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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet How do we fix life online without limiting free speech? NewYorker... “The Internet started as a bastion for free expression,” a former Reddit C.E.O. wrote. These days, “the trolls are winning.” Illustration by Javier Jaén Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people online go where you’d expect them to go. The only truly surprising entry, in fourth place, is Reddit, whose astronomical popularity seems at odds with the fact that many Americans have only vaguely heard of the site and have no real understanding of what it is. A link aggregator? A microblogging platform? A social network? To its devotees, Reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last Internet giants to resist homogeneity. Most Reddit pages have a throwback aesthetic, with a few crudely designed graphics and a tangle of text: an original post, comments on the post, responses to the comments, responses to the responses. That’s pretty much it. Reddit is made up of more than a million individual communities, or subreddits, some of which have three subscribers, some twenty million. Every subreddit is devoted to a specific kind of content, ranging from vital to trivial: r/News, r/Politics, r/Trees (for marijuana enthusiasts), r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts (for tree enthusiasts), r/MildlyInteresting (“for photos that are, you know, mildly interesting”). Some people end up on Reddit by accident, find it baffling, and never visit again. But people who do use it—redditors, as they’re called—often use it all day long, to the near-exclusion of anything else. “For a while, we called ourselves the front page of the Internet,” Steve Huffman, Reddit’s C.E.O., said recently. “These days, I tend to say that we’re a place for open and honest conversations—‘open and honest’ meaning authentic, meaning messy, meaning the best and worst and realest and weirdest parts of humanity.” On November 23, 2016, shortly after President Trump’s election, Huffman was at his desk, in San Francisco, perusing the site. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Reddit’s administrators had just deleted a subreddit called r/Pizzagate, a forum for people who believed that high-ranking staffers of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, and possibly Clinton herself, were trafficking child sex slaves. The evidence, as extensive as it was unpersuasive, included satanic rituals, a map printed on a handkerchief, and an elaborate code involving the words “cheese” and “pizza.” In only fifteen days of existence, the Pizzagate subreddit had attracted twenty thousand subscribers. Now, in its place, was a scrubbed white page with the message “This community has been banned.” The reason for the ban, according to Reddit’s administrators, was not the beliefs of people on the subreddit, but the way they’d behaved—specifically, their insistence on publishing their enemies’ private phone numbers and addresses, a clear violation of Reddit’s rules. The conspiracy theorists, in turn, claimed that they’d been banned because Reddit administrators were part of the conspiracy. (Less than two weeks after Pizzagate was banned, a man fired a semiautomatic rifle inside a D.C. pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, in an attempt to “self-investigate” claims that the restaurant’s basement was a dungeon full of kidnapped children. Comet Ping Pong does not have a basement.) Some of the conspiracy theorists left Reddit and reunited on Voat, a site made by and for the users that Reddit sloughs off. (Many social networks have such Bizarro networks, which brand themselves as strongholds of free speech and in practice are often used for hate speech. People banned from Twitter end up on Gab; people banned from Patreon end up on Hatreon.) Other Pizzagaters stayed and regrouped on r/The_Donald, a popular pro-Trump subreddit. Throughout the Presidential campaign, The_Donald was a hive of Trump boosterism. By this time, it had become a hermetic subculture, full of inside jokes and ugly rhetoric. The community’s most frequent commenters, like the man they’d helped propel to the Presidency, were experts at testing boundaries. Within minutes, they started to express their outrage that Pizzagate had been deleted. Redditors are pseudonymous, and their pseudonyms are sometimes prefaced by “u,” for “username.” Huffman’s is Spez. As he scanned The_Donald, he noticed that hundreds of the most popular comments were about him: “fuck u/spez” “u/spez is complicit in the coverup” “u/spez supports child rape” One commenter simply wrote “u/SPEZ IS A CUCK,” in bold type, a hundred and ten times in a row. Huffman, alone at his computer, wondered whether to respond. “I