
Reddit reports 18% reduction in hate content after banning nearly 7k subreddits - theBashShell
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/20/21376957/reddit-hate-speech-content-policies-subreddit-bans-reduction
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justchilly
Said differently: "Reddit banned nearly 7,000 subreddits, but left alone the
ones that contribute 82% of hate content."

That seems like a dismal result, practically an admission that many of the
bans were unjustified and/or subs that should have been banned were not.

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pietrovismara
The last bunch of bans was simply a leftist purge, banning several subreddits
that at most advocated violence against landlords, not really a "minority".

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Someone1234
Calls for violence have been against Reddit's policy forever, and is also
often illegal. It has nothing to do with minority status.

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chromedev
Anyone remember them saying in their ToS that hate speech is okay as long as
it isn't against a group considered to be the minority?

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antiterra
To be fair to their intentions, the the cultural meaning is different based on
social context. This is why successfully policing content on a global or even
national social media site is nigh impossible.

When a woman is recounting frustration at being talked over during a meeting
and says "kill all men," there's a non-literal connotation based in a belief
in patriarchal suppression.

When a man says "kill all women" it reads darker, based on a belief that men
subject women to violence specifically based on their gender/sexuality. Even
if it's clearly not meant to be taken literally, there's still a dark
underpinning culturally (e.g. see Marilyn Manson's 'I Want to Kill You Like
They Do in The Movies’)

As a result, "kill all women" is much less likely to be said in mixed company;
the more common communication discriminating against women will be longer
form, and not easily string-matched.

Therefore, with 'even' enforcement, an offhand complaint about men's place in
society will often instantly trigger an automatic deletion/ban, while a
misogynistic screed will require human review to be removed.

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SpicyLemonZest
But everyone says "oh you're missing the context" when challenged on their
hateful rhetoric, and no targeted group enjoys being told they ought to die. I
don't really see why anyone should be allowed to spread hate speech, even if
they don't mean it literally or it doesn't "read darker".

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happytoexplain
I don't read the parent as advocating the opinion that the people subjected to
the "less dark" form shouldn't consider it a kind of hate speech or shouldn't
feel offended by it. The context is moderation, and why it makes sense to
treat the cases differently - that doesn't mean simply always allowing one and
always disallowing the other. The point is that prudent and pragmatic
judgement is necessary.

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SpicyLemonZest
That doesn't really change my perspective. I'd be very frustated if a
moderator told me "well, we generally don't allow hate speech, but let's be
prudent and allow it when it's targeted at you".

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gruez
>The company also says that half (48 percent) of all hateful content on the
site was targeting a person’s ethnicity or nationality. That was followed by
their class or political affiliation (16 percent), [...]

"Hate speech" now includes your political affiliation? That's news to me. I
thought it's usually restricted to immutable characteristics about a person
(race, religion, gender, etc.).

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niyazpk
How is religion immutable when political affiliation is not?

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ip26
Race & religion are sometimes deeply entwined, see Jewish.

Imagine if Jewish ethnicity was a protected class but Jewish religion was not.
How would that even work in practice?

 _" I was not discriminating against the Jews on account of being ethnic Jews
but rather on account of their Jewish faith, your Honor!"_

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schwartzworld
When most people describe Judaism this way they are only thinking of Ashkenazi
Jews. My family comes from eastern Europe. We are not the same race as
Ethiopian Jews. Nor do we have the same food, music or culture any more than a
Christian from Mexico and a Christian from China.

The idea of race is deeply flawed and riddled with contradictions. it has no
real meaning in terms of genetics.

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ip26
Are you finding fault with my point or simply trying to expand or add color?

I hear a dissenting bent but am unable to connect your comment to the topic of
what makes immutable vs mutable characteristics.

Also, I cannot help but observe, whether or not race has meaning in genetics,
we cannot simply pretend the social construct does not exist. Therefore it's
still relevant & topical to discrimination & protected classes. It's literally
right there in the Civil Rights Act.

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schwartzworld
Yes, I was disagreeing with your description of Jews as a race. It's a very
askenazi-centric view. Jews experienced a diaspora a very long time ago and
are very diverse.

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chrisco255
Since there's no objective definition of "hate content", this is akin to them
patting themselves on the back for outright censorship based on their own
arbitrary definitions.

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cma
The_Donald promoted the Charlottesville hate rally, people with white shirts
and torches.

