Thread by @robweir

So I’ve been listening off and on to reaction to the NZ shootings today, and boy do most of the media do a piss-poor job of understanding the core issue. I think there are two reasons for this. (1/?)

(I’m using “the media” here to refer to what I’ve read/listened to, which is pretty mainstream: NYT, WaPo, NPR, CNN). 2/

Reason the first: I don’t see many people in journalism who spend a lot of time on social media sites (or, rather, spend a lot of time on social media sites that have an extremist or right-wing edge). Twitter and Facebook can be well curated; Reddit and the (X)chans, not. 3/

I moderate (with about 40 other people) a pretty big subreddit, r/AskHistorians. Reddit has taken a fairly absolutist (and typical of tech bros/tech cos) approach to "free speech", which is “post anything as long as no one sues us." 4/

This is one of the reasons that Reddit admins just banned, f.ex, “r/watchpeopledie” and "r/gore” today. (Really, the website should probably just be launched into the sun; AskHistorians could be collateral damage.) 5/

It’s weird that we make the news when we do something eminently reasonable, such as banning Holocaust denial from a history forum: reddit.com/r/AskHistorian… 6/

(Brief pause while I tend to the 4-year-old) 7/

OK, anyhow. This is not a theoretical thing — in the past month or so, I’ve banned multiple people for Holocaust denial, as well as general racism/bigotry/incivility, American Indian genocide denial, and just generally breaking the rules. 8/

And it’s easy to see how people get radicalized: they just want to ask questions about whether Rommel was really a bad guy and what Hitler thought about Jesse Owens, and they wind up in super dark corners of the Internet. 10/

I’m not going to go into the whole “ironic” nature of Polandball and wehreabooism and Pepe memes — that ground is well tilled. But the point is that T_D exists cheek by jowl (until today) with r/watchpeopledie as well as AskHistorians and r/starwars, etc. 11/

(As another aside, watching the Star Wars fandom get trolled and radicalized by people because they dared to put a white woman, an Asian woman, and a black man in the franchise is depressing at best, to say the least. It’s also part and parcel of the whole thing.) 12/

(Kept messing up the SW tweet, sorry.)

Most folks I know who work in media either don’t know what Reddit is other than one of places we awkwardly crowdsource from; or know what it is & won’t admit it. Because a lot of Reddit is watching the train wreck and enjoying it, tbh. 13/

So I’ve worked in newspapers for 26 years now, starting when I was 15, and I teach journalism, and I will say that 99 percent of the people I know in the business are smart, and dedicated to their craft. & also live in a bubble that draws some weird conclusions about things. 14/

So this is point the second: I was listening to NPR do their Friday conversation with pundits, and both said something along the lines of “Well, social media can radicalize people but what do you do, we run into a First Amendment issue.”

Full stop. 15/

*No, you fucking don’t*, and I’m not going to apologize for the language.

The First Amendment bars the government from suppressing speech on most grounds.

Currently (thank the maker) Zuckerberg and @jack and the Reddit admins are just useless techbros, not the government. 16/

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are all private companies, and as such — like any private company — both have a 1A right to publish what they like, and *also* the right to decide what people can use their platform for. That includes banning hate speech and hateful users. 17/

So even if you take the techbro approach to free speech, which is basically “good drives out bad,” you have two issues: 1) do people deserve a platform; 2) do people deserve amplification?

18/

Our basic position on our corner of the Internet is “no, Holocaust deniers (etc) do not deserve a platform.” The objection is “well, if you push them out here they’ll just go somewhere else.” Our response is, basically, “good riddance.” 19/

Regarding the “other platform” argument — as Reddit admins have banned hateful subreddits, they’ve generally gone to places such as Voat.

Have you heard of Voat?

It’s the (checks notes) 6,368th most popular website in the world.

Reddit is no. 3.

19/

So even if Nazis and other idiots can find other holes to crawl into on the Internet, their reach is inherently less, which is a Good Thing. Throwing up our hands and saying “there’s nothing we can do” is … a thing? I guess? But not a useful thing. 20/

One of the fascinating things about these platforms is that they can choose what speech to display — they all operate in Germany, where they have to filter out Nazi content. But they choose

Again: They choose

Not to do that in other markets. 21/

Why don’t they? I have many thoughts, but a big one is probably that their “value” in the market is related to scale, and banning big groups of people chips away at that.

But vy allowing and hosting and amplifying hateful content, they contribute to radicalization. 22/

Somewhere in the bowels of Facebook, I’m sure some employee is writing up an analytics report on the livestream of the shooting and what it did for engagement.

I hope they feel really bad about this.

23/

The point is, this isn’t particularly difficult. We have about 40 mods, of whom many do other projects and don’t do a lot of comment removal/banning. And we keep a subreddit of 920,000-odd people free of Nazis. If social platforms wanted to do this, they could. 24/

Also: I am aware of that story that came out a week or two ago on Facebook moderators and how poorly paid they are/what they deal with.

But think that’s an indictment of a badly designed system, not of moderation in general.

25/25 also a lot of people are RT/liking/following. Thank you for listening.

I don’t have a Soundpatreoncampthing. If you liked this, give a couple bucks to the newspaper where I work? It’s a perpetual gift that lets us keep educating journalists. mizzougivedirect.missouri.edu/Item.aspx?item…