consider myself a troll at heart,” he said later. “Making people bristle, being a little outrageous in order to add some spice to life—I get that. I’ve done that.” Privately, Huffman imagined The_Donald as a misguided teen-ager who wouldn’t stop misbehaving. “If your little brother flicks your ear, maybe you ignore it,” he said. “If he flicks your ear a hundred times, or punches you, then maybe you give him a little smack to show you’re paying attention.” “He’s unbeatable on carpet.” Although redditors didn’t yet know it, Huffman could edit any part of the site. He wrote a script that would automatically replace his username with those of The_Donald’s most prominent members, directing the insults back at the insulters in real time: in one comment, “Fuck u/Spez” became “Fuck u/Trumpshaker”; in another, “Fuck u/Spez” became “Fuck u/MAGAdocious.” The_Donald’s users saw what was happening, and they reacted by spinning a conspiracy theory that, in this case, turned out to be true. “Manipulating the words of your users is fucked,” a commenter wrote. “Even Facebook and Twitter haven’t stooped this low.” “Trust nothing.” The incident became known as Spezgiving, and it’s still invoked, internally and externally, as a paradigmatic example of tech-executive overreach. Social-media platforms must do something to rein in their users, the consensus goes, but not that. Huffman can no longer edit the site indiscriminately, but his actions laid bare a fact that most social-media companies go to great lengths to conceal—that, no matter how neutral a platform may seem, there’s always a person behind the curtain. “I fucked up,” Huffman wrote in an apology the following week. “More than anything, I want Reddit to heal, and I want our country to heal.” Implicit in his apology was a set of questions, perhaps the central questions facing anyone who worries about the current state of civic discourse. Is it possible to facilitate a space for open dialogue without also facilitating hoaxes, harassment, and threats of violence? Where is the line between authenticity and toxicity? What if, after technology allows us to reveal our inner voices, what we learn is that many of us are authentically toxic? The only way to understand the Internet, at least at first, was by metaphor. “Web” and “page” and “superhighway” are metaphors. So are “link,” “viral,” “post,” and “stream.” Last year, the Supreme Court heard a case about whether it was constitutional to bar registered sex offenders from using social media. In order to answer that question, the Justices had to ask another question: What is social media? In sixty minutes of oral argument, Facebook was compared to a park, a playground, an airport terminal, a polling place, and a town square. It might be most helpful to compare a social network to a party. The party starts out small, with the hosts and a few of their friends. Then word gets out and strangers show up. People take cues from the environment. Mimosas in a sun-dappled atrium suggest one kind of mood; grain alcohol in a moldy basement suggests another. Sometimes, a pattern emerges on its own. Pinterest, a simple photo-sharing site founded by three men, happened to catch on among women aspiring to an urbane life style, and today the front page is often a collage of merino scarves and expensive glassware. In other cases, the gatekeeping seems more premeditated. If you’re fourteen, Snapchat’s user interface is intuitive; if you’re twenty-two, it’s intriguing; if you’re over thirty-five, it’s impenetrable. This encourages old people to self-deport. Huffman and his college roommate, Alexis Ohanian, founded Reddit a few weeks after graduating from the University of Virginia, in 2005. The first people to show up were, like the co-founders, the kind of strong-headed young men who got excited about computer programming, video games, and edgy, self-referential humor. Reddit’s system was purely democratic, which is to say anarchic. Anyone could post any link, and the ones that got the most “upvotes” would rise to the top of a page. At the time, Facebook was available only to college students, and before joining it you had to provide your real name, your birthday, and a valid school e-mail address—the equivalent of being carded at the door. To join Reddit, all you needed was a username that hadn’t been claimed yet. You could start as many anonymous accounts as you wanted, which gave rise to creativity, and also to mischief. Back then, Ohanian was ungainly and clean-shaven, and he was often photographed in a hoodie and with a goofy smile. At his wedding, last year, wearing a beard and an Armani tuxedo, he was nearly unrecognizable. (The paparazzi weren’t too interested in him, though, given that his bride was Serena Williams.) Huffman, on the other hand, has always looked more or less the same: bright-blue eyes, chipmunk teeth, and a thatch of blond hair. A few months after Reddit launched, Huffman created the first constraints. People were posting links to vulgar and violent content—which was fine, except that Huffman wanted users to have some idea of what they were about to click on, so that they could avoid, say, inadvertently opening porn in front of their bosses. Huffman labelled some content N.S.F.W.