Reddit is about reflecting their audience's taste or lack thereof, not condoning nor condemning it. Reddit works precisely because they maintain some sort of "net neutrality" ethics, refusing any editorial meddling. Banning a distasteful content provider would break that neutrality; but hiring him would break it just as much.
If there's a will, among Reddit's users, to help Brutsch find a new job, he'll get it. And I'd bet it will happen, if only because some companies would value the PR outcome of such a move. But that's for the community to decide, not for the infrastructure guys at Reddit inc.
Reddit has neither a high nor a low moral ground on this; Reddit is and should remain amoral. That's where the Nike comparison completely falls apart.
You realize that this is impossible, right? Reddit cannot be amoral, it makes moral decisions all over the place.
Why did they ban the jailbait subreddit? They made a moral decision to ban it. Why don't they allow doxing people? They made a moral decision to ban it. They make many other moral decisions in the breach; it's just easier to see their decisions when you look at what they don't allow rather than what they do.
Simply hosting and allowing /r/creepshots to exist is a moral decision. Reddit provides them support, legitimacy, a platform, and server space by allowing them to use reddit. This is a moral decision.
You don't get to provide material support for a site and at the same time say "we're not responsible for it". You are, to some extent, responsible, and to deny that is immoral.
Absolutely. And I think it’s worth noting that by allowing creepshots, but banning doxxing those who post creepshots, Reddit is expressing the moral preference that it’s okay to harass women and photograph them in compromising positions, but it’s not okay to call someone out on that.
I find that position repugnant, and I’m sickened people keep talking about this situation as if it’s Michael Brutsch who’s the victim here.
Adrian Chen on Twitter: “Why I felt OK outing Violentacrez: Anonymity should be valued mainly to the extent it helps protect powerless from powerful. VA wasn't that.” (https://twitter.com/AdrianChen/status/258703898695593984)
> "Reddit is expressing the moral preference that it’s okay to harass women and photograph them in compromising positions"
Oh come on, that's bull. This is the exact same line of reasoning as "if you're not with us you're against us" - not being against something does not indicate that one is for something, or even condoning of something.
Reddit's position against doxxing means Reddit is against doxxing - any further extrapolations are your own. Reddit's stance on doxxing may result in women being harassed and photographed in compromising situations, but that in no way means that, quote, "Reddit is expressing the moral preference that it’s okay to harass women and photograph them in compromising positions".
That is a patent falsehood, and I find your entire post deeply offensive. This is the same exact argument right-wing politicians have used in the past to take us to war.
By your logic, the burger you had for lunch last week expresses your moral preference for factory farming practices and the grave environment impact of meat consumption. Guilt by association much?
You quoted only part of the sentence. “...but it's not okay to call someone out on that.”
Reddit has decided to allow one form of legal(?) content (invasive, sexually exploitative photos) but disallow another (publicizing the name of people who post such photos). By doing so, they are explicitly privileging the former over the latter and that is a moral preference.
The Reddit community is all in favor of free speech when women are being harassed, but opposes free speech when the name of a harasser is being published.
In other words, this is not about free speech at all.
That isn't the part of the post that's offensive, and therefore wasn't the part I quoted.
I do not take issue with your line of argument re: free speech, though I disagree with it.
I do take strong issue with your baseless ad hominem attack against every person who works for Reddit. Their actions (or rather, lack thereof) is not an "expression of moral preference" for the harassment of women.
That portion of your post was deliberately intellectually dishonest to the highest and most vindictive degree.
It's not terribly surprising though. This isn't actually the first time I've come across a bunch of left-wingers using the exact same bullshit arguments as the right wing this week; ran across the incident described in http://www.popehat.com/2012/10/09/frankly-i-dont-care-how-du... a few days ago which is about typical.
I said nothing about “every person who works for Reddit”. Wikipedia says Reddit has 20 employees. I would sure hope that at least one of those employees doesn’t hold harassers as more worthy of privacy and protection than their targets. But that is the apparent position of the company as a whole based on the company’s actions.
