Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet How do we fix life online without limiting free speech?

 

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Since most of you here are barely literate I took the liberty of highlighting a few excerpts from the article:

 

Spez on Spezgiving:

 

On November 23, 2016, shortly after President Trump’s election, Huffman was at his desk, in San Francisco, perusing the site. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Reddit’s administrators had just deleted a subreddit called r/Pizzagate....The reason for the ban, according to Reddit’s administrators, was not the beliefs of people on the subreddit, but the way they’d behaved—specifically, their insistence on publishing their enemies’ private phone numbers and addresses, a clear violation of Reddit’s rules. The conspiracy theorists, in turn, claimed that they’d been banned because Reddit administrators were part of the conspiracy.....Other Pizzagaters stayed and regrouped on r/The_Donald, a popular pro-Trump subreddit......Huffman’s is Spez. As he scanned The_Donald, he noticed that hundreds of the most popular comments were about him:

“fuck u/spez”

“u/spez is complicit in the coverup”

“u/spez supports child rape”

One commenter simply wrote “u/spez is a cuck,” in bold type, a hundred and ten times in a row.

 

Huffman, alone at his computer, wondered whether to respond. “I consider myself a troll at heart,” he said later. “Making people bristle, being a little outrageous in order to add some spice to life—I get that. I’ve done that.” Privately, Huffman imagined The_Donald as a misguided teen-ager who wouldn’t stop misbehaving. “If your little brother flicks your ear, maybe you ignore it,” he said. “If he flicks your ear a hundred times, or punches you, then maybe you give him a little smack to show you’re paying attention.” ......Although redditors didn’t yet know it, Huffman could edit any part of the site. He wrote a script that would automatically replace his username with those of The_Donald’s most prominent members, directing the insults back at the insulters in real time: in one comment, “Fuck u/Spez” became “Fuck u/Trumpshaker”; in another, “Fuck u/Spez” became “Fuck u/MAGAdocious.”

 

On the reaction to Ellen Pao banning involuntary pornography:

 

His successor was Ellen Pao, a former venture capitalist. She lasted eight months. Early in her tenure, Reddit announced a crackdown on involuntary pornography. If you found a compromising photo of yourself circulating on Reddit without your consent, you could report it and the company would remove it. In retrospect, this seems like a straightforward business decision, but some redditors treated it as the first in an inevitable parade of horrors. “This rule is stupid and suppresses our rights,” u/penisfuckermcgee commented.

 

A few months later, Reddit banned five of its most egregious communities, including r/FatPeopleHate and r/ShitNiggersSay. Again redditors were apoplectic (“We may as well take a one way ticket to North Korea”). Almost every day, strident misogynists called Pao a tyrant, an “Asian slut,” or worse. (Yes, it gets worse.) She resigned in July, 2015. “The Internet started as a bastion for free expression,” she wrote in the Washington Post. “But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.”

 

Spez on t_d:

 

The_Donald, with more than half a million subscribers, is by far the biggest pro-Trump subreddit, but it ranks just below No. 150 on the list of all subreddits; it’s roughly the same size as r/CryptoCurrency and r/ComicBooks. “Some people on The_Donald are expressing their genuine political beliefs, and obviously that’s something we want to encourage,” Huffman said. “Others are maybe not expressing sincere beliefs, but are treating it more like a game—If I post this ridiculous or offensive thing, can I get people to upvote it? And then some people, to quote ‘The Dark Knight,’ just want to watch the world burn.”

 

The_Donald accounts for less than one per cent of Reddit’s traffic, but it occupies far more than one per cent of the Reddit-wide conversation. Trolls set a cunning trap. By ignoring their provocations, you risk seeming complicit. By responding, you amplify their message. Trump, perhaps the world’s most skilled troll, can get attention whenever he wants, simply by being outrageous. Traditional journalists and editors can decide to resist the bait, and sometimes they do, but that option isn’t available on user-generated platforms. Social-media executives claim to transcend subjectivity, and they have designed their platforms to be feedback machines, giving us not what we claim to want, nor what might be good for us, but what we actually pay attention to.

