
Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers - artsandsci
https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddit-ceo-cracks-down-on-abusive-content-to-protect-users-attract-advertisers-1510853654?mod=e2tw
======
flunhat
And from what I understand, it's been quite effective, too [1]. It seems that
removing abusive communities basically reduces the amount of abusive content
overall, because there's one less community where that content is acceptable
to share. So not as much of a "spillover effect" as feared, which is good
news.

[1] [http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-
hate.pdf](http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)

~~~
rightos
That study if I recall correctly completely misses the spillover to other
websites, considering only reddit itself - but bans on sites like reddit and
Twitter have lead to the rise of sites like Gab, 8chan and Voat in recent
years. The spillover is very real, just not on the same site.

~~~
zimpenfish
> The spillover is very real, just not on the same site.

Which is good - concentrate the hate speech into a single place and then take
it down.

~~~
ema
How would that help? It's not exactly rocket science to open up yet another
reddit clone for the untouchables afterwards.

~~~
zimpenfish
Sure but a registrar / hoster that has just closed one hate site isn't going
to let someone spin up another immediately. And soon enough they'll be out of
options.

~~~
tambienben
Your brazen support of censorship is troubling.

~~~
flunhat
Why?

------
adekok
Similarly, Youtube is demonetizing videos with "bad words". Such as referring
to "the naked eye".

See here for a deconstruction: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlRFoYr-
XuY&t=306s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlRFoYr-XuY&t=306s)

This kind of censorship is nice, until it turns into censorship of "things the
company dislikes", versus "bad / illegal things."

See recent vidcon for an example. Despite rules against harassment, a panelist
out-and-out harassed an attendee... and the organizers did nothing.

This shows that power and political agendas trump peopl's alleged morality.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
I’m not familiar with vidcon- can you provide a link to the incident?

~~~
j_s
[https://medium.com/@VidCon/vidcon-
debrief-e6bb4e187a28#5f56](https://medium.com/@VidCon/vidcon-
debrief-e6bb4e187a28#5f56)

I think this observation summarizes even this thread:

> _do not violate harassment policies, but the result is often that the
> vitriol of their followers ends up focused not on ideas, but on people_

I was looking for any attempt at a neutral-ish video of the incident but came
up empty.

~~~
adekok
The video taken by the "harassers" at vidcon seems pretty clear.

Were they forbidden from attending vidcon because of their alleged history of
harassment of the panelists? _No_.

Do they get kicked out of vidcon for violating the rules? _No_.

Does the panelist violate the rules by calling them out and insulting them
publicly? _Yes_.

So... let's say Sargon and his ilk _are_ terrible people. Shall we destroy the
rule of law to "get" him?

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Bolt](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Bolt)

\---

 _Roper:_ So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

 _More:_ Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after
the Devil?

 _Roper:_ I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

 _More:_ Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you
— where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted
thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut
them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could
stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil
benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

\---

I am disturbed by the fascination with witch-hunts. My attempts here to ask
people to explain themselves have resulted in no explanations (of course).
Just accusations.

Well, if those people are so bad, then the rule of law should allow them to be
banned and/or punished. If they're not that bad, then the rule of law should
be followed. If we're not going to follow the rule of law, then why pretend to
have rules?

Maybe I'm weird... but none of that makes any sense to me.

~~~
j_s
I tried to avoid gigantic quotes from the Vidcon Medium post I linked
previously, but I'm assuming you read this:

 _Our founder, Hank Green, talked with our panelist and said two things:

1\. He told her that her comment had violated our policy, but that he
understood that there was a broader context (which to be clear, we were
blissfully ignorant of until this weekend, and remain inexpert in.)

2\. He apologized to her for not having been more aware of and active in
understanding the situation before the event, which resulted in her being
subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for._

> If we're not going to follow the rule of law, then why pretend to have
> rules?

Rules are an imperfect tool. People behaving badly while carefully staying
within the limit of the rules often run afoul of the intentions of the rule
makers; it boils down to trusting those responsible for rule interpretation
and enforcement.

