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Judge rules YouTube, Facebook and Reddit must face lawsuits claiming they helped radicalize a mass shooter | CNN Business (www.cnn.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I agree with you, but ... I was on reddit since the Digg exodus. It always had it's bad side (violentacrez, jailbait, etc), but it got so much worse after GamerGate/Ellen Pao - the misogyny became weaponized. And then the alt-right moved in, deliberately trying to radicalize people, and we worked so. fucking. hard to keep their voices out of our subreddits. And we kept reporting users and other subreddits that were breaking rules, promoting violence and hatred, and all fucking spez would do is shrug and say, "hey it's a free speech issue", which was somewhere between "hey, I agree with those guys" and "nah, I can't be bothered".

So it's not like this was something reddit wasn't aware of (I'm not on Facebook or YouTube). They were warned, repeatedly, vehemently, starting all the way back in 2014, that something was going wrong with their platform and they need to do something. And they deliberately and repeatedly choose to ignore it, all the way up to the summer of 2021. Seven fucking years of warnings they ignored, from a massive range of users and moderators, including some of the top moderators on the site. And all reddit would do is shrug it's shoulders and say, "hey, free speech!" like it was a magic wand, and very occasionally try to defend itself by quoting it's 'hate speech policy', which they invoke with the same regular repetitiveness and 'thoughts and prayers' inaction as a school shooting brings. In fact, they did it in this very article:

In a statement to CNN, Reddit said, “Hate and violence have no place on Reddit. Our sitewide policies explicitly prohibit content that promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability, as well as content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people. We are constantly evaluating ways to improve our detection and removal of this content, including through enhanced image-hashing systems, and we will continue to review the communities on our platform to ensure they are upholding our rules.”

As someone who modded for a number of years, that's just bullshit.

Edit: fuck spez.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Yep that’s how the Nazis work on every site. The question is who lets them on these sites so easily to do this work on society. And why do sites fight for them to stay? Are Nazis high up in government? Is it the wealthy? Probably something like that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Part of the reason they get so high up on nerd sites (And Reddit at least started as a nerd site) is that they hunger for power, and the right people are too shy to seek power themselves.

This would all be greatly relieved if communities asked for communities to nominate other members, and asked for the type of folks who are the types who would mostly only consider the position of asked/ or if they were write-ins.

People with the capacity but are looked over because they maybe lack the ego or self confidence to take such power.

This works especially well in smaller communities under 4K users or so, which kinda falls apart in our Big Internet world, sadly...