 

Spez on banning users and communities:

 

Still, Ohanian and Huffman never took their own rhetoric too literally. The site’s rules were brief and vague, and their unwritten policy was even simpler. “We always banned people,” Huffman told me. “We just didn’t talk about it very much.” Because Reddit was so small, and misbehavior relatively rare, Huffman could do most of the banning himself, on an ad-hoc basis. “It wasn’t well thought out or even articulated, really. It was ‘That guy has the N-word in his username? Fuck that.’ Delete account.”

 

As C.E.O., Huffman continued the trend Pao had started, banning a few viciously racist subreddits such as r/Coontown. “There was pushback,” Huffman told me. “But I had the moral authority, as the founder, to take it in stride.” If Pao was like a forbearing parent, then Huffman’s style was closer to “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it.” “Yes, I know that it’s really hard to define hate speech, and I know that any way we define it has the potential to set a dangerous precedent,” he told me. “I also know that a community called Coontown is not good for Reddit.” In most cases, Reddit didn’t suspend individual users’ accounts, Huffman said: “We just took away the spaces where they liked to hang out, and went, ‘Let’s see if this helps.’ ”

 

Spez on his political views:

 

“My political views might not be exactly what you’d predict,” he said. “I’m a gun owner, for example. And I don’t care all that much about politics, compared to other things.” He speaks in quick bursts, with an alpha-nerd combination of introversion and confidence. His opinion about Trump is that he is incompetent and that his Presidency has mostly been a failure. But, he told me, “I’m open to counterarguments.”

“I have biases, like everyone else,” Huffman told me once. “I just work really hard to make sure that they don’t prevent me from doing what’s right.”

 

The “snarky, libertarian” ethos of early Reddit, he said, “mostly came from me as a twenty-one-year-old. I’ve since grown out of that, to the relief of everyone.” The executives nodded and chuckled. “We had a lot of baggage,” he continued. “We let the story get away from us. And now we’re trying to get our shit together.”

 

Spez on how he intends to keep reddit's shit together:

 

Later, Huffman told me that getting Reddit’s shit together would require continual intervention. “I don’t think I’m going to leave the office one Friday and go, ‘Mission accomplished—we fixed the Internet,’ ” he said. “Every day, you keep visiting different parts of the site, opening this random door or that random door—‘What’s it like in here? Does this feel like a shitty place to be? No, people are generally having a good time, nobody’s hatching any evil plots, nobody’s crying. O.K., great.’ And you move on to the next room.”

 

Is reddit the tail or the dog:

 

“I go back and forth on whether Reddit is the tail or the dog. I think it’s a bit of both.” First, he laid out the tail hypothesis: “Reddit is a reflection of reality. People are enthusiastic about Bernie or Trump in real life, so they go on Reddit and talk about how much they like Bernie or Trump. So far, so good.” Then he laid out the dog hypothesis, which his fellow social-media executives almost never acknowledge—that reality is also a reflection of social media. “All sorts of weird things can happen online,” he said. “Imagine I post a joke where the point is to be offensive—like, to imply, ‘This is something that a racist person would say’—but you misread the context and think, ‘Yeah, that racist guy has a good point.’ That kind of dynamic, I think, explains a lot of what happened on The_Donald, at least in the early days—someone keeps pushing a joke or a meme to see how far they can take it, and the answer turns out to be Pretty fucking far.”

 

Leftist communities on Reddit often implore the company to ban The_Donald. So far, Huffman has demurred. “There are arguments on both sides,” he said, “but, ultimately, my view is that their anger comes from feeling like they don’t have a voice, so it won’t solve anything if I take away their voice.” He thought of something else to say, but decided against it. Then he took a swig of beer and said it anyway. “I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections,” he told me. “We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But, if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.”That’s a terrifying thought. It’s also almost certainly true.

 

Spez on the alt retards that descended on his Alma Mater in Charlottesville:

 

“I was on a plane when I saw the news, and I got really emotional,” Huffman said. He told his employees, “If any of these people are on Reddit, I want them gone. Nuke ’em.” This felt cathartic, but personal catharsis is an awful way to make policy. “Luckily, my team knew me well enough to go, ‘Steve, you’re pissed off right now. Let’s talk about it more rationally on Monday.’ ”

 

Early the next week, Reddit banned Physical_Removal. In Charlottesville, James Alex Fields, one of the white nationalists, had driven a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring nineteen and killing a woman named Heather Heyer. “This is a good thing,” the top post on Physical_Removal read. “They are mockeries of life and need to fucking go.” Reddit had a rule prohibiting content that “encourages or incites violence,” and this was a violation of that rule. Huffman said, “We’d had our eye on that community for a while, and it felt good to get rid of them, I have to say. But it still didn’t feel like enough.”

