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What, if any pressure, has the current Whitehouse applied to Reddit, in regards to censorship?
Since it has recently been revealed that the Whitehouse pressures Facebook (and the FBI pressures FB as well), Twitter, Youtube into censoring American citizens, I wonder if similar pressure has been applied to Reddit.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/01/white-house-big-tech-colluded-to-censor-misinformation-lawsuit/
sorry I thought it was common knowledge that the Whitehouse coordinates with social media giants to censor American citizens.
As you clearly know, many people who lean left would disagree with that. In an attempt to convince them, or at least give people something to discuss, you should post evidence, and discuss context in more detail.
Also the entire "White house censorship" thing is irrelevant. Reddit mods have been censoring the exact same things, misinformation, right wing stuff, nazis, etc for a decade now just on a volunteer basis. Why does it matter if it's the white house doing the same thing?
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Mod here:
Top level comments in this thread as supposed to have a higher level of effort and length. For this specific comment you could elaborate on the examples of censorship and link to news stories about the censorship. Look at some of the other top level comments in this thread for examples.
Prominent news stories from the past week should count as common knowledge. Past some point, asking people to give references is just filibustering them.
This is partly to avoid a race to the bottom. If someone wants to write a top level effort post we want to encourage that. However, if there are already a bunch of low effort top level comments burning people out on the discussion then it can ruin the motivation to write a longer effort post on the same topic.
This definitely creates a tradeoff, where sometimes topics might not get any discussion at all because no one wants to write a top level effort post about it. Zorba and others in charge thinks that tradeoff is ok.
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I thought this was the culture war thread where we can say whatever we want whenever we want?
https://nypost.com/2022/09/01/white-house-big-tech-colluded-to-censor-misinformation-lawsuit/
No...? I'm not sure what gave you that impression. We don't forbid topics, but it's not "write anything you want any way you want". There are a bunch of rules at the top of the thread for a reason.
Just add more context going forward, I don't need the article now.
reported
you might want to rethink your approach here.
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Unrelated, I had no idea you jumped backed into the fray of modding. Ice seeing one of the OG crew from SSC days back at it.
Best of luck to you!
Ya, I offered to help during the website transition. I didn't want to see this community dry up, and the modding has always seemed like an important component of themotte.
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It's quite likely we'll get some actual information on it from one of the relevant legal cases at some point.
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I'm pretty sure the moderators of the big normie subs are mostly CIA.
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Personally I don't believe it's all that needed on Reddit.
Years ago I noticed something interesting related to GMO products. You could be in the most obscure sub you could think of and if you just mentioned GMO is a negative light at all, suddenly you'd get a 3 page post citing 100's of "scientific papers" proving how safe, or even healing GMO meat was, how anti-science you were, how evil, how much of a Nazi, etc. Pretty much the exact same post no matter where you were, but different accounts (as far as I cared to look anyway). Then if you brought something up (e.g. "yea but literally all of those papers you cite are from GMO companies?") then you might get silence for a bit, then seemingly instantaneously all over the site there would be a package response to that. It was such a bizarre phenomena but it was really like Beetlejuice: say "GMO sucks!" and they would appear.
Then came the 2016 election. All of the mainstream news subs were pro Bernie and hostile to Hillary (and to Trump of course, though he had that crazy meme sub at that point). Then Hillary won the primary and I saw the exact same thing happen with Hillary. The same Beetlejuice affect. You could be in /r/rollerskatesforpeoplewith3legs and say "those are cool skates but they remind me of Hillary Clinton and she's just not likable" and out comes the canned posts with all the exact same message stated the exact same way (e.g. "Most qualified person to ever run for president"... uh, what about a president running for a second term, wouldn't they be more qualified?). Highly aggressive. But this time it wasn't one or two it could be dozens of people or more. What made it stand out to me was how fast and how radical this changed. The die hard "Bernie or nobody" people seemed to literally disappear. Of course they were there but suddenly they were downvoted to oblivion.
