Daily Bard Digest 2024-07-05

At 2024-07-05T05:39:59+00:00 on /r/changemyview with a score of yall:

If AgainstHateSubreddits violated the User Agreement, Content Policies, Sitewide Rules, or Moderator Code of Conduct, then Reddit would have shuttered us years ago —

But AHS doesn't violate the User Agreement, Content Policies, Sitewide Rules, or Moderator Code of Conduct. AHS is a group of people who documented the violent hate speech in hate group subreddits — which were, overwhelmingly, right-wing terrorist groups and White Identity Extremism groups — and we demanded a Sitewide Rule Prohibiting the Promotion of Hatred Based On Identity or Vulnerability.

And on June 08, 2020, Spez agreed. This is what he told AgainstHateSubreddits:

We shared our thoughts and intentions last Friday, June 6; your list and our list have a high amount of overlap. We'd like to show progress with what we do in the coming weeks rather than what we say. I'm looking forward to speaking directly with those of you participating in the Mod Councils. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and for all you do for your communities.

In the four years since, we've asked for, and gotten, a Moderator Code of Conduct — one which results in hate group operation teams being sitewide suspended and thereby decimating their ability to run networks of hate groups. In November 2022, the Moderator Code of Conduct instituted a rule against Community Interference.

The rule against Community Interference means that harassment groups set up to Make Reddit Die by extorting and intimidating moderators and communities, get kicked off the site.

Today, with Reddit Inc taking responsibility for a set of Acceptable Use Policies that shut down Domestic Violent Extremism, Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism, Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism, mafias, and other sociopaths from holding Reddit hostage, AHS serves as a guide and assistant to help people report those groups directly to Reddit, and a library of how bad it used to be back then —

So no one can get away with lying about it.

At 2024-07-06T03:31:22+00:00 on /r/politics with a score of yall:

So what happens if Biden drops out?

"Biden weak" — as asserted by Trump — confirmed. Trump gets a win. Trump controls the election without having any qualities that a President should have, and wins the Presidency by spewing lies and hatred.

Democratic party is confirmed weak by the transitive property. GOP gain points / credibility with low information voters. Fascism spreads.

You all need to understand that this is a fascist ascension, a political takeover. What the fascists want, you don't deliver. You fight.

History tells us, consistently, "Do Not Comply With Fascist Demands".

At 2024-07-06T03:31:22+00:00 on /r/conservativeterrorism with a score of 1 point:

"Networked violence" is a specific term of art for what we'd colloquially call "vigilantism". It covers conspiracy to commit violence using communications networks.

At 2024-07-06T03:31:22+00:00 on /r/conservativeterrorism with a score of yall:

👌🏻

👍🏻

At 2024-07-06T02:21:18+00:00 on /r/conservativeterrorism with a score of 4 points:

One of the problems of "give everyone free ID" is that such ID requires documentation showing the person is an American citizen — religious communities such as the Amish (for example) don't get birth certificates or Social Security numbers for their children, so (for example) people leaving Amish communities have difficulty getting proof of their natural American citizenship. Similarly for people who were born in poor rural communities.

Giving everyone IDs also doesn't solve the problem of suppressing the student vote, where laws are used to deny American citizens who reside near their University from voting where they reside — laws that demand they only vote in the place they moved from to attend University — often an immense burden if those states / municipalities don't accept mailed ballots.

The simple matter is that vote fraud is vanishingly small, and the right to vote is fundamental, and gatekeeping schemes like this are consistently used for selective voter suppression.

At 2024-07-06T02:21:18+00:00 on /r/conservativeterrorism with a score of 6 points:

He's a naturalised American citizen.

He might have lied on his immigration paperwork, but at this point holding him accountable for that is a political non-starter.

But holding him accountable for ☝🏻 this —

At 2024-07-06T02:21:18+00:00 on /r/conservativeterrorism with a score of 3 points:

Naturalised, yes. Can vote; can't be President.

At 2024-07-06T01:13:23+00:00 on /r/conservativeterrorism with a score of 5 points:

Voter ID laws have the effect of suppressing African-American voters, Native American voters, the poor, the elderly, and students — demographics that overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates & proposals (or, at least, don't vote for / vote against Republican candidates & proposals).