—not safe for work—and separated it from everything else. That was the end of pure democracy. In 2006, Ohanian and Huffman sold Reddit to Condé Nast, a media conglomerate that owns more than twenty magazines, including this one. (Reddit now operates independently.) The sale made them twenty-two-year-old millionaires, but they didn’t fit in at a large corporation, and three years later they left. In their absence, the party got bigger and weirder, and ominous cliques started to gather in the corners. One popular subreddit, r/Jailbait, was devoted to sexually suggestive photos of young-looking women. This was profoundly creepy, but probably not illegal—the subreddit’s users swore that all the women in the photos were eighteen or older—and Reddit allowed the community to grow. In September of 2011, Anderson Cooper discussed the subreddit on CNN. “It’s pretty amazing that a big corporation would have something like this, which reflects badly on it,” he said. Traffic to Jailbait quadrupled overnight. Twelve days later, after someone in the group apparently shared a nude photo of a fourteen-year-old girl, the community was banned. And yet the founder of Jailbait, an infamous troll who went by u/Violentacrez, was allowed to stay on Reddit, as were some four hundred other communities he’d created—r/Jewmerica, r/ChokeABitch, and worse. (Yes, it gets worse.) Yishan Wong, an engineer who had worked at Facebook, was then Reddit’s C.E.O. He implied that he’d banned Jailbait only because the subreddit had violated U.S. law. “We stand for free speech,” he wrote in an internal post, in 2012. Reddit’s goal, he continued, was to “become a universal platform for human discourse.” Therefore, “it would not do if, in our youth, we decided to censor things simply because they were distasteful.” At the time, Wong’s free-speech absolutism was ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. Twitter’s executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Facebook’s original self-description, “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges,” had evolved into a grandiose mission statement: “Facebook gives people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” With the Arab Spring fresh in everyone’s mind, few questioned the assumption that “giving people the power” would inevitably lead to social progress. Barack Obama, who had been carried into office by a social-media groundswell, often expressed a similar optimism about the salubrious effects of the Internet. “In the twenty-first century, information is power,” Obama said in a 2011 speech on Middle East policy. “The truth cannot be hidden. . . . Such open discourse is important even if what is said does not square with our worldview.” Wong left the company in 2014, after two and a half years. His successor was Ellen Pao, a former venture capitalist. She lasted eight months. Early in her tenure, Reddit announced a crackdown on involuntary pornography. If you found a compromising photo of yourself circulating on Reddit without your consent, you could report it and the company would remove it. In retrospect, this seems like a straightforward business decision, but some redditors treated it as the first in an inevitable parade of horrors. “This rule is stupid and suppresses our rights,” u/penisfuckermcgee commented. A few months later, Reddit banned five of its most egregious communities, including r/FatPeopleHate and r/ShitNiggersSay. Again redditors were apoplectic (“We may as well take a one way ticket to North Korea”). Almost every day, strident misogynists called Pao a tyrant, an “Asian slut,” or worse. (Yes, it gets worse.) She resigned in July, 2015. “The Internet started as a bastion for free expression,” she wrote in the Washington Post. “But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.” Over time, social networks have turned into institutions. More than two billion people now use Facebook. In other words, the company has achieved its mission of making the world more connected. In 2016, that meant, among other things, making the American electorate more connected to white supremacists, armed militias, Macedonian fake-news merchants, and micro-targeted campaign ads purchased in rubles. “I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be President,” Obama said that year, despite the mounting aggression in some online