~~~
adekok
> He told her that her comment had violated our policy, but that he understood
> that there was a broader context

Ah... so the rules _don 't_ matter, because excuses.

Look, if Sargon and his ilk _did_ something, fine, punish them. But so far,
the only response to my request for _evidence_ is insults.

And side-stepping the topic.

> a broader context (which to be clear, we were blissfully ignorant of until
> this weekend, and remain inexpert in.)

Which means that they didn't talk to the victim in this case (Sargon). Only
the abuser (Anita). Sargon said as much on Joe Rogan's podcast.

i.e. _accusation of guilt is assumption of guilt_. Evidence be damned.

> which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had
> not signed up for.

People who showed up and did _nothing_ and said _nothing_ to her. OMFG,
crucify them.

Look this whole victim complex is appealing. But did any of it happen?

According to _everyone in this thread_? Nope.

> it boils down to trusting those responsible for rule interpretation and
> enforcement.

Nope. If they show they're biased, I don't trust them as far as a shit-
flinging monkey can throw poo.

------
Pxtl
They'll have to dig themselves out of a pretty deep hole, reputation-wise.
While there are specific subject subreddit with fantastic content, most of the
regional subs they carry lots of news and politics have a well-earned
reputation for racism and xenophobia, and the more discussion-oriented subs
add in misogyny into the mix.

Only the subs with obsessively strict moderation like the science subs (or
/r/Canada politics) seem to succeed in discussing issues without hatred.

Meanwhile, Twitter maintains mainstream acceptance despite being the online
home of David Duke and various other infamous white supremacists.

~~~
Mikeb85
/r/Canada isn't too bad because that's how Canadians are. Even when we
disagree we generally try to be civil.

~~~
Pxtl
No, I meant /r/CanadaPolitics, but the name got autocorrected away. /r/Canada
is a hive of racism and getting worse since the last election or so.

~~~
Mikeb85
It's not a hive of racism, Americans just have become such virtue signalling
morons that they call everything racism.

There happens to be a middle ground on many issues. Debating immigration
policy isn't racist. Hell, even Emmanuel Macron and Merkel have started to
control migration. No country can accept all the world's poor. It's simply not
feasible. And the truth is, that is the concern that most Canadians are
having. The economy's not great, working class wages and jobs are
disappearing, the few places with good jobs have unaffordable housing, and
Trudeau's talking about increasing immigration.

You guys can talk about how everyone that wants to debate certain topics is
racist, but that doesn't change the fact that politics all over the west are
moving a certain direction. The only question is whether we'll simply adjust
policy, or wait too long and elect someone extreme as a knee jerk reaction.

------
malvosenior
I would love to see a statement from Reddit/Twitter... _explicitly_ stating
that they will remain politically neutral. There’s certainly content that
should legally be taken down, there’s probably content that isn’t advertising
friendly and could be taken down. It seems like these companies are being very
slanted in their evaluation of the latter category. Basically right leaning =
bad, left leaning = good. All I want is impartial.

~~~
argv_empty
The subs I've heard about banning were echo chambers dedicated to the idea
that "this group of people I don't like ought to be [starved|exiled|thrown
from helicopters|raped|enslaved]" and such things. If that makes you think the
policy is "right leaning = bad, left leaning = good," that says some pretty
nasty things about the modern right, doesn't it?

~~~
sillysaurus3
Ah, that's the crux: racism and misogyny are terrible enough that if you hate
it, you must be correct.

For me personally, the echo chamber on _both_ sides is enough to keep me far
away from both /r/politics and /r/The_Donald.

For example, you cannot say anything positive about Trump on /r/politics.
Nothing. There was a screenshot showing that there were 231 negative articles
posted and zero positive articles. It's literally propaganda, but from the
other direction.

Now, you can argue that you should fight the good fight and that it's immoral
to say anything positive about him. Sure, I sort of buy that: If Trump was
equivalent to nazis, then we should resist that from becoming a reality.

And yet he's not. From what I've studied of history, the climate today is
similar-ish to 1920's Germany. But if you examine the details of how the Nazi
party seized power, you'll find they held guns up to people's heads in order
to get various statesmen to vote a certain way. The German political
institutions were captured by popular vote, then by force. And as long as we
avoid the latter, the former isn't _necessarily_ an indication that fascism is
on the rise.

But it's hard to make that argument in this climate. If you try, you're
shouted down or misinterpreted or outright framed. And that's the central
issue here: When you become a zealot, you lose the ability to take advantage
of the opposition's good ideas. Are you sure it's true that Trump's entire
political franchise has had zero good ideas?

I'm worried that in the process of fighting Trump, we'll lose reason and
rationality.