Note that if you take my “okay/not okay” sentence that you half-quoted, and substitute “allowed on Reddit/not allowed on Reddit”, it is literally fact. I do not agree that going from “allowed on Reddit” to “okay” is dishonest. The company is aware of both the harassment and the doxxing, and they have chosen to allow the former but ban the latter, and having done so, they cannot claim neutrality.
> "But that is the apparent position of the company as a whole based on the company’s actions."
You keep saying that, I don't think "apparently positions" means what you think it means.
The position of the company is simply: "Reddit does not allow doxxing" - like I said before, any extrapolations on Reddit's intent is your own. Reddit's failure to prevent creepshots content does NOT
IT DOES NOT (repeated because you apparently don't get it) imply a "moral preference that it's okay to harass women".
This is no different than someone turning a blind eye to bullying. You can imply a certain lack of moral fortitude, or even argue that turning a blind eye enables bullies, but to go from that to "this implies you have a moral preference for bullies" is just complete nonsense.
I don't have a problem with the above arguments - the enabler and the lack of moral fiber, heck, I agree with that stance in many ways. What I do have a problem with is your wild extrapolations and presenting them as fact. Do you have any evidence that Reddit has an expressed "moral preference for the harassment of women"?!
This is ad hominem and smearing at its worst.
> "they cannot claim neutrality."
No, perhaps they can't. But you're shifting the topic again. You came out with an ad hominem appeal to emotion argument that was as completely unsubstantiated and inferred as it is inflammatory - that is what I'm challenging you on. You can't go around claiming "company X has an expressed moral preference for sexual harassment" with your sole reasoning being "they fail to stop it from happening".
You are sensationalizing and arguing from an incredibly disingenuous position.
Your reasoning is nonsense. The doxxing rule is designed to prevent harassment of female and other Reddit users. Reddit.com draws its line at onsite vs offsite, not female vs not female.
This isn't quite the case. Reddit has been presented with situations that called for a response: do we take action or not? In the case of banning /r/jailbait and doxxing, Reddit decided to take a stance against those things. When it comes to enabling communities whose primary purpose is harassment, Reddit has decided to allow those things.
> Reddit's position against doxxing means Reddit is against doxxing - any further extrapolations are your own. Reddit's stance on doxxing may result in women being harassed and photographed in compromising situations, but that in no way means that, quote, "Reddit is expressing the moral preference that it’s okay to harass women and photograph them in compromising positions".
Reddit (as a company) has taken a position that enables harassment of women instead of taking the right action to police their own site from content in the same league as doxxing. A stance against doxxing followed up by actions that excuse the very things that lead to doxxing in the first place is a symptom of a cover your ass mentality that shows Reddit staff could give a shit less about actually cleaning up the site they run.
> "Reddit (as a company) has taken a position that enables harassment of women"
That is fair, but where is the link between that and "expresses a moral preference" for the harassment of women?
You can say (and it would be reasonably fair) that Reddit's actions (or lack thereof) enables deplorable behavior - but that's long, long, long, LONG way from condoning or preferring it.
I don't take issue with the fact that people find Reddit's stance problematic. I do take issue when people go off the rails and essentially resort to ad hominem character attacks and smearing.
I think this comes back to actions speaking louder than words. It doesn't matter if Reddit says nothing or even makes a statement against harassment, but if what they are doing enables it, then we can't really say that their words even mean anything. I would say its not really about expressing a preference or not, but rather about actually taking actions that create the kind of community you want to run on your site.
Your burger tangent is a strange one because yes, by eating that burger you're providing direct support to the meat industry, further enabling their factory farming practices. When you buy factory farmed meat you're specifically expressing your moral preference for cheap, tasty meat over the environmental and moral costs of its preparation. You can't dissociate the two.
