
Things to Love About Reddit’s First Transparency Report - jedberg
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/7-things-love-about-reddits-first-transparency-report
======
mattbee
"According to the report, reddit received 33 requests to remove content ... to
do with alleged defamation. reddit stood by its users and refused to comply
with any of these requests."

Good on Reddit for not being swayed, but they'd better keep their servers out
of the UK.

Here in the "libel capital of the world" hosting providers are treated as co-
publishers of allegedly libellous content once we've been notified of it on
our network. We _have_ to act, though many complainants don't really
understand the precedent and try to hand-wave us into taking down a whole site
without giving any specifics.

I wrote [https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2010/02/07/adventures-in-
libel-o...](https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2010/02/07/adventures-in-libel-or-why-
i-wont-read-your-forum) in 2010 though Simon Singh's case
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Chiropractic_Associatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Chiropractic_Association_v_Singh)
was a precedent that improved things.

~~~
erglkjahlkh
Also, they are not mentioning the cases where the SJW subreddits have
terrorized the moderators and admins to delete complete subreddits. It's like
if those incidents never existed.

~~~
sergiotapia
Don't know why your comment is being voted down. It's been known that the
Reddit administrators will delete any and everything criticizing tumblr-esque
sjw. It's been a long time coming but the mental image I had of Reddit was
tarnished.

Ideal world: Reddit admins would only delete things that are illegal according
to the local laws where their servers are located. Then they would only focus
on making sure the platform works and leave the content policing to moderators
of individual subreddits.

~~~
jedrek
And yet there are tons of those subs around, how's thar work?

~~~
rmc
It's almost like that's a made up fantasy?

~~~
jedrek
Caught in a landslide, no escape to reality

------
UnoriginalGuy
One of the things that irks me about current US policing is that police use
tactics which imply they have more authority than they have (e.g.
administrative subpoenas, demands for information, demands with withhold
information, etc) and never (that I know of) get into legal trouble for doing
so...

In fact in the current system such demands are not only legal but are
rewarded. Police will call the resulting evidence "voluntary" even if the
company had no idea it was volunteering anything (and thought, often because
they didn't hire a lawyer, it was required).

Small companies in particular who don't have a staff lawyer, and who don't
want to spend a thousand dollars in fees to check an incoming request, are
particularly susceptible. Even if they do have a lawyer on retainer, that
lawyer may not specialise in this type of law.

------
ipsin
Wait, administrative subpoenas are actually non-binding? I would like to know
more.

Given how widely they're used in the U.S., spreading the word that you can
just _ignore_ them seems like a good idea. If that's true.

------
tomp
Let's not forget that Reddit was censoring the Fappening subreddits, along
with plenty of other censorship on a smaller scale (usually censoring specific
stories in some subreddits, which is done by the moderators of said
subreddits, but in the case of default subreddits, it's de facto approved by
the company). Sometimes, censorship and privacy attacks by internal actors is
as big a threat as external attacks.

~~~
raldi
And other times, the benefits of censorship outweigh the costs. I believe that
stolen naked pictures is one of those situations. Moderators "censoring" spam
and off-topic submissions is another.

~~~
just_athrowaway
Not sure if you're disagreeing with tomp's comment or just changing the
subject.

TwoX is a default and at least before I quit the site a contrary view in that
sub was likely to earn a shadowban. I understand the mods have to deal with
trolls but when contrary viewpoints are being censored as "trolling" it's gone
too far.

The toxicity of the reddit's "social justice" movement and SRS in particular
is poisoning the site and making discourse about controversial topics nearly
impossible.

~~~
DanBC
I thought shadowbans were implemented by admins and admin tools and not by
mods.

Has that changed?

~~~
8note
no, reddit's ban types just aren't well publicised

------
dreamdu5t
Why should I care about any of this? Serious question. Transparency is double-
speak. It's marketing and branding for the demographic that Reddit caters to.

Notifying users of requests by law enforcement that they are legally allowed
disclose is just stupid. What matters is the nature of the requests - not the
number of them!

------
blahedo
Interesting: in this article, EFF praises Reddit for its quick publication:
"Published within 30 days of the reporting period.... That means more recent,
and potentially more relevant data." But in the FAQ about warrant canaries,
also published by EFF (and linked from this article), they recommend
otherwise: "How often should an ISP publish the warrant canary? Various ISPs
have published canaries on a wide range of schedules. To allow time to file a
case and for the court to rule on the important legal questions, we suggest at
least few months between the transparency report and the time period covered."

So it's not really clear what the best practice is here.

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
Reddit has never had a warrant canary, so the recommendations on that page
have little bearing on this. Even if reddit did get a couple of NSLs, it gets
so many actual requests for information that it grants that there's little
reason to have one, especially given that it could report it received 0-249 of
them 6 months later anyways.

------
mesofile
Kudos to the reddit team for setting a great example. Given the relatively
poor resources of the site administrators, hopefully this will help to
disprove the idea that transparency is too onerous to be done thoroughly,
proactively, and promptly.

On a side note, I've been a reddit user for some years but this is the first
time I've noticed that the name is preferred un-capitalized.

------
aragot
Good from EFF to advertise companies who have a good behavior, but what
sensitive information does reddit manage? It seems to me like it's only logins
and IP addresses, so it's not like they are in charge of emails, maps of where
you've been/where you go and personal calendar, is it?

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Are how emails different from private messages?

------
gcb0
from a company that makes money by disguising paid posts. yeah. thanks for the
hypocrisy.

~~~
username223
Ahem: [http://i.imgur.com/FqxKmpX.png](http://i.imgur.com/FqxKmpX.png)

~~~
flycaliguy
I'm not entirely sure the comment you are replying to is correct but I believe
gcb0 is suggesting that paid posts are blended into reddit seamlessly. Your
image clearly shows several differing elements which distinguish an ad from a
traditional submission.

~~~
username223
My image _clearly_ shows several differing elements which _subtly_ distinguish
an ad from a traditional submission. I have trained my ad-blindness to skip
the HN ads, usually without even consciously reading the company name, but it
took training, just like it takes training to find the tiny "sponsored
content" disclaimer elsewhere. That's the point of "native ads" \-- to slip in
seamlessly with the rest of the content. If HN wanted to advertise openly, it
would use a different background color for the ads, and/or clearly label them
as such.

------
ryanlol
Why does this matter? Reddit isn't exactly the kind of company that holds any
important data worth a transparency report.

~~~
Maakuth
How about an IP address of a user posting something criminal?

