Amerika

Reddit has long been known for one-sided censorship that favors Leftists and punishes Rightists, which is why yesterday’s banning of the user “Marusama” seems off-narrative. This user had posted the following:

This is in response to reddit admins complaining about “Bash the Fash” comments.

And yes I did leak this from meta, but fuck it this needs to be made public.

Dear Reddit Administration:

No, r/anarchism will not remove comments with terms like “BASH THE FASH”. No, we will not meekly follow commands from the site administration with the threat of quarantine or deletion. We will not stand for the oppression of left wing subs on your site, and the overwhelming targeting of subreddits such as r/RiotsAreFun. We will not submit to the demands of administrators who allow subreddits which are actively hostile and toxic, actually advocating and providing instructions on sexual harassment and rape, such as r/Incels, r/TheRedPill, or others. We will not conduct censure of our subreddit on such a double standard, to administrators with a clear right wing bias. We will not censor ourselves to allow reddit a better appearance for advertisers. We will not block open discussion for the purposes of Reddit’s upper staff accumulating more and more capital.

To summarize, no, we will not take actions against users who make comments such as “Bash the Fash.”

Sincerely, r/Anarchism.

There are a number of problems with this unrelated to content. If users are able to get away with defying the admins of the site, it will encourage a mass revolt against the rules which will need to be resolved through mass enforcement later. It also probably wants to be out of the business of being anyone’s command-and-control center, especially after it was revealed that Muslim terrorists are using encrypted chat program WhatsApp to coordinate their activities. In fact, the latter may have been more on the minds of administrators than any freedom of speech issues.

As far as content goes, this one seems a puzzler at first, but then it becomes clear: Reddit wants to be a home for the bourgeois Left which now includes the working-class carnies who have used the power of usury to buy themselves middle class lifestyles who form the basis of Reddit’s userbase. This means there must always be one pinky lifted, and those who go too far into outright violence ruin the comfortable browsing experience that Reddit wishes to sell.

On the other hand, the optimists among us might see change: social media has now seen several firms verge on self-destruction by choosing to censor right-wingers and as a result, driving away many of the power users. Power users tend to be less active, but contribute more of the interesting content, and up until now, social media has favored more active users because it gets more ad impressions from them. However, the power users are what draw the others to the service.

As a result, social media may be heading back toward a policy of “capturing the middle” and discouraging extreme behavior of all stripes. In particular, as they find themselves censoring Right wing content but awash in radical Islamism and Antifa coordinating their next attack on teenage girls, social media may be becoming wary of those it considered an audience before that are dragging it down.

Tags: censorship, reddit, social media