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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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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.

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.

Personally I don't believe it's all that needed on Reddit.

I think it could be unnecessary, and still happen.

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