>By your logic, the burger you had for lunch last week expresses your moral preference for factory farming practices and the grave environment impact of meat consumption.
A lot of people do believe that though, sadly "with us or against us" is really really common.
You can be amoral, by not basing your actions on moral considerations. That's what's expected of judges, cops etc.: they (ought to only) consider whether you broke the law, not whether you're a good person.
Reddit banned jailbait because it was bound to host a lot of illegal material, not because it was disgusting.
> You don't get to provide material support for a site and at the same time say "we're not responsible for it".
I understand their position as "we materially support everything that interest some people and doesn't break the law, irrespective of our personal opinion about it". It means sometimes supporting stuff they might sometimes find personally appalling, just as a lawyer sometimes has to try and get out of jail a person he personally despises.
Besides, supporting freedom of speech forces to support questionable expressions: speeches which don't offend anyone don't need to be protected.
> I understand their position as "we materially support everything that interest some people and doesn't break the law, irrespective of our personal opinion about it"
That is a morality! That's a moral decision.
What I'm disagreeing with is the notion you proposed that reddit could be "amoral". Every decision you make has a moral component; keeping /r/creepshots alive is one of them.
I understand it to be more of an economic/legal decision, not moral. Laws are crafted after morals, but following the law does not make you morally sound. It only allows you to maintain your freedom by avoiding prosecution.
> Every decision you make has a moral component;
What we're discussing here is the moral motivation (or lack of it) of Reddit. Any moral implications it has for the population are irrelevant.
Not every decision has a moral component. Deciding whether to have cucumbers in my salad today at lunch does not have a moral components (its mostly about how fresh they look that day.)
Here, I see how you could say they made a moral decision. But in this case they made one moral decision of essentially "We allow all legal speech here". After they made that call, there is no further moral decision in keeping any particular, (legal) thread alive.
Had they decided "We will exercise some editorial discretion beyond just what is needed to comply with the law" then every single thread becomes a moral decision.
If you want to be precise, reddit has made the single moral decision that they will permit (legal) free-speech and beyond that point they have chosen to be amoral.
> reddit has made the single moral decision that they will permit (legal) free-speech
except for doxing, of course. Except for hate speech. Except for spam. Except for gawker (whoops, no that was by accident). Except for...
> reddit has made the single moral decision that they will permit (legal) free-speech and beyond that point they have chosen to be amoral
1) As I stated above, that falls apart when you look at it closely. Reddit indeed tries to minimally muck around with content, but it certainly does do so.
2) You can't substitute legality for morality and call it amorality; all you can do is align your morality with the law if you choose to do so.
Imagine an alternate universe where the internet existed during Jim Crow, and Georgia law required it to have black and white websites. According to the "law supersedes morality" theory, they could morally segregate white and black users in Georgia.
Obviously that's a ludicrous scenario for many reasons, but I think Jim Crow laws are an excellent illustration of the divergence of morality and legality. Choosing to follow the law is a moral decision, and you can't wish that away.
I agree with your basic point, but for clarity we as a society hand a fair bit of discretion to cops and even more to prosecutors and judges. In at least some instances we want them to make moral judgements, so long as thos moral judgements are within and guided by the law.
This is especially true in sentencing. For a minor traffic violation, a cop has discretion to say "You were speeding, but you have a totally clean record and it wasn't much, this time you get a warning." Most people want them to be able to do that and it is a mostly moral judgement. A prosecutor can say, "You met all the technical definitions of the crime, but you had extenuating circumstances. I decline to prosecute." Sometimes that is based on either law (the extenuating circumstance, like self defense, is explicitly recognized), or the evidence (its a close call whether they could win and they have "bigger fish to fry"), but sometimes its a straight moral call. Often we want them to be able to make that moral call.
With judges it depends on the jurisdiction, but they often have enormous discretion once it comes to sentencing. In many jurisdictions, the legislature hands out some guidelines, but just guidelines. The same crime might get many years in prison or probation, depending on the judge's moral decision about whether that instance of the crime was heinous or more excusable and whether the judge thinks that person is a career criminal or someone who gave into temptation once.