~~~
te_chris
It's not propaganda if he's actually THAT bad. I'm being deadly serious. He is
not a normal candidate and claiming that it's biased because there are lots of
true stories about a bad person is a feature of our media, not a bug!

It says more about Trump's fans that they're willing to overlook his egregious
failings and attack and undermine quasi-impartial institutions just to point
score than it does about bias.

~~~
tomp
So... what were the _actually_ bad things that _actually_ happened because of
Trump (i.e. because of something he did)? In my view, much like with Brexit,
the fearmongering is way exaggerated compared to reality.

~~~
beepboopbeep
The purposeful gutting/disorganization of major federal agencies and
operations, the discrediting of the white house's statements, the undermining
of existing federal law (see: explicitly sabotaging the ACA), then there's, of
course, aiding and abetting enemies in order to win an election.

~~~
ThomPete
What exactly is it you mean these things show? Sounds mostly like you are
complaining about his form than anything he has actually done.

Is it worse than Bush administration who started a war?

~~~
beepboopbeep
I just don't know how else to tell you that these things are all very bad.
They, to me, should appear bad at face value. We clearly differ in the
perception of the world at a fundamental level.

~~~
ThomPete
Even if they are bad are they as bad as Bush starting a war?

It's claimed that somehow Trump is the worst of them all. From what you have
stated here do you personally think they are worse things than Bush starting a
war?

~~~
bllguo
I find it really hard to believe you're arguing in good faith. What is the
purpose of a comparison to Bush..? Even if the answer is that Bush was worse,
it does not take away at all from how terrible Trump has been. And we're
comparing 8 yrs of Bush to not even 1 from Trump, here.

Anyway - yes, I do think that conspiring with hostile foreign entities to
manipulate voters and undermine American democracy is worse.

~~~
ThomPete
Well believe it.

The purpose is to test whether the claim that Trump is somehow worse than
everyone else based on the mentioned examples of his bad deeds really holds up
to a sanity check.

I think your last sentence much better illustrates who of us are in good faith
here though.

------
infodroid
Someone needs to put a stop to this bad meme... On social media, advertising
is _not_ an endorsement of the content. This might be the case for traditional
media, but social media is different. Advertisers and platforms need to
recognize the difference, to accept the lack of control over user-generated
content as a feature, and to push back on unfair criticism. But perhaps their
real goal is increasing their control _over_ social media content.

~~~
geofft
Wait, what makes it different? There's the old adage that half of your
advertising money is wasted, you just have no way of knowing which half. Why
would you willingly spend it on putting your ads next to content you don't
want to associate with your brand? It seems exceedingly likely that this is
the half that isn't productive.

(This is also what I don't get about the Twitter fake-account-number business
and the YouTube videos-targeting-children business - if I were an advertiser,
I would have no interest in spending money advertising to bots or to young
children. I would prefer to pay for ads in front of 4 million users I want to
reach than in front of 5 million users, 1 million of whom I don't want to
reach. Why are advertisers not pushing back hard on inflation of account
metrics?)

~~~
infodroid
How we treat advertising on social media is a matter of convention, a social
negotiation. If we agree that it's just targeting demographics and not
endorsing the actual content, then that is what it means, and advertising
dollars wouldn't care about the content. The effectiveness of social media
advertising doesn't need to be sensitive to content.

And maybe it isn't totally different from newspapers and TV news programs.
Just like we don't associate advertising on news media with the often violent
and disturbing content of the news itself, we don't need to treat social media
advertising as endorsing its user-generated content. And in fact, we haven't
been doing that until the recent YouTube controversy.

------
godman_8
Yah, except they're hosting /r/The_Donald which has been confirmed to violate
Reddit rules. Just like Twitter they cherry pick for $$$.