These laws don't stop vote fraud, which is cosmically low - just 0.00004%.

In the name of stopping ~200 likely incidents of voter fraud per national election, Republicans have consistently and repeatedly prevented hundreds of thousands of Americans from casting votes.

And here is Elon Musk, owner and operator and main character of the former-town-square-of-the-world, using death threats to intimidate voters leading in to the 2024 elections.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impact-voter-suppression-communities-color

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debunking-voter-fraud-myth

https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work/2014.10.09_Texas%20District%20Court%20Opinion.pdf

At 2024-07-06T00:25:16+00:00 on /r/ModSupport with a score of 4 points:

There was a group that did this same thing in 2015 using the same tech that powers grammar correction and autocorrect and text prediction software to farm karma, and populated their efforts in sports subreddits & game subreddits - anywhere that is antagonistic & polarised and also has catchphrases or cliches that could be reused over and over. They farmed accounts to use to astroturf pro-Republican / Donald Trump content, and they did it in volume.

By 2020 they had enough live trolls who had a sixpack of sockpuppets each.

Now, Reddit has CQS & the Reputation filters, as well as Crowd Control. Those are going to be the bulwark against a deluge of astroturfing this election season.

At 2024-07-06T00:25:16+00:00 on /r/ModSupport with a score of 2 points:

Reddit has open registration, and has always had open registration; a few years ago they started to rely on Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft to solve the "CAPTCHA" problem of fending off automated account creation.

Of those, only Apple really "solved" that problem, primarily by controlling what can run on their devices, which devices act as physical tokens.

A lot of adult content subreddits, as soon as 3-4 years ago, started putting in automod rules to filter or remove any comments or posts from a username that matched the pattern of a Reddit-suggested automatically generated wordworddigits username. Porn / s*x services spammers had cracked CAPTCHA on Reddit and were churning out masses of sockpuppets even then.

At 2024-07-06T00:25:16+00:00 on /r/conservativeterrorism with a score of 2 points:

While I was growing up, I heard a lot of "He needs / needed killin'" talk from adults around me. I thought "It must be so", because it was adults saying it. I later realised those adults were violent bigots, and the people they thought "needed killin'" were only people who weren't White Anglo Saxon Protestants. It's a goddarned KKK shibboleth.

At 2024-07-06T00:25:16+00:00 on /r/ModSupport with a score of 1 point:

Well. Not HaikuBot or the Grammar correction bots necessarily, but like,

When you open up Microsoft Word and type in "They ain't got good places to get to no more", for example, and the style wizard suggests "They don't have any place to go to anymore" —?

That's using the same kind of tech to make that suggestion that powers predictive text on mobile keyboards and even powers ZIP compression. It's an algorithm that was released into the public domain in 1989, and has been used to power a lot of tech.

The CQS filter works pretty well; I tested it out on several subreddits with various audience profiles.

At this point, any lack of proper grammar is probably a conscious choice, for the same reasons that 419 scammers use broken English. Style engines can make someone's written work output sound like any arbitrary target, to the point of impersonating that target. Doesn't even need AI.

At 2024-07-05T17:12:09+00:00 on /r/conservativeterrorism with a score of 5 points:

In April 2023, the Heritage Foundation published the 920-page Mandate written by hundreds of conservatives,[39] most prominently former Trump administration officials.[2] Nearly half of the project's collaborating organizations have received dark money contributions from a network of fundraising groups linked to Leonard Leo, a major conservative donor and key figure in guiding the selection of Trump's federal judge nominees.[31]

From Wikipedia

Surely, lying neofascist dictators wouldn't throw the administrative officials that are a threat to gaining power, under the bus, would they?

Siri, what is "The Night of the Long Knives" —?

At 2024-07-05T15:11:10+00:00 on /r/conservativeterrorism with a score of yall:

Our rule #5 is "No Meta", meaning no posts about Reddit.

If you find comments or posts that are racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc - please report them https://reddit.com/report