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s9w
white shirts and torches - that's so much worse than the BLM riots!

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cma
A small minority in both broke into violence (someone was murdered at
Charlottesville).

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gfodor
Just imagine what they could accomplish if they just shut down the site!

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GaryNumanVevo
Definitely could get 100% of hatespeech taken off it they shut it down. Not to
mention the absolute productivity boost to everyone working from home.

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whywhywhywhy
7000 subreddits only accounted for an 18% reduction?

What the heck is going on with that website.

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jfengel
It's a website with 138,000 subreddits. That sounds like a pretty conventional
distribution, where 5% of the site contributed 20% of the problem. That's
about what you'd expect from the Pareto principle, which says that 80% of the
effects come from 20% of the causes.

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salmon30salmon
More accurately would be to say Reddit reports 18% of hate content moved to a
different platform. This would be akin to saying "salmon30salmon saw a
reduction in hate content when he stopped attending hate group meetings".

While I appreciate any attempt to reduce hate, it isn't really something to
cheer in this case. The goal is to reduce hate, and pushing people further
into the fringes doesn't do that. Now instead of being part of a community
that has hate, but also positive information, the hate groups are going to be
forced into a more focused hate forum. It is a means to further push people to
the fringes which could further radicalize folks.

Essentially, Reddit etc. doesn't make people hate more, the internet just
exposes the hate that already existed. It is part of a larger cultural
problem. People don't generally become hateful after seeing 12 memes, they are
raised in an environment that breeds hate. Banning the subreddits _feels_
good, but it is not a solution to the core problem.

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pkulak
Everything I've seen suggests that removing platforms actually does reduce
this stuff. It's analogous to the argument that there's no point trying to
reduce suicides; people are just gong to do it some other way. But no, if you
put a barrier on a bridge, suicides really do go down in total. If you make
something even just a little bit more difficult, you reduce it.

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dcow
I don't think “places to be hateful on the internet” are in short supply.

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ebg13
> _I don 't think “places to be hateful on the internet” are in short supply._

Neither are ways of committing suicide, and yet stopping people from accessing
_obvious_ and _easy_ options does reduce the number of people doing it.

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dcow
I think it's a lot easier to be hateful, all things considered.

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davesque
I actually noticed this over the past month or so. It made a precipitous
difference.

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zalkota
The other 82% is /r/politics

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chromedev
Nope, definitely /r/conspiracy.

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moksly
I’m a sucker for conspiracy theories, like the Bermuda Triangle. Aliens
abducting cows and lizards living inside the Queen. I don’t believe in any of
it, but I’ve just loved that stuff since I was a kid. So I actually used to
follow /r/conspiracy, but I stopped around the 2016 election when everything
started being about American politics.

Not sure what happened, but it went from “the lone gunmen” to “angry American
central” over night, and the place has royally sucked since.

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Daishiman
It was taken over as a tool for political propaganda. Political operatives
realized that and have been refining this strategy.

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throwaway590007
Reddit hasn't been taken over by communist SJWs, they're just preparing for an
IPO. If you're unhappy that participating in capitalism usually entails some
kind of unaccountable censorship you should probably revise some of your pre-
existing beliefs about capitalism.

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oxymoran
We could banish 100% of hate if we just banished people entirely.

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p7hwfizeONj
Great idea. They could just shadow ban everyone and then have
/r/SubSimulatorGPT2 bots fill in the comments.

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jungletime
Will they an Vampires for hating the Sun?

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oxymoran
You

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bra-ket
there is still plenty of hate content there, mostly addressed against Trump
supporters and anyone who disagrees with BLM agenda and violence. it's a
radical left site.

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oxygenmolds
How much of that hate content was expressing politically inconvenient facts?

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ffpip
Bullshit. Hardly 100 were active of the 7k.

And they say hate speech against majority (which spez implied as straight
white men) is not 'hate speech'.

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jimbob45
So between Reddit, YouTube, and Google News, we’ve got a bunch of websites
that have become unbelievably and visibly corrupt but whose business models
are so difficult to replicate and navigate that no one else can do what they
do.

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striking
There are plenty of alternatives that lean towards freedom of expression at
all costs. I think the possibility of building another thing like Reddit has
been proven (even if less popular and on a smaller scale), IIRC r/the_donald
ended up moving to their own Reddit clone.

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jimbob45
Plenty of alternatives, none that can scale, financially or otherwise.

