Thread by @arctotherium42

More on the 2016-2019 closure of the Internet. In 2015, Reddit, like YouTube, had almost no content policy beyond banning illegal activity, doxxing, harassment, and involuntary or underage pornography. By 2020, Reddit had purged political dissent from the site.

Much of Reddit's shift was motivated by one thing: that r/The_Donald, the hub of internet Trump support, could consistently reach and dominate the front page. Reddit repeatedly changed their algorithm and policies specifically to suppress r/The_Donald before banning it.

The first major crack in Reddit's freedom of speech stance was in 2016, when the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, was caught personally editing user's posts on r/The_Donald. He then changed Reddit's policy to exclude r/The_Donald from the r/popular Reddit homepage.

After Unite the Right in Charlottesville (October 2017), Reddit announced an expanded content policy against hate speech and banned around 20 subreddits.

In March 2018, Reddit began banning the (legal) sale of guns or prostitution in response to the Parkland mass shooting.

In September 2018, Reddit revamped their quarantine system (subreddits became invisible to non-members, killing growth) and began quarantining dozens of subs, including popular ones such as r/TheRedPill, for being "controversial" [ie, some activist wrote an article].

Also in September, Reddit changed its harassment policy from requiring fear for real-world safety to simply "anything that works to shut someone out of the conversation through intimidation or abuse," a much laxer standard. This led to dozens more subs getting purged.

In January 2019, many subreddits were banned for "anti-Muslim content" after the Christchurch shooting, including r/Gore and r/cringeanarchy, neither of which were political.

r/The_Donald, the hub of Trump support on the Internet with 754,000 subscribers, was quarantined in June 2019, as was r/frenworld (for using pepe the frog memes as coded antisemitic messaging). r/The_Donald was banned for good in 2020, along with more than 2000 other subs.

In numbers: in 2019 Reddit quarantined 256 subs, banned 21,900 subs, suspended 55,994 accounts for policy (as opposed to eg spam) violations, and removed 222,000 pieces of content for policy violations. Moderators removed 84.1 million pieces of content.

One of the more difficult things to find concrete information on was the role of power mods. By 2020 six volunteer moderators had autocratic control over 118 of the top 500 subs; these individuals tend to be leftist and plausibly more powerful than the actual site.

In 2015, Redditors were almost universally hostile to the idea of censorship or banning "hate speech." By 2018, a significant minority were in favor. By 2020, most dissenters having been banned from the site, a majority were in favor.

Today, Reddit is notorious for its doctrinaire leftism, but it used to be a very ideologically heterogenous site and the main discussion forum between different groups on the Internet. Nothing has successfully replaced 2016 Reddit for actual popular debate.

(Every single step of this process was encouraged, celebrated, and cheered on by journalists). Some sources/links: engadget.com/2017-10-25-red…,
socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-re…,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Don…,
researchgate.net/publication/34…,
deccanchronicle.com/technology/in-…,
digitaltrends.com/social-media/r…,
newsweek.com/reddit-quarant…,
vice.com/en/article/red…,
gizmodo.com/reddits-next-w…,
hal.science/hal-03609930v1…,
reddit.com/media?url=http…