~~~
Helmet
What about r/The_Donald violates the rules other than going against your
political preferences? There are left-wing sub-reddits that openly call for
armed revolution, violence against the "bourgeoisie" and the police,
destruction of property, etc; but I'm sure they're OK to exist, right?

~~~
josefresco
Ah yes, "whataboutism" \- it's almost like we're on The_Donald right now!

~~~
Cuuugi
You shouldn't berate someone for essentially asking to back up claims.

~~~
scrollaway
Asking "what about left-wing subreddits" is whataboutism. Nobody is claiming
bannable content shouldn't be banned because it's left-wing (except GP's
implication).

~~~
creaghpatr
crying 'whataboutism' is effectively ceding the argument I'm not sure why this
term has been plaguing HN lately.

~~~
mvf0
They learned a 'big word' and they use it to feel smart. It's like the time
Peter Griffin learned the phrase 'shallow and pedantic'.

[https://youtu.be/yetwdpsiM8Q](https://youtu.be/yetwdpsiM8Q)

------
brndnmtthws
When your business model is advertisement based, this is the inevitable
outcome. The users are the product, and advertisers are the customer.
Furthermore, non-government entities are under no legal obligation to protect
speech in most jurisdictions.

------
whywhywhywhy
_Actual_ abusive content or just abusive content Reddit staff dislike?

Some bullying subs have been rightly banned but major ones like /r/cringe
/r/srs and /r/cringeanarchy remain.

~~~
stevekemp
This is just like the banning of /r/jailbait, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc from the
the last time reddit "cleaned house".

Some of the most blatant subs will be banned, or quarantined, and despite
repeated calls for action things that are still-bad, but slightly-less-bad,
will remain. Until the next purge - including /r/srs, /r/the_donald, and
similar.

------
koolba
> Reddit also has a business incentive to clean up its act: It needs to appeal
> to marketers—and live up to its investor’s expectations. In July, Reddit
> raised $200 million at a $1.8 billion valuation.

> [truncated]

> Mr. Huffman didn’t give specific numbers, but said Reddit’s ad revenue had
> grown fivefold over the past two years, from a small base.

I'm sure given the scale of the userbase the property is worth something
substantial, but $1.8 billion for a 10-year old company that, AFAIK, has never
turned a profit is nuts.

Either 1) investors saw something in the revenue growth numbers that painted a
rosier picture about the future, 2) the entire valuation is illegitimate, or
3) the tech world is really that bubbly right now.

~~~
aaron-lebo
Yeah, it really doesn't make sense. Reddit was stagnant for a decade, never
made money, now they are taking on $200 million and scaling up?

Completely unjustified, people just want something to throw money at.

------
empath75
Reddit is swarming with Russian bots and they still have a whole network of
white supremecy and various hate subs, operating both out in the open and
‘quarantined’.

~~~
Cknight70
All these companies have been pushing this "Russia did it!" narrative with
very little evidence or reason backing their claim. My theory why the whole
Russian conspiracy is a thing is because its easier to dehumanize Russia as
"the bad guys" rather than face the facts of how many people are opposed to
you in your own country.