They must follow the law, but within the law we as a society explicitly hand out a lot of discretion at different points and we expect part of that discretion to be used to make moral calls within the framework of the law.
I'd call those legal decisions rather than moral ones. Reddit banned those subreddits because they were worried about their liability exposure, not any moral issue.
>Reddit works precisely because they maintain some sort of "net neutrality" ethics, refusing any editorial meddling. Banning a distasteful content provider would break that neutrality; but hiring him would break it just as much.
This is incorrect. They have banned 'distasteful content' and they have banned posts due to pressure from advertisers. Reddit is behaving extremely hypocritical and their PR on this subject is just nonsense. People shouldn't post on subjects on which they don't even have a basic understanding. I don't mean to sound rude, but this post is getting the most votes as of this writing and it's just flat out wrong.
This was for legal matters, not for distastefulness. The same obligations fall on network operators, and wouldn't be cancelled by any net neutrality law.
Yes, we agree. I don't think anyone else would have looked at the facts and come to a different decision than what reddit did, and I'm sure they did not make the decision easily.
Actually, this is untrue. The r/jailbait drama blew up when someone solicited underage pornography there, but at the end of the day it was banned for "threatening the structural integrity of reddit," ie the fallout from the Anderson Cooper story. Legality had little to do with it, just like you see with the ban on dox; it was banned for making the site look bad.
I should add that this is not direct pressure from their advertisers, but from their parent company, Condé Nast. I'm sure that Sears is and advertiser for at least some Condé Nast properties, so it's effectively the same, though with an extra level of indirection.
Some context would be useful here. The post was in relation to a URL exploit on a Sears site, and I can see the justification for a company taking issue with a partner of theirs posting how to exploit their site.
This isn't just "Advertiser gets a post banned they don't like", this is "Advertiser asks partner to pull down an exploit". Framing it as the former makes it sound like a capricious, moralizing decision.
I keep seeing you and other Reddit apologists throwing the word "distasteful" around. Sorry but "distasteful" isn't going to whitewash Reddit and Redditors any better than "horseplay" did Jerry Sandusky.
Stalking is not merely "distasteful":
- But the girls don't know!
- Bullshit. We know. Every time.
- But we took these photos in public!
- Bullshit. You took the photos from down below or up above.
Taking upskirt photos of minors is not merely "distasteful":
- But these girls are too sexy to be minors!
- Bullshit. Did you ask for an ID?
- But we took these photos in public!
- Bullshit. Child porn is illegal everywhere.
Hosting said upskirts is not merely "distasteful":
- But we didn't know!
- Bullshit. You knew, and you profited.
- But we are protecting free speech!
- Bullshit. Rape- and pedophile-adjacent porn is not free speech.
Let's call a pig, a pig. We are talking about a forum whose sole purpose is to make and distribute pornographic photos of children and young women.
By the way, an almost identical set of arguments happened around Amazon's defense of its sale of a book titled "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-lover's Code of Conduct". Amazon defended the book with the usual "if we stop selling it, Freedom Of Speech will die", and Amazon apologists made arguments very similar to yours. A few weeks later, they voluntarily took down Wikileaks because "It is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."
Reddit is about reflecting their audience's taste or lack thereof, not condoning nor condemning it. Reddit works precisely because they maintain some sort of "net neutrality" ethics, refusing any editorial meddling. Banning a distasteful content provider would break that neutrality; but hiring him would break it just as much.
If there's a will, among Reddit's users, to help Brutsch find a new job, he'll get it. And I'd bet it will happen, if only because some companies would value the PR outcome of such a move. But that's for the community to decide, not for the infrastructure guys at Reddit inc.
Reddit has neither a high nor a low moral ground on this; Reddit is and should remain amoral. That's where the Nike comparison completely falls apart.