Why Reddit moderators are “censoring” Glenn Greenwald’s latest

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/28/why_reddit_moderators_are_censoring_glenn_greenwalds_latest_bombshell_partner/

by DocFeind • 12 years ago

185 167 12 years ago

jere3• 12 years ago

tl;dr: /r/news considers the piece an opinion piece and they don't allow those.

And here's the last paragraph of The Incerpt aticle that makes clear it's opinion:

Whatever else is true, no government should be able to engage in these tactics: what justification is there for having government agencies target people – who have been charged with no crime – for reputation-destruction, infiltrate online political communities, and develop techniques for manipulating online discourse? But to allow those actions with no public knowledge or accountability is particularly unjustifiable.

Phlarp• 12 years ago

This feels too convenient.

And maybe just a little bit ironic given the subject matter?

jere3• 12 years ago

If you've ever used reddit, you'll have noticed that subreddits have pretty strict rules that are clearly and prominently displayed and they offer alternatives subs if your content doesn't fit.

I'd hardly call any of this convenient. It's simply the way reddit filters content.

http://www.reddit.com/r/news/wiki/rules

makomk2• 12 years ago

That's certainly /r/news' justification, but their argument doesn't wash. It's no more opinion than any other piece of investigative reporting - they all tell a particular story through the facts they select, how they describe the issue, and the conclusion they draw.

larrik• 12 years ago

But IS investigative reporting "news"? Traditionally they've been bundled together, and there is undoubtedly overlap (depending on the piece), but at their core they could be considered quite different.

eric_cc• 12 years ago

Investigative reporting is not news.

asgard10242• 12 years ago

Although I disagree with the premise that news shouldn't contain any opinion (because it's not always black and white, especially since the article in question contains original reporting), I would play a devil's advocate and argue that this isn't an opinion.

The sentence states that this cannot be justified by the government, which may be a fact. Or do you know of any justification? We could maybe even prove that this contradicts freedom of speech, and therefore cannot be justified.

(What I am trying to show here is that you can, to some extent, make an opinion into a fact and vice versa.)

raldi2• 12 years ago

I disagree with the premise that news shouldn't contain any opinion

Nobody's asserting that premise. The question is whether /r/news should contain opinion.

pjc50• 12 years ago

The very selection of what is "news" constitutes an opinion.

jere3• 12 years ago

The word "should" makes it opinion right off the bat. The word "justification" is about right and wrong.

Outside of a universally agreed upon objective morality, it's an opinion piece.

fnordfnordfnord3• 12 years ago

tl;dr: /r/news considers the piece an opinion piece and they don't allow those.

Except they do allow them and apply this rule(s) at their whim.

The next excuse that's trotted out is that reddit isn't a democracy moderators can do that if they want to. Go make your own subreddit if you don't like it, etc.

Fine, what a shitty way to run a default subreddit. (little transparency, little accountability, etc.)

And here's the last paragraph of The Incerpt aticle that makes clear it's opinion:

So what, you can find the same in a good portion of the content that remains on /r/news etc. The article is not an Op Ed, but if you like, read all but the last two paragraphs. Furthermore, the Intercept article[1] was rewritten[2] by other journalists to exclude "editorialized content" and also subsequently moderated.

Missing from much of the discussion on this is the irony that the story in question exposes gov't operations whose task is ongoing infiltration and manipulation of the media. Even if you're happy to defer to the mods' interpretations that the articles written to date regarding this particular news story are appropriately moderated; you must then concede that the rules are inappropriate if they manage to effectively exclude such a timely and appropriate news story.

[1] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

[2] http://www.examiner.com/article/snowden-government-infiltrat...

thrillgore2• 12 years ago

Power users/Mods using the vague reasoning of "editorial standards" on a crowdsourced rating mechanism to game stories. Where have we seen this before???

higherpurpose3• 12 years ago

My thoughts exactly. On a crowd-sourcing platform based on consensus you shouldn't need moderators messing around with the stories being posted there.

As PG put it "if it's what the community wants, it's what the community wants" (even though I'm very disappointed he's still heavily penalizing stories with "NSA" in them).

mahranch6• 12 years ago

It's easy to say "Oh, you shouldn't need moderators" but the reality is, you most certainly do need them. It's like saying "Wikipedia shouldn't need mods or admins". I couldn't see wikipedia existing without them. There are just too many people out there who aim to ruin it for everyone.

Without moderators the system is easier to game, communities will almost immediately go off-topic, and the lowest common denominator will win. It's naive to think that online anonymous internet forums can exist without moderation. It's even more naive to think that you can foster high-quality content without heavy-handed moderation. Subreddits like /r/Askscience just wouldn't exist without it.