I personally think reddit these days is 80% bots and "call centres" making comments. So there's no need to censor the site directly, just put backroom restrictions on what the call centres and bots are allowed to push.
NOTE: The above is purely from memory and I'm a human so some of it won't have actually happened how I remember it now but I think it gets the point across of what I was seeing and why I have come to this conclusion.
They are right about GMOs - they're just not that common, and the genes that are inserted are usually fine. Gene transfer just happens sometimes in evolution. Sticking a wheat disease resistance protein into a potato ... okay, so? what's the issue?
Now, selective breeding is entirely capable of changing crop characteristics on its own. And over the last 150 (and to an extent, tens of thousand) years, agricultural crops have been bred to be entirely different from their historical counterparts - more carbs/sugar and less of anything else, etc, to be more drought resistant, efficient at growing, last longer, look better, etc. This has, imo, made them somewhat less nutritious, and taste less good. Similarly, pesticide regulation, while much better than in the past, still leaves much to be desired - often a pesticide will be banned for having some subtle negative effect, and then a new one will be introduced that totes meets the regulations, then it'll be banned ten decades later, repeat. These are potential issues, GMOS are not. Same if you're a redditor who reads all the 'gmo good antiscience bigot bad' posts - surely some of them will believe it and then argue for it on /r/debate_everything_incesantly?
This doesn't mean there aren't people arguing - but often they're just people who genuinely believe it. If you're an ag scientist developing pesticides or breeding plants, you genuinely think you're making food provision more efficient, are following in the steps of norman borlaug, feeding the planet, etc, and genuinely think that pesticides don't matter much. And maybe they have an incentive to think so, and maybe anyone who cares too much and disagrees quits, but 'paid shills' (which also exist, sometimes) aren't always there. And even if they are ... who wins by pointing them out? Paid shills for your causes exist too, better to actually disprove their arguments, because they probably aren't shills!
You've entirely missed the point. It doesn't matter if GMOs are good or not. Based on the obscurity of the subs I saw this occur in and near identical posts (I remember going and checking similar posts because I initially thought it was the same person) demonstrates pretty well that it was bots/astroturfing. Which was what my post was about.
Second of all, the issue with GMOs are not really about if it's healthy or not. The problem is companies owning DNA and we've already seen ugly fall out from this. It will only get worse. I'm not prepared to advocate a total ban on all patents, as some do, but I think we should at least be able to say that DNA must be public information and cannot be patented.
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The GMO might just be the fact that it's a part and part of the whole "I-fucking-love-science" technologist mindset (along with nuclear power, vaccination and some other similar topics, also discussed here) that's shared by a lot of nerds, which would tend to form an oversized share of Redditors, as they might be expected to do on online longform debate forums generally. I mean, I generally support nuclear power and vaccination, as well as GMOs, but I also readily recognize there are people who go beyond supporting them to making them shibboleth cure-alls for a variety of global problems with pretty much zero possible downsides, and who also readily search for perceived anti-technology heretics (hippies, conspiracy theorists, other general "Luddites") to struggle with; much of the COVID vaccination debate was fuelled by this, and it was obvious a lot of people supporting vaccine mandates did so not only or even primarily because they thought it would help fight COVID but also because it was a good way to punish those fucking idiot antivaxxers, a convenient online punching bag for years and years before Covid.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if there were also GMO company bots shilling their products online, but the general pro-GMO online atmosphere also creates a fertile soil (pun not intended) for that shilling to succeed.
I also encountered a GMO astroturf account on an low-traffic local sub -- I'm fairly sure it was a real person, and it did encourage organic response from IFLS types you describe -- but if you looked at the post history it was all "arguing about GMOs on obscure subreddits".
I'm shocked that anyone finds Reddit important enough to run this sort of op on, but I'm pretty convinced that some people are either paid to do it, or both organized and ideological enough as a group to spend time repeating talking points.