 

Updated content policy and banning communities:

 

“Encouraging or inciting violence” was a narrow standard, and Huffman and his team agreed to expand it. Four words became thirty-six: “Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise, do not post content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals.” This, too, required interpretation, and forced the company to create a non-exhaustive list of exceptions (“educational, newsworthy, artistic, satire, documentary”). Still, it made the team’s intentions clearer. Jessica Ashooh, Reddit’s head of policy, spent four years as a policy consultant in Abu Dhabi. “I know what it’s like to live under censorship,” she said. “My internal check, when I’m arguing for a restrictive policy on the site, is Do I sound like an Arab government? If so, maybe I should scale it back.” On the other hand, she said, “people hide behind the notion that there’s a bright line between ideology and action, but some ideologies are inherently more violent than others.”

 

In October, on the morning the new policy was rolled out, Ashooh sat at a long conference table with a dozen other employees. Before each of them was a laptop, a mug of coffee, and a few hours’ worth of snacks. “Welcome to the Policy Update War Room,” she said. “And, yes, I’m aware of the irony of calling it a war room when the point is to make Reddit less violent, but it’s too late to change the name.” The job of policing Reddit’s most pernicious content falls primarily to three groups of employees—the community team, the trust-and-safety team, and the anti-evil team—which are sometimes described, respectively, as good cop, bad cop, and RoboCop. Community stays in touch with a cross-section of redditors, asking them for feedback and encouraging them to be on their best behavior. When this fails and redditors break the rules, trust and safety punishes them. Anti-evil, a team of back-end engineers, makes software that flags dodgy-looking content and sends that content to humans, who decide what to do about it.

 

Ashooh went over the plan for the day. All at once, they would replace the old policy with the new policy, post an announcement explaining the new policy, warn a batch of subreddits that they were probably in violation of the new policy, and ban another batch of subreddits that were flagrantly, irredeemably in violation. I glanced at a spreadsheet with a list of the hundred and nine subreddits that were about to be banned (r/KKK, r/KillAllJews, r/KilltheJews, r/KilltheJoos), followed by the name of the employee who would carry out each deletion, and, if applicable, the reason for the ban (“mostly just swastikas?”). “Today we’re focussing on a lot of Nazi stuff and bestiality stuff,” Ashooh said. “Context matters, of course, and you shouldn’t get in trouble for posting a swastika if it’s a historical photo from the 1936 Olympics, or if you’re using it as a Hindu symbol. But, even so, there’s a lot that’s clear-cut.” I asked whether the same logic—that the Nazi flag was an inherently violent symbol—would apply to the Confederate flag, or the Soviet flag, or the flag under which King Richard fought the Crusades. “We can have those conversations in the future,” Ashooh said. “But we have to start somewhere.”

 

At 10 a.m., the trust-and-safety team posted the announcement and began the purge. “Thank you for letting me do DylannRoofInnocent,” one employee said. “That was one of the ones I really wanted.”

 

/u/freespeechwarrior gets a shoutout:

 

Some of the comments on the announcement were cynical. “They don’t actually want to change anything,” one redditor wrote, arguing that the bans were meant to appease advertisers. “It was, in fact, never about free speech, it was about money.” One trust-and-safety manager, a young woman wearing a leather jacket and a ship captain’s cap, was in charge of monitoring the comments and responding to the most relevant ones. “Everyone seems to be taking it pretty well so far,” she said. “There’s one guy, freespeechwarrior, who seems very pissed, but I guess that makes sense, given his username.”

 

Policy on dramas goto prescription for what ails you:

 

The woman in the captain’s cap said, “O.K., someone just asked, ‘How will the exact phrase “kill yourself” be handled?’ ”

“It all depends on context,” Ashooh said. “They’re going to get tired of hearing that, but it’s true.”