When you plant a rose garden, you don't just let the garden grow wild. You prune it to your liking, and to keep the garden healthy. The garden must be meticulously pruned if you want it to look beautiful. Pruning content which break the rules is the same thing.

maxerickson4• 12 years ago

It's arguable that the moderators of a given subreddit constitute the community of that subreddit. A group of 5 people regularly interacting around a common purpose is a community. A group of 200,000 people occasionally clicking arrows is not.

lutusp4• 12 years ago

Redditors are calling it an act of censorship.

It's not as thought Reddit moderators don't censor certain fact-based topics at their personal whim:

http://arachnoid.com/psychology/reddit_psychology.html

maxerickson4• 12 years ago

It is probably better to say sub-Reddit moderators, they are given a free hand.

(That this is not consistent with their jargon doesn't really matter, the moderators of /r/AskScience can't do anything about you starting /r/Asklutuspaboutpsychology, they don't have the ability to moderate "Reddit", the various levels of site administrators do that)

lutusp4• 12 years ago

It is probably better to say sub-Reddit moderators, they are given a free hand.

Yes, true, but what Reddit moderators do reflects on Reddit itself. But if I had the power to choose, I wouldn't change anything -- the risk of one sort of suppression of freedom of expression must be balanced against another.

I think the outcome should be decided by the public, and (as with the topic of this thread) the Streisand Effect will resolve these kinds of issues.

For me, the problem with r/askscience is that the moderator doesn't understand science. He thinks science has no formal definition, that philosophers haven't decided what is and is not science -- therefore psychologists can call what they do science. That's false, but it's just someone's opinion, unfortunately he's running a subReddit that influences how many people think about science.

cwal373• 12 years ago

I actually think /r/askscience is one of the best moderated subreddits, which is impressive given its size and traffic. The example you linked is incredibly frustrating to me. That blogger has a very specific mindset about a subset of problems in parts of the general field of psychology that he is hellbent on applying generally to the entire broad discipline.

I went to an engineering-heavy undergrad and I saw that disdain from engineers on "softer" sciences all the time. I did not major in psychology, and parts of the field do have some serious issues, but to paint with such a broad brush and be so sure of yourself in casting aspersions on fields you have no formal training in is really gross to encounter.

EDIT: Hell, I'll go a step further and say that as neuroscience continues to intersect and grow with psychology I would consider a greater portion of psychologists as scientists than engineers.

lutusp4• 12 years ago

That blogger has a very specific mindset about a subset of problems in parts of the general field of psychology that he is hellbent on applying generally to the entire broad discipline.

Which blogger would that be? Perhaps you're thinking of Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, who has taken exactly the same position I have, and for exactly the same reason:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better." [emphasis added]

For the above reasons, the NIMH has recently ruled that the DSM may no longer be the basis of scientific research proposals, on the ground that it has no scientific content.

... parts of the field do have some serious issues, but to paint with such a broad brush and be so sure of yourself in casting dispersions [sic] on fields you have no formal training in is really gross to encounter.

Fair enough. Let's see how your viewpoint stands up under scrutiny. Do you think astrology is a science? No? But you don't have a degree in astrology -- doesn't that disqualify you from having an opinion on this subject? My point is that, in science, authority counts for nothing, only evidence matters. To put this another way, in science, evidence means everything, reputation means nothing. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.

Also, the expression "casting dispersions" isn't quite what you had in mind (s/dispersions/aspersions).

And finally, Allen Frances, editor of DSM-IV, has recently written a book that makes the same points I do (http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Normal-Out-Control-Medicalizati...).

If NIMH director Insel, or Allen Frances, tried to post to r/askscience, they would get the same treatment I got -- scientific censorship.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/building_science

bertil• 12 years ago

I’m not very convinced by either side: none is trying to offer an objective take on what Greenwald tried to do. It doesn't sound impossible to get the source, filter facts from his analysis and offer that to r/news. Is this me not being a journalist, and missing the point?

jasallen2• 12 years ago

I support the Reddit moderators. There is no censorship going on, and the idea of unbiased journalism is becoming something we don't even respect any more (to say nothing of how hard it is to achieve, but we don't even seem to agree it's a laudable goal any more).

Read the article, a non-analysis based piece on the same subject made the front page and was not removed. Reddit has other subreddits for analysis pieces, that why there are subreddits.

/r/news just got a new reader.

selmnoo2• 12 years ago

It's not really as simple as that. If you say GG is partaking in biased journalism, who's to say whether the silence and hesitance of established news organizations (to not be as aggressively iniquisitive as GG has always been) is pro-gov bias or not?