Another example -- I have it on reasonably credible authority that the youth wing of the Liberal Party of Canada distributes specific talking points which its members then astroturf on the national and provincial subs whenever there's a controversy; you can see this because it's usually some legalistic nitpick that's repeated word for word by different (legitimate seeming) user accounts to create the impression of "politics as usual, nothing to see here, Conservatives are just too dump to understand what's happening".
I doubt that the LPC can afford to hire Chinese bot/troll farms -- but they don't need to because they have a readymade group of youngsters who care enough to do it for free. The key is the coordination of responses to create the impression of a reasoned consensus; again I don't see this as worth doing, because Reddit's userbase is overwhelmingly aligned with Young Liberals anyways -- but somebody important enough to coordinate this appears to disagree.
I am open to the possibility that better-resourced actors do something similar with for-hire agencies -- although this does seem like something that would eventually come to light in the form of "I was a Reddit consensus-manufacturer, AMA" type exposes.
Running that sort of op might also just be to generate cohesion among the liberal party. Propaganda goes both ways.
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I know what you mean and I saw that too but there was a certain kind of post, kind of a schema or template that appeared all over. Same arguments, same links (literally 20 or 30 or more), same reactions, same tone, different user name.
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I think it could be unnecessary, and still happen.
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Alternatively, people are herd animals and follow fashionable trends. The vast majority of reddit users don't comment at all, so a small increase in the number of comments from a particular sector (say, their candidate just won a primary) might look a lot like an entire site turning 180 degrees.
But what happened to all the people who were pro-Bernie and hated Clinton literally hours before? They should have still been there.
They follow what other people do - and - they want to get a non-racist republican elected.
The same happened with trump, right? Shouldn't all the anti-trump people have still been there after the primary?
You're telling me Bernie followers want to get a Republican elected?
sorry, was tired - i meant a "not-racist, not-republican candidate" i.e. a " non-(racist republican)"
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It's documented that some groups do use bots to push narratives. Search "Hillary Clinton correct the record" and you'll find no shortage of articles about her PACs spending millions on users to adversarially engage with any posts criticizing her.
I'm having trouble finding the exact article I'm thinking of but the WHO engaged in similar funding of online accounts to combat covid misinformation.
If your assumption is something like "why would anyone waste resources on social media botting/shilling, it must not be happening", then perhaps you should revise your priors accordingly since bots and shills are used to shape narratives around even utterly meaningless shit like Meghan Markle.
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Influence ops are definitely a thing. Your point may just as well be made to argue that they are easier to implement than one may think. I've seen a convincing paper analyzing twitter bot activity in influence ops around the war in Ukraine recently: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07038
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I doubt this. Reddit is very easy to manipulate so you don't need a ton of "bots".
That said, it's so funny to go in to like corporate subs whenever they release a shit product, like Google with the Pixel 6, and look at the shill threads and comments. It's is so incredibly transparent.
You may not need it, but it seems highly unlikely to me that various actors wouldn't be out there trying to insure their voice wins out. Look at Twitter: the bot count seems to be higher than previously thought.
I'm not saying that there aren't bots, I'm saying that you don't need a ton on Reddit because the website's design makes manipulation easy and requires far less engagement than sites like Twitter.
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Blended automated/real user accounts (shares, upmodding/downmodding, low effort dunks automated, while a real user or users adapts a script in more complicated posts) are apparently the current meta in this kind of thing. And it jives with how you'll see some seemingly canned longpost response on a topic like Covid or Ukraine from an account whose entire history is football subreddits.
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/r/stadia comes to mind. It’s very creepy how almost everyone on there is so emotionally invested over a unremarkable service that lets you play a small selection of video games on your chrome device. Sort by top to see the sub constantly fluctuate between wailing and gnashing of teeth over dwindling user base to euphoric highs when Google pushes a update (rare).
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