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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.
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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