You should read Bill Keller's conversation with Greenwald here on the objectivity/partiality of news: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/opinion/a-conversation-in-...

It's a little long, but it's a very, very important conversation, everyone should read it really.

higherpurpose3• 12 years ago

Agreed. I'm not liking this latest trend of saying journalists that attack the government are "biased", especially when they have strong facts to support their reasoning, and it's not just the daily senseless Obama-bashing we see on TV. I think there's a pretty big difference between these two.

I really don't want this to just "fade in the background" like it happened the last time around with the NSA:

http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-...

username223• 12 years ago

It's a little long,

It's Greenwald -- what else would you expect? He is sometimes insightful, but always long-winded, hyperbolic, and shrill, which is why I don't usually bother to read him. It saves me time and head-desks to follow the Snowden thing through more mainstream sources.

jasallen2• 12 years ago

Who the hell said 'biased journalism'? It was an analysis piece. Plain and simple.

asgard10242• 12 years ago

The problem is that "objectivity" is often used as a way to frame the debate. I think you should listen to some Chomsky. He has a lot of examples of this happening.

cryoshon4• 12 years ago

It's just as bad as "seriousness" in terms of moving the window of debate away from unwanted opinions.

Before this latest leak, there was no way that you could suggest that the government was trying to influence conversations online or spying on activist groups-- you'd be decried as a conspiracy theorist aka "not serious" aka "don't listen to this crazy person".

It's disturbing that people don't understand that the frame of discussion dictates the terms of the discussion.

nobbyclark• 12 years ago

Is unbiased journalism what /r/news and /r/worldnews readers actually want? Or are they looking for a channel where alternative - to mainstream press outlets - points of view can be seen and discussed?

Judging by the reaction to the deletion of GGs stories, a significant minority or even a majority want the latter.

So the real question is does the public get what the public wants?

untog2• 12 years ago

So the real question is does the public get what the public wants?

Well, not really. Not when creating a new subreddit is free and easy to do. If a significant minority of a subreddit audience dislikes a decision they can easily set up their own community.

chc• 12 years ago

So the real question is does the public get what the public wants?

I don't think "Is our precious little Public getting everything he wants?" is the right question. What the public wants is shouty-but-shallow opinion pieces and cat pictures, and in those interests they are already well-served. The point of moderation is to raise the level of discourse above the lowest common denominator.

mcphilip• 12 years ago

Having obsessively read the news 1+ hours a day since the financial crisis, I'm no longer under the illusion that there is much unbiased news in the first place. Even a non-analysis piece listing just the facts can still be biased by virtue of the facts that are left out.

I always assume that news pieces are sketches of the truth and that it takes discipline and effort to educate oneself about what's really going on -- and often times it's simply not possible. You can't rely on a single source, you have to be willing to take the analysis along with the fact lists if your goal is to try and piece together a big picture. Perfect example is the news from Syria. I can't tell you how many articles and longform pieces I've read on the situation and still can't even pretend that I've achieved some true awareness of what's really going on, though I can recite facts and figures that make me look more well read than the average person.

comice2• 12 years ago

the ideal of unbiased journalism is a myth. It does not exist. Whenever it's claimed to be a goal it's either made from ignorance or as a way to mislead.

RankingMember• 12 years ago

100% agree. The moment an idea is taken into someone's brain it is translated and distorted by their unique perspective.

That said, I feel like there's a certain point at which the interpretation goes from being unconsciously-manipulated to consciously-manipulated. For example, Roger Ailes presenting a narrative on a daily basis for Fox News personalities to play to is obviously a conscious manipulation.

Someday, there'll be a way some kind of biometric way to authenticate a put-forth idea as your brain's best attempt at neutral translation of an event (sort of like verifying a message is from you with PGP), but until then we'll have to rely on people being dumb and obvious in their manipulations a la Fox News.

SeanDav• 12 years ago

Of course there is censorship going on - it is clear that not everything that someone thinks is news can be posted. That is not necessarily a bad thing in principle. In reality it is a very slippery slope and has to be closely monitored, especially in the case of articles commenting on manipulation of the news!

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

the idea of unbiased journalism is becoming something we don't even respect any more

The problem isn't (entirely) biased news. It's that society's current relationship with it is unhealthy. These subreddits just bury stories without helping their readers understand how to identify and digest bad news sources/articles/etc...

It only perpetuates the false notion that unbiased news can exist, and that unbiased is generally regarded as "doesn't rock the boat," regardless of what bias actually goes into the reporting. (If "unbiased" reporting could exist, it wouldn't have to walk back any meaningful points made just to teeter in the middle of the national political spectrum...)

