by both traffic and membership, and even today serves as an incubator for hate, which then spills out to the rest of the world - and then we have to clean up the aftermath.
The law allows a restaurant to kick out people who are being racist. I would have a problem with a restaurant that doesn't kick out people loudly being racists out of concern for the other customers. That the people who have a problem with the racism can go to a different restaurant with different rules doesn't strike me as justifying the first restaurants decision to allow the racism.
I refuse to allow my activities to fund the white supremacist portions of the website they have no problem with.
Maybe that's obvious and unimportant to those using the term, or it's an intentional disconnect that I'm missing...
Yes, perhaps if you make it about your personal experience then I will find it harder to point out that you're blaming the minority populace for feeling that a website supporting racists over them is moronic, immoral, and possibly racist itself. I find it supremely amusing that you want to finger wag at anyone here for "grandstanding".
Anyway, I'm not the arbiter of why someone would want to go to a certain subreddit. Maybe they want to see what is being said about minorities. I certainly feel you feel differently, and think they should just shut up and sit down, and stay in their own lanes, while the website they want to be on subsidizes the existence of discussion regarding their being killed en masse. Maybe they want to track down where something else they've seen on Reddit has come from. As was pointed out above, subreddits aren't sealed off clean-rooms. The users of those subs are not banned from posting in other subreddits. They can take the bullshit they learn, or are fed, on /r/imaracistdouchebag and soft pedal it in another sub where they're maybe just asking questions.
I find it utterly bizarre that anyone would think that's a good way for things to operate, but here we are.
Because (as several people have pointed out), a hate subreddit is very much unlike Vegas - what happens there rarely stays there. Just because you choose to not visit r/AgainstGayMarriage doesn't mean that you've cut off your exposure, because the people in these sorts of subreddits routinely push out into other, more mainstreamed subreddits.
There's a reason that bigotry on Reddit is routinely likened to toxic waste - it behaves much the same:
* It harms people,
* It damages the value of spaces it contaminates,
* Containment is expensive and prone to failure, and
* Ultimately, the best solution is to not produce it in the first place.
The point is that racism shouldn't be treated as normal, and the fact that it is treated as such is due to (as you note) specific pressures to normalize it. Again, this is part of why the statement in the OP is so important - nothing normalizes bigotry in a space like the person in charge saying "racism is A-OK here."
The content of speech shapes the structures of speech and vice versa. It's usually pretty obvious how the formal and informal structures of speech (like mod rules, grammatical construction, and idiom/convention/memes/etc) shape the content of speech but it's less obvious to many people how the content of speech shapes the structures of speech. Several people here have pointed to the suppression of speech by racist, harmful speech (for example, how racial minorities might avoid a forum full of openly racist speech). However, rather than frame such suppression as an exercise of epistemological power (who is and is not allowed to create group knowledge and norms), I've found that many internet libertarians frame the phenomenon as one of choice ("People choose to go to different sites/participate in different conversations"). The choice framing conveniently relocates speech suppression to the mind/body of the suppressed minority, rather than the racist/bigoted speech and speaker, while simultaneously absolving the racist speaker of responsibility (since it is the supposedly free choice of the other to not speak or speak elsewhere).
There are shades of this within the current Facebook privacy scandal. Facebook chose to commodify individual user's speech for private financial gain. Rather than take responsibility for the harm Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook created by the structural choices they made, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have tried to blame bad third party actors and the unforeseeable consequences of the technology. By actively removing moderation and judgment from advertising choices and promoted content, Facebook essentially ceded the public square to the worst actors during a critical moment in our nation's history. This error and the harm flowing from it cannot be erased by a few mock sincere promises to Congress to look into the problem and do better in the future. All of the tech companies creating public platforms, Reddit among them, should actively and openly participate in a public debate about the formal and informal structures of speech that should be universally adopted to foster the kind of dialogue and speech that will serve the public good.
Making no choice is making a choice. Tech companies cannot dodge responsibility by handwaving away the consequences of their inaction/action.
The people in those sorts of subreddits exist in our society, and push out into it everywhere. So what is your solution?
Under the founding principles of the U.S. , at least, their views can't be rendered illegal to express, nor can they be punished for holding them. Therefore a private company (e.g. reddit) cannot be legally compelled to get rid of them or actively exclude them.
Like, I think we all agree that racism is bad, racists are assholes and worse, but there's no tools we can give the government to curtail their freedom of expression that won't/can't be used to also curtail freedom of expression of progressive views as well.
This post is heavy on rhetoric and light on substance. For instance, I don't see the existence of r/AganistGayMarriage as reddit "supporting homophobes over me"--a phrasing that prejudges the very issue at hand, namely whether I have some kind of right or interest to get that forum shut down. Reddit is only supporting them over me if we already assume that my request that they be shut down is reasonable.
Suppose I went to my local community center or event space and wandered into a meeting of the local Republican Party chapter. Suppose they're talking about how they want to end food stamps, or amend the constitution to forbid affirmative action and abortion, and I get really upset. So what? That's a meeting space dedicated to Republican ideas, for Republicans. If I claimed aggrieved status in the interaction I would be being ridiculous. If hearing that stuff is too upsetting for you to handle, then yeah, it's fully appropriate to "stay in your own lane."
If there's so much cross-forum raiding that reddit can't sustain wholesome knitting subforums or whatever, I find it understandable why they would get rid of the unmanageable racist subreddits. I don't know enough about reddit culture to say (thought I suspect that I would have different standards here). Whatever. What I disagree with is that the idea of a safe space for me (whatever that comes out to) implies a right to make ~every~ space safe, even the ones I'd never go to, on the grounds that their existence and the people populating them offend me, or on the grounds that people discussing those dangerous ideas might even go out into the world and advocate for them. Sometimes it can be nebulous what a culture of free speech really amounts to, but if there's anything that's incompatible with it, it's that.
This is demonstrably false, as indicated by the number of democracies that have anti-hate speech laws on the books.
And while currently the government cannot do anything to punish individuals for having racist views, everyone else certainly can. That's what boycotts, advertisers pulling out, public shaming, etc. is about.
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Right, and the mods have stated this isn't about what solutions we can have the government provide to this issue.
So it's on users of Reddit to make it known that they do not wish to tolerate supporting a website that allows that discussion and content to be present on its servers. They should, if they feel that way, make it known that they are opposed to their being shown ads that the users of the racist subs won't see so as to subsidize those racist subs.
The idea is to push the idea as far to the fringe as is possible. To make it known that racism and the support of the use of violence toward minorities is such an unacceptable idea that we won't be having that kind of conversation on Reddit.
Will there still be a Stormfront? Probably, yup, but that does not mean that Reddit needs to have their own subs full of similar bullshit.
Basically: perfect should not be the enemy of good. Just because we can't wipe out racism on the Internet in one fell swoop doesn't mean we should not try to remove it from discourse when and where we can.