Reddit has banned QAnon – The Verge

Reddit finally banned r / greatawakening, the main subreddit of QAnon, then banned / r / The_GreatAwakening, the backup routine where users were running away. QAnon, the network of conspiracy theories – which involve Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, politicians and government officials going back to the Kennedy era – was born on 4chan by Q, an anonymous person claiming to have high-level security . clearance. It then spread quickly on Reddit, Facebook and finally offline.

A spokesman confirmed to The edge this r / greatawakening was banned for violating Reddit's policy against "incitement to violence, harassment and disclosure of personal information" while r / The_GreatAwakening was arrested for inciting harassment.

The takedowns follow the r / MillionDollarExtreme ban earlier this week, the community belonging to the alt-right comedy troupe of the same name led by Sam Hyde, Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll. r / MillionDollarExtreme and the associated subgroups / r / BillionShekelSupreme and / r / ChadRight were banned from the site Monday night, a spokesman for Reddit confirmed The edge, citing violations of the latest update of the company's content policy. According to the messages left in place of the subreddits, MDE and ChadRight were banned for violating the violent guidelines of the forum, while BSS was taken offline for evasion ban.

While Reddit's previous bans were largely driven by external pressures, these are the first high-level bans directly related to Reddit's new, more explicit content policy, launched in October 2017. After years of inconsistent this set of bans by the site suggests a more codified strategy implemented at all levels for monitoring toxic users.

Reddit's MDE ban follows a similar decision by YouTube in May to ban the group for violating content. Their comedy is what some people would call nervous: racist, sexist and homophobic. Adult Swim, who hosted the first group show, Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, should have removed swastikas and coded racist messages before the broadcast of the show. Similarly, the QAnon community is renowned for its connections to prominent people such as Roseanne Barr, the former star of her eponymous show who lost her job after twisting a racist remark about former Obama adviser Valérie Jarrett. Conspiracy related to Q.

Since its creation in 2005 as a hotbed of interesting links, Reddit has long been defined as a space that favors a freedom of speech and almost absolute expression. "We are a free expression site with few exceptions (mostly personal information) and having to endure occasional reddit trolls like morally dubious photos or redits like jailbait is part of the Freedom Award." "Expression on this site" Manager Erik Martin said in one of Ask Me Anything's sons of the site in 2011.

The subreddits / r / Jailbait and / r / PicsOfDeadKids have been banned, as well as many of their worst compatriots, but each ban has been more or less a punctual response to long campaigns by users, the media and the general public . (Research suggests that these bans have the effect of reducing the platform's share of dreaded content.) As Reddit has become increasingly popular, it is becoming increasingly clear that the implicit standards and protections offered by the site are insufficient. Although CEO Steve Huffman is still committed to banning the worst Reddit players, a change seems to be emerging.

The week following the violent rally of white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia, and two months before the implementation of its current directives, Reddit banned subreddit / r / Physical_Removal. Referring to the habit of the former Chilean president, Augusto Pinochet, to assassinate his enemies by throwing them out of the helicopters, the idea was that the liberals and the leftists deserved specifically "to have a helicopter ride". New YorkerAndrew Marantz reported in March:

"It's a good thing," read the top post of Physical_Removal. "These are mockery of life and you have to go." Reddit had a rule banning content that "encourages or incites violence", which is a violation of this rule. Huffman said, "We had an eye on this community for a while, and I felt good about getting rid of them. But that still was not enough.

the New YorkerReddit's reports imply that Reddit has a list of subroutines that it considers to be at the edge of the areas of the site likely to violate the new guidelines (ish) that it might be required to take against a day. A list like this is a smart thing to do: some Internet domains are simply more violent and offensive than others, and if a site like Reddit is really serious about how it treats violent content and offensive, to know how these areas operate on its own servers.

The fandom around the alt-right comedy troupe Million Dollar Extreme has long been one of those spaces. Two years ago, Adult Swim ordered Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace at the series, only to cancel five months after his first, thanks to the pressure of adult swimming talents like Tim Heidecker and Brett Gelman, who have called the series "hate instrument".

Hyde claimed to be confused as to the reason for the cancellation of the show. "It's not the craziest thing that's ever been on TV here. And we were fired – I do not know why, he said The Hollywood Reporter shortly after the cancellation. "Probably because we are not anti-white."

The under-purchases of MDE and BSS reflect Hyde's attitude and they frequently use racial slurs and antisemitic memes. (Even if their subroutine is down, you can easily recreate the experience by browsing @new_engine, according to Hyde's Facebook, MDE's new Twitter account. In the meantime, a number of believers in Q plots have found themselves in referenced places in the online community. These new prohibitions reflect Reddit's more explicit attitudes towards its most virulent subreddits, including a focus on "forbidden escape" – ensuring that forbidden subreddit does not simply reform a new name.

The way Reddit addresses the problem internally is a bit more involved, according to a source within the company familiar with the process. Once a subprogram has been banned for violating Reddit's content policy, site administrators can track where banned users are going. And if another like-minded subreddit decides to host the fleeing community, administrators also ban these communities. Earlier this week, an official spokesman for Reddit said The edge that "on September 10, r / milliondollarextreme and associated subreddits were banned for violating our rules of violent content", suggesting that those who associate subreddits, r / BillionShekelSupreme and r / ChadRight, were the following. The same thing seems to have happened to r / greatawakening and r / The_GreatAwakening users.

It is an effective strategy to ensure that the site's most toxic users do not duplicate the behaviors that ban them from other subreddits. It's also a smart way to determine which subsites host similar types of content. Think of it in terms of viral replication: viruses spread inside an organism by taking over the machinery of the host cell to reproduce millions of copies of themselves; afterwards, they trigger an explosion of their host, and these copies flood the rest of the body in search of new cells to infect.

In this case, the explosion is a scale-wide ban on the site, and Reddit's administrators simply follow the new viruses and stop them before the next host gets infected, as they try to protect the virus. Whole organism. Contains a virus and it does not spread. The bans seem to indicate that Reddit finally figured out how to apply a speech policy. It remains to be seen whether they will continue to apply it in the long term.