I read a column a while back that really helped me to process news, "Hey, MSM: All Journalism is Advocacy Journalism" by Matt Taibbi [0]. Funny enough, digging that link up it also turns out to be a reaction to a reaction to Greenwald.

You can still get information out of biased sources. I'd expect Fox News to be banned outright on that subreddit, but if they managed to get a scoop on (for example) the Chris Christy trainwreck I'd still want to read that. I wouldn't, and shouldn't, need CNN to synthesize another reporter's reporting for me, I need their reporting for further developments and to help me synthesize and contextualize Fox's reporting en masse.

[0] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/hey-msm-...

darkarmani• 12 years ago

I support the Reddit moderators. There is no censorship going on

How exactly do you define censorship? I'm not saying censorship is a bad thing but removing something is exactly censorship.

roc• 12 years ago

“The story itself is irrelevant, it’s simply how the story is presented—which is why any unbiased, objective and wholly factual news article on the event would be (and is) allowed in /r/news.”

That's an awfully hazardous line they're trying to walk. I understand the desire to walk it, but the inevitable hair-splitting over when articles cross a given line is going to go on forever.

nhangen2• 12 years ago

I'd have more sympathy for GG if he wasn't using the Snowden docs to further build his personal brand.

He's treating these docs like a marketer treats a new product launch, and because of that, I have little faith in his analysis. I'm happy to see /news standing up for what they believe in.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

I believe this is by design and with agreement from Snowden.

MrZongle2• 12 years ago

So what if GG is using them to build his personal brand?

Are the documents authentic? Then the truth needs to be reported and disseminated as widely as possible.

If GG is a self-promoting hack, it will eventually catch up to him.

nhangen2• 12 years ago

I've come to the conclusion that he is a self-promoting hack. His primary concern should be disseminating the truth, not editorializing it on an ala carte basis.

His treatment of the docs is a disservice to the public.

afreak4• 12 years ago

Reddit moderation is generally terrible as for larger traffic areas require full time moderators, and as a result of them being non-paid, you can end up with people running the show who otherwise wouldn't get hired to do so. Luck of the draw and early adoption are really key to being a mod in r/news or elsewhere. This also leads to abuses that exist likely due to their inability to exert such control elsewhere.

Part of the reason why I like HN's moderation is you do not know who is generally doing the moderation work--same goes for places like 4chan if I might say. This prevents the sort of power tripping you will see on Reddit because there isn't a way to prove your worth. While I find some of the content posted here is not to my liking, I rarely have anything if at all to say about how the site is administered.

Now whether or not this is censorship is subjective. To say that Reddit is engaging in censorship in this case is a bit erroneous as these moderators are not employees. You can still post these stories elsewhere without consequence.

sroerick2• 12 years ago

I don't think that anyone got censored here, and I'm a big Greenwald supporter.

I think reddit needs to reform their moderator system immediately. Whether it's issues like this one, or the /r/standupshots fiasco, content is simply too controlled to be useful.

It's very similar to what happened with digg. Control of the medium became less democratic and more centralized. This time, it's in the hands of moderators rather than very powerful users. The problem is the same.

I'd like to see reddit eliminate the default subs and allow subs there by way of voting. As it is, it's too easy for a moderator to control a sub, and no easy way to get rid of them.

Subreddits are amazing, don't get me wrong. They're just subject to becoming less useful as they get bigger. Ironically, the subreddits I really like are usually the ones with very strict moderation. Reddit needs to find a way to bridge the gap between the users who unsubscribe from all the default subs and the users who never log in.

I'd like to see a reddit clone that used dogecoin for up votes and featured both increased mod power and increased transparency.

mahranch6• 12 years ago

"content is simply too controlled to be useful."

Really? I believe the opposite is true. I think reddit needs more moderation. I wish mods wouldn't be as afraid to lay down the ban-hammer. I think the mods of /r/News were justified in their approach, and that these censorship stories coming out about reddit are due to an ignorance of how reddit works.

The mods are fighting a battle against the lowest common denominator and losing. The beauty of reddit is that anyone can create their own subreddit and mod it however they see fit. If you want an easy going subreddit with mods that are hands-off, you're free to create one or subscribe to one. If a mod wants to rule their domain with an iron fist, their free to do that too.

More importantly, the users are free to subscribe to any subreddit they wish. Users can literally vote with their feet and have done so on more than one occasion. Your proposed overhaul would change that dynamic. It's a dynamic which has helped reddit get to the level it's at now. People like to believe the collapse of digg contributed to reddit's success, but the fact is, (according to google trends), reddit had already surpassed Digg long before the big collapse.

afreak4• 12 years ago

I personally don't believe it is censorship either.