Edit: I'm not in denyal that Russia had nothing to do with the election but I
think Russia's involvement is grossly over represented. Its so much easier to
say "Russia did it" while ignoring why subreddits like /r/thedonald or the
right propaganda caught on so much.

~~~
aaron-lebo
If you really believe there is no evidence, you just aren't looking, or you
are very selectively deciding what qualifies as evidence. The reality is that
Russia is run by a guy who assassinates political opponents and whose glory
days were those of the USSR.

This is a long-running conflict with Russia. There really are issues in the US
that need to be fixed (as the Soviets gladly pointed out about Jim Crow in the
1950s/1960s), but Russia is also geopolitically smart enough to attack those
vulnerabilities. If you just sit down and consider why and what advantages
Russia would have in spreading propaganda, it is hard to believe they aren't
doing it.

------
bitL
So what are reasonable Reddit alternatives that don't act as outlets of banned
subreddits? Once you start banning stuff left and right, it's a slippery
slope, making large groups of population feel weird/forcing them to learned
hopelessness. It would be better instead to train some ML for content
classification, then set user preferences about what triggers them, and then
warn users that some submission might disturb them, requiring additional click
to see the content in question. There ML would be just a helper, not sole
arbiter-of-truth, and even an imprecise one won't have a stifling effect on
free speech.

Of course, if Reddit owners/investors feel they need to fully submit to
requirements of their advertisers, there is little they can do, and should
just max profit and see if they can survive with a lot less "love" from their
users.

~~~
cannonedhamster
How exactly does one put a warning on "Posting here may cause you to get death
threats, brigaded, doxxed, etc..."? I think Reddit's problems are that their
most fervent users are their biggest problems. They actively encourage trolls.
Whatever was good about Reddit needs a better site to go to.

~~~
bitL
You can simply blur the post like Quora does and by clicking on it it would
reveal. There is already one mechanism in place by voting threshold, but very
popular posts in certain subreddits might not be ad-friendly.

I am looking at social media as a form of reinforcement learning, especially
the exploration phase; by censoring it the exploration phase is significantly
weakened, leading to worse results in the end. So maybe evolutionary argument
would be to allow all kinds of crazy ideas (with some requiring a bit more
work to read), and let people themselves to decide which ones would be used in
exploitation phase? In the past when a single stupid idea was forced upon
everyone by authority (e.g. nazis), people didn't have any means to counter
it. With open discussion spaces some people might find excellent
counterexamples immediately, clearing the issue for millions right away why a
certain idea is a really bad one.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Reddit's problems go far deeper than just the type of content they have
though. Specifically, the fact that it creates a space for polarizing opinions
and encourages groupthink through the upvote system would seem to be anathema
to what most advertisers are looking for. Perhaps they can start running the
same advertisers as Alex Jones and Breitbart who don't seem to be as shy of
divisive content.

------
Cknight70
What I don't understand about this new trend of companies trying to make their
content "Advertiser friendly" is that those same advertisers seem to be fine
advertising during events like the Vegas Shooting. I'm just hoping this trend
of making your websites rated G dies off sooner rather than later.

~~~
dnate
I don't see the connection between the shooting and advertisers. If you are
American I understand that the Las Vegas shooting probably affected you very
much. There is a lot of violence going on around the world, so what do you
suggest?

~~~
Cknight70
I don't think advertisers associate their ads with violence when cnn reports
on it and I don't think they should associate social media websites with the
minority of offensive content they host. Reddit and YouTube aren't identified
by their edgy content.

------
SquareWheel
This article's content has nothing to support the title. It's just an empty
retelling of the site's last year's history.

What's actually being reported here? Feels like clickbait.

------
Razengan
Any other non-Americans just fed up with this peurile black-and-white, Left-
vs-Right tribalism that all discussions of US politics have seemingly devolved
into over the last few years?

It’s like watching a bizarre caricature of some dystopian satire.

~~~
stevenwoo
I follow UK politics a bit and am American and have difficulty seeing any
substantive difference between the right/left divide in the UK and the USA,
but I am only reading the BBC headlines. In the USA, many people can trace the
right left not working together to 1990's or so with Newt Gringrich, so it's
not a recent phenomena either.

------
threepipeproblm
But who will protect the users from Reddit's CEO, who has admitted to editing
posts to make his arguments look better, and suffered no consequences?