forums. “And the reason is because I have a lot of faith in the American people.” (In response to Obama’s remarks, a commenter on The_Donald wrote, “FUCK THAT LOW ENERGY CUCK!”) Shortly after the election, Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s top digital strategist, told Wired, “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing.” Reddit was also an important part of Trump’s strategy. Parscale wrote—on Reddit, naturally—that “members here provided considerable growth and reach to our campaign.” The_Donald, in particular, proved a fecund host cell for viral memes. On July 2, 2016, Trump tweeted a photo collage of Hillary Clinton, piles of cash, and the phrase “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” written inside a six-pointed star. When Trump’s critics called attention to the image’s anti-Semitic implications, The_Donald’s users rushed to Trump’s defense, posting photos of other six-pointed stars in innocuous contexts. “Where is the outrage from the liberal left on this one?” a user wrote, beneath a photo of a “Frozen”-themed sticker book with a star on its cover. A few hours later, Trump tweeted the same photo, with a version of the same question, followed by “Dishonest media! #Frozen.” During the campaign, Trump, or someone typing on his behalf, participated in Reddit’s signature interview format—an A.M.A., for “ask me anything.” In response to a question about the “protected class of media elites,” Trump wrote, “I have been very concerned about media bias and the total dishonesty of the press. I think new media is a great way to get out the truth.” This drew hundreds of jubilant comments (u/RAINBOW_DILDO: “daddy YES”; u/CantContheDon: “WE’RE THE MEDIA NOW”). The_Donald, with more than half a million subscribers, is by far the biggest pro-Trump subreddit, but it ranks just below No. 150 on the list of all subreddits; it’s roughly the same size as r/CryptoCurrency and r/ComicBooks. “Some people on The_Donald are expressing their genuine political beliefs, and obviously that’s something we want to encourage,” Huffman said. “Others are maybe not expressing sincere beliefs, but are treating it more like a game—If I post this ridiculous or offensive thing, can I get people to upvote it? And then some people, to quote ‘The Dark Knight,’ just want to watch the world burn.” On some smaller far-right subreddits, the discourse is more unhinged. One, created in July of 2016, was called r/Physical_Removal. According to its “About Us” section, it was a subreddit for people who believe that liberals “qualify to get a helicopter ride.” “Helicopter ride,” an allusion to Augusto Pinochet’s reputed habit of throwing Communists out of helicopters, is alt-right slang for murder. The_Donald accounts for less than one per cent of Reddit’s traffic, but it occupies far more than one per cent of the Reddit-wide conversation. Trolls set a cunning trap. By ignoring their provocations, you risk seeming complicit. By responding, you amplify their message. Trump, perhaps the world’s most skilled troll, can get attention whenever he wants, simply by being outrageous. Traditional journalists and editors can decide to resist the bait, and sometimes they do, but that option isn’t available on user-generated platforms. Social-media executives claim to transcend subjectivity, and they have designed their platforms to be feedback machines, giving us not what we claim to want, nor what might be good for us, but what we actually pay attention to. There are no good solutions to this problem, and so tech executives tend to discuss it as seldom as possible, and only in the airiest of platitudes. Twitter has rebuffed repeated calls to ban President Trump’s account, despite his many apparent violations of company policy. (If tweeting that North Korea “won’t be around much longer” doesn’t break Twitter’s rule against “specific threats of violence,” it’s not clear what would.) Last fall, on his Facebook page, Mark Zuckerberg addressed—sort of, obliquely—the widespread critique that his company was exacerbating political polarization. “We’ll keep working to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, and to ensure our community is a platform for all ideas and force for good in democracy,” he wrote, then stepped away as a global howl of frustration grew in the comments. This article appears in the print edition of the March 19, 2018, issue, with the headline “Antisocial Media.” Andrew Marantz, a contributing editor, has written for The New Yorker since 2011.Read more » Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
I would imagine David Irving could tell you about that. ;)
There are no replies to Comment # 1. End Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
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