The biggest problem Reddit has is how the moderator structure works. I can go and create a new sub-Reddit, automatically becoming the main moderator as a result. You can then assign moderators below you who then in turn can add moderators who are below themselves and so on. The problem is if one of the moderators disappears and then reappears later on and then removes any other mods they can, it stirs up drama. /r/atheism for as bad as it is, had this happen when someone attempted to "clean" it up. I stopped posting in one sub-Reddit local to where I live because of the same idiocy.

Personally I'd like to see moderation in the way they have it now removed in favour of the Slashdot method where a post with a large number of downvotes is reviewed by those with good-standing in that sub-Reddit but with the username and other details removed. This will allow for some level of sanity within the imperfections that Reddit provides.

diogenescynic• 12 years ago

Reddit moderation is generally terrible as for larger traffic areas require full time moderators, and as a result of them being non-paid, you can end up with people running the show who otherwise wouldn't get hired to do so. Luck of the draw and early adoption are really key to being a mod in r/news or elsewhere. This also leads to abuses that exist likely due to their inability to exert such control elsewhere.
Part of the reason why I like HN's moderation is you do not know who is generally doing the moderation work--same goes for places like 4chan if I might say. This prevents the sort of power tripping you will see on Reddit because there isn't a way to prove your worth. While I find some of the content posted here is not to my liking, I rarely have anything if at all to say about how the site is administered.

As someone who spends a lot of time on reddit, I totally agree. There are a few moderators who mod over hundreds of subreddits. There is too much room for gatekeeping and censorship. You see a lot of selective enforcement of the 'rules' and abuse of power.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

Now whether or not this is censorship is subjective.

No, its absolutely censorship. Whether or not this is the kind of censorship that is undesirable is subjective, as is any other evaluation of desirability.

fourstar• 12 years ago

So what do you propose? I run a large subreddit and it's hard to find worthwhile moderations and keep the submissions fresh/useful as it grows even larger.

afreak4• 12 years ago

As I had said in another comment:

Personally I'd like to see moderation in the way they have it now removed in favour of the Slashdot method where a post with a large number of downvotes is reviewed by those with good-standing in that sub-Reddit but with the username and other details removed. This will allow for some level of sanity within the imperfections that Reddit provides.

Make moderation blind and make it so we don't know who the moderators are; this prevents power-tripping.

balls187• 12 years ago

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

I knew there had to be a reason why my posts were getting downvoted.

JeremyMorgan• 12 years ago

Funny, that article pretty much describes why I don't participate in Reddit much.

Drama, drama and more drama.

Your news is filtered no matter where you go to get it. Unless you're personally there and involved with every event happening around the world, you're getting filtered news.

If you don't like how /r/news is filtered don't go to /r/news. It's that simple.

normloman• 12 years ago

No it's not that simple. When you get news from a community curated source, you get a say in how it's run. You're criticism helps shape how r/news is run. In a way, places like r/news depend on participants voicing their complaints.

higherpurpose3• 12 years ago

Ok - what about the story about webcam spying yesterday. It was #1 on r/technology for a couple of hours, and all of the sudden it disappeared from the page.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 12 years ago

Maybe if he didn't want to be censored there he should have posted teen girl creepshots or some other reddit-condoned content.

madaxe_again5• 12 years ago

Highly relevant here would be the GCHQ/NSA slides on the topic of how they've infiltrated positions of power (i.e. moderation) in online communities - reddit is specifically cited. It's all about FUD, discrediting, and censorship on fallacious grounds. It would not surprise me to learn that BipolarBear0 is a plant. It would also not surprise me to learn that he's a pedantic basement-dweller, but I don't think, given what we've learned, it's conspiratorial or paranoid to suppose that this is governmental control. It's perfectly feasible.

mturmon• 12 years ago

You have a point. It can sound like tinfoil-hattery, but there are several examples in which the FBI and other police had so thoroughly infiltrated radical groups that there were practically as many monitors as activists. This was not only a 60s and 70s thing, it has continued up to the present day in some cases.

mattmanser• 12 years ago

It's still happening today. Massive stink when one of the UK's undercover police broke down and admitted his guilt to the media in 2010:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kennedy_(police_officer)

How many more of them are there? Who knows.

