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In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations in mid-2013, moderators at /r/technology configured filters to automatically censor posts containing "politicized" words, based on findings by creq. This censorship appears to be ongoing. The banned words include NSA, Comcast, Anonymous, CISPA, SOPA, Swartz, FCC, net neutrality, GHCQ, EFF, ACLU, and others.
The admins claim they simply configured their bots to delete "politicized" posts. Yet their filters (which were not announced or explained) effectively precluded meaningful discussion of contemporary issues. Could this reflect willing government collaboration by Reddit's admins, or might they have been served with an NSL to force compliance?
News coverage of the censorship is at the Daily Dot. A fuller list of banned words are available on pastebin. The reddit post reporting censorship on /r/rechnology.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @05:15PM
The title and body of this post strongly imply that the reddit admins had anything to do with this. In reality it was done by the user-moderators of a user-created section of the site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @05:27PM
Sometimes people will do this to their particular boards. As sometimes I know this is weird... People like to troll.
One board I frequently visit finally had enough. If it is anything to do with politics or religion the board operators do not delete the post. But just ban it to their own section where they can argue it out. It keeps 99% of the users happy. It also seemed to make the trolls decide to try elsewhere as their response rate went to nearly 0.
People have the right to free speech and all that. But that also means I have the right to tell them to STFU.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Serial_Priest on Thursday April 17 2014, @07:05PM
r/technology is one of the main subreddits, and up until this censorship was exposed, it was moderated by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian ("kn0thing"), among other interested parties. See this series of posts: http://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing [reddit.com]
In theory, you are correct that "admins" and "user-moderators" are separate. In practice, they overlap significantly, both on Reddit and elsewhere. It is disingenous to suggest that this censorship was divorced from the site owners' intentions.