Note that it claims 22 different countries used him. And he was explicitly called out as being an agent provocateur.

mintplant• 12 years ago

BipolarBear0 isn't even the one who removed the links. When you're making wild accusations, at least try to point them in the right direction.

mahranch6• 12 years ago

That's the problem with articles like these. They're written by people who, at best, only have a vague understanding of how reddit works. This article in particular isn't too bad, but the previous ones I've seen were laughably ignorant about reddit and it's infrastructure.

Making things worse are the commentors who see "censorship" and get all worked up and start frothing at the mouth. This submission is only an hour old yet there are already comments here by people who honestly believe that the mods were infiltrated by the NSA and they're the ones who pulled the submission. The tin-foil hat crowd completely ignore the fact that the submission was only pulled in a single subreddit and that it wasn't pulled in dozen other subreddits, including /r/worldnews which is a larger subreddit with more subscribers.

There are hundreds of thousands of subreddits on reddit and only one pulled the submission because it broke their rules. The other subreddits had no problem with the submission. But why report that? Because it doesn't generate as many hits.

scarmig3• 12 years ago

How are these wild accusations? The story in question is about how GCHQ infiltrates and disrupts online communities to discredit and bury unfavorable stories.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

cryoshon4• 12 years ago

Yep. Controlling the gatekeepers of public conversation is a measure that is squarely in the court of totalitarianism-- this leak was the evidence needed to begin calling the USA a right wing authoritarian/totalitarian state. I really wish the mainstream media had picked up this story, because it'd be an easy way to convince the public that the government is targeting them as an enemy. It's blatant evidence that the government is interested in controlling thought regardless of involvement with terrorism or national security.

It's foolish to think that they wouldn't try to gain positions of power in bastions of alternative thought and activism. Admittedly, reddit is extremely mainstream-- but it's still a place for citizens to communicate with each other and discuss happenings. It'd be invaluable control-wise to be able to influence conversations there.

wooter• 12 years ago

really wish you had dropped the "right wing"... its a false dichotomy which we really need to stop perpetuating.

TomSawyer• 12 years ago

Here's an enlightening video on the political spectrum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DioQooFIcgE

NegativeK3• 12 years ago

It would not surprise me to learn that BipolarBear0 is a plant.

If he is, I hope he's fired. Removing an article like that to cover your ass seems like an inordinately stupid thing to do.

It would also not surprise me to learn that he's a pedantic basement-dweller

This characterization bothers me. "Basement dweller" and "neckbeard" seem to have become the way that fellow nerds can insultingly call each other nerds.

eco• 12 years ago

If he is, I hope he's fired.

Reddit moderators are not employees of reddit. They're just regular users with moderation powers for a particular subreddit.

wpietri• 12 years ago

This may be too much of a tangent, but I think there's a line between being a nerd who functions as a normal citizen and one who doesn't. For me, that's what the "basement-dweller" thing is pointing at, as I think the long version of that is "mom's basement".

I think if anybody's equipped to usefully judge how people deploy their nerdiness, it's other nerds.

madaxe_again5• 12 years ago

Basement-dweller was intended to rather more mean "person with a lot of time on their hands" - no slight was intended. Hell, I live a basement, albeit not my mom's!

Anyway, he appears to be a DoD contractor with far too much time on his hands.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

It would not surprise me to learn that BipolarBear0 is a plant.

Sounds more like some form of mammal.

maxerickson4• 12 years ago

But nobody takes /r/news seriously!

I guess it might be worth $5 to the government to occasionally bump a page off the front of reddit, but they should probably spend that money on cute pictures of kittens or donate it to AdviceAnimals before they spend it on infiltration.

spindritf• 12 years ago

BipolarBear0 is a name I recognize from reddit. He's always there, and on Snoonet (unofficial Reddit IRC network).

Now, he could be a plant but more likely he's just another kid power-tripping on Reddit over some silly policy. If you scan subs like the mentioned /r/subredditdrama, or /r/shitredditsays, you can see how deeply people are invested into what others say in throw-away comments on the Internet. Off-colour jokes can lead to discussions with hundreds of participants across multiple subreddits.

eridius• 12 years ago

he's just another kid power-tripping on Reddit over some silly policy

The primary purpose of the subreddit moderators is to enforce the rules. If the moderator does not enforce this so-called "silly policy" then he is not doing his job.

paul_willis• 12 years ago

BipolarBear0 has stated that he's an independent contractor for the DoD: http://reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1z0zao/reddit_mods_bu...

FireBeyond• 12 years ago

Given what other mods have to say, power - and ego tripping seem to have a big part to do with it:

"“We are the official news board of the Front Page of the Internet. We have rules.””

Official?

Front Page of the Internet?

Kapura• 12 years ago

It is wrong to accuse people of being plants without strong, specific evidence of their misdeeds. Being an opinionated Internet commenter, I have seen unjust charges levelled against others and myself, and it absolutely destroys productive discourse.

I'm not saying that GCHQ or the NSA don't have moderation positions on Reddit, but you should listen to the user's explanations of their actions before calling them traitors. The explanations brought forward in the updates to the Salon article do not seem unreasonable; let's not jump to conclusions.

adamors2• 12 years ago

They actually ban entire websites from /r/news, not just articles. Here's a post that contained the list of banned domains:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130831135727/http://www.reddit...

Here's BipolarBear0 commenting on it: http://np.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1yxlxa/claims...

Also, since /r/conspiracy was discussing this topic heavily in the last couple of days, BipolarBear0 started flooding the subreddit with anti-semitic content. Here he is admitting it:

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1ywspe/new_snowde...

acqq• 12 years ago

See the comment of paul_willis:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7320581

BipolarBear0 has stated that he's an independent contractor for the DoD

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC2• 12 years ago

"Unbiased news" - what would that even look like? As soon as you decide what to report on and what not to report on, that is a bias. If anything, this is about filtering out stories that don't fall within the consensus narrative and thus require that value judgements be made explicit and explained - what they seem to call "analysis".

Semiapies5• 12 years ago

I believe the idea is the "both sides" approach, where you get quotes from those who disagree on the story at hand, then uncritically present an equal amount of quotes from both sides (and there are only ever two sides to a story). And of course, you do your best to keep out any context that might suggest one side or both is full of shit.

Zigurd3• 12 years ago

You are being too generous. "Unbiased" means you didn't ask questions outside of the talking points predigested by the press secretary's office or PR agency that prompted something to be in the news in the first place.

Everything else is obviously driven by potentially dangerous and unfair opinion, since it hasn't been vetted for safety.

vidarh• 12 years ago

Whenever someone talks about wanting "unbiased news" my assumption is always that they're trying to used it as an excuse to justify enforcing their specific bias.

giardini3• 12 years ago

The article is factual. There are only a few sentences of opinion at the end. Banning the article _was_ censorship. It should not have been banned. The article states that "... these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself."

Is that opinion? No, unfortunately.

The documents reveal the above is only part of what the agencies are trying to do. They also speak of "ruining businesses", "leaking confidential information", etc. It instructs how to damage someone's reputation and even their psyche on the Internet. This is the worst of human deceptive behavior.

This is a public relations disaster for GCHQ/NSA. Very, very bad stuff.

SeanLuke• 12 years ago

The article is factual. There are only a few sentences of opinion at the end.

Are you aware of the contradiction inherent in your two sentences here?

giardini3• 12 years ago

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,

adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

                   - Ralph Waldo Emerson

_delirium• 12 years ago

Banning the article _was_ censorship.

The entire idea of "subreddits" is community-specific curation. If you post a leftist screed to /r/libertarian, they might choose to leave it, they might delete it, who knows. It's up to each subreddit to decide what kind of content they want to see, through a mixture of up/downvoting and moderator action. Some communities want the Greenwald article, some don't. Some have very little moderator action, others have a lot, and those differences are part of what defines them (e.g. /r/AskHistorians is known for its aggressive moderation). That's not censorship, any more than HN deleting some stuff is censorship.

giardini3• 12 years ago

The groups where article was removed: /r/news and /r/worldnews

and the article was news if there ever was news. Sorry, you lose!

Let's review the GCHQ/NSA slides to find which ruse this was intended to be ... hmmm, I can't find "red herring" amongst them. Are we sure they released _all_ the GCHQ/NSA slides? [it's working already! Paranoia is setting in! Aaaaargh!]

bduerst• 12 years ago

I think this is where the semantics of the word come into play.

Is the subreddit community mods banning the article censorship? Yes.

Is it a violation of first amendment rights or worth getting upset over? Absolutely not.

kyrra• 12 years ago

But when a subreddit is part of the default selection of subreddits (for non-logged in users), that has a fairly large impact for the userbase of Reddit in general. And if it is part of the default, then the normal user (someone that doesn't mess with their subreddit selection much) would also be impacted.

dredmorbius4• 12 years ago

The entire idea of "subreddits" is community-specific curation.

There are a number of significant issues with that. Straight off the top, a few that I can think of:

• /r/news is a default subreddit. It carries rather more weight and significance on reddit than, say, /r/swoleacceptance or /r/dredmorbius. It really ought to reflect a fair assessment of what is or isn't news.

• Subreddit squatting has been known to happen, often by those with a specific axe to grind. In the worst cases, this leads to a very profound drift of a sub from what its initial charter was. /r/srs is probably one of the more significant examples (it went from a general critique sub to a pretty radical political viewpoint). Another case which came up recently is /r/xkcd, yes, the subreddit devoted to the xkcd comic. After its initial moderator went AWOL, it was picked up by a neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denying mod, who installed a number of similarly-minded sub-mods. Randall Munroe even chimed in to voice his disappointment. An alternative sub has formed, /r/xkcdcomic. Story: http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1xdwba/the_history_of_...

• There's no real mechanism to keep subreddit drift from happening. This, given the issues above, seems like it could be a long-term problem for reddit.

• In the absence of "acceptable" mainstream news coverage of the latest from The Intercept, it seems that /r/news really should have accepted the article. As Greenwald has noted, the MSM and government are clearly biased in their own coverage of this story.

res0nat0r• 12 years ago

Reddit has never positioned itself as a bastion of anything goes free speech. The mods are free to remove anything they don't believe is aligned with the subreddit's rules.

keeshawn• 12 years ago

Reddit did position itself as the bastion of anything goes free speech... when the speech itself was child pornography.

mahranch6• 12 years ago

"Banning the article _was_ censorship."

Technically, that's correct. But technically, you can call those square things floating in my coke "water cubes". It's not the term I would use, but it's technically correct. Most people would refer to them as "ice cubes" because it's more accurate and more descriptive. Just because a term is technically correct doesn't mean it's the most accurate.

In the same vein, I wouldn't use censorship to describe what happened on reddit and instead use "content curation" or even pruning. Using censorship implies the intentional suppression of information. The mods of /r/news were actually recommending other, more suitable subreddits for users to submit the controversial article, and pointing out places where you could find it (like in /r/worldnews). That, to me, shows they were more concerned with content curation and not actual suppression of information.

igivanov• 12 years ago

I'll go with end result: the discussion has shifted from the manipulation stuff GG wrote about to censorship. Doesn't it look like a perfect example of successful manipulation?

grandalf• 12 years ago

I don't think the moderators are necessarily employed by the US Government. The gravitational pull of power, particularly state power, is something some people have a hard time resisting.

I am pretty shocked about the ban on RT as it seems like a legitimate news org that helps fill in the gaps in coverage.

Zigurd3• 12 years ago

It is very unlikely that participants in spinning online forums are direct government employees. PR agencies do this. There are even GSA schedules for buying PR services from an established group of firms. What you see on TV and read in mainstream newspapers has been steered by this PR. It would be anomalous to think online forum influence isn't on the menu of services.

detroitcoder• 12 years ago

After reading the article, my gut reaction was 'Oh this is an interesting article, I wonder what the HN comments have to say about it?'

Then I see the top comments and they all try to discredit Greenwald as a sensationalist trying to grab publicity at the expense of honest reddit moderators. I then mentally put less validity on the article and move on to the next link. However I can't help but question if somehow my reaction was engineered by someone else. Just a thought.

smutticus• 12 years ago

There's no censorship going on, and Reddit is not the only place people get their news. Seriously, if /r/news is your primary news source then something is wrong with you.

cryoshon4• 12 years ago

The conspiracy theory explanation for this is that the mods are actually government assets and censored the stories in order to make their handlers happy. I don't believe that this is consistent with the history of the NSA leaks on reddit so far, given that most of the other NSA stories have been highly visible and upvoted, though some have been deleted infrequently.

Perhaps this isn't so far fetched after all, though. I checked the front pages of CNN, ABC, MSNBC, and FoxNews, and found zero mention of the NSA whatsoever, nevermind the explosive reveal of COINTELPRO style operations against the internet public.

guelo• 12 years ago

Why is /r/subredditdrama spilling over onto HN? Flagged.

mindrag• 12 years ago

This issue has implications far beyond reddit.

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

News flash: If you get all your news from a single source, you might not get a complete and unbiased picture of the news.

ryepen• 12 years ago

The problem with classifying this event as censorship is the subjectivity of the argument. One can propose that an individual is a subject of a government whose sole purpose is the malicious discredit of unfavorable information pertaining to that particular government's desired propaganda, but we can also propose that this particular individual believes that government conspiracies to undermine the public opinion on internet forums seems irrational.

I think we can all agree that both are entirely feasible, but remain unable to provide substantial evidence that discredits the other.

adamors2• 12 years ago

Interesting that even this post is dropping heavily on the frontpage. Posts that were submitted 6 hours ago that have less karma are higher up.

Why Reddit moderators are “censoring” Glenn Greenwald’s latest

Related Stories