Reddit Censorship

Reddit allows people to freely share and discuss content but that freedom sometime displeases others. In Denmark, several actors feel embarrassed by Reddit users who clip and share their nude scenes.

A Danish trade group Rights Alliance says that it's time for the platform to take responsibility. These comments from the Rights Alliance come in response to a revelation from the local radio program Kulturen . In a recent episode, it revealed that sexually revealing scenes were systematically shared on Reddit.

Kulturen reported hearing from 20 Danish actresses affected by this issue, which some describe as abuse and being molested. While they are fine with the original sex or nude scenes, being featured this way is not what they intended.

Actress Andrea Vagn Jensen, who has had one of her explicit scenes shared online, explains that there's a huge difference between appearing naked in a film and being posted on Reddit. She said:

It's just abuse. You deliver something for the production and the story, and then you end up being molested that way.

fellow actress Signe Egholm Olsen added:

It's crazy that some people feel entitled to do that, and what's just as crazy is that there are so many people who subscribe to it.

Rights Alliance reported the issue to the police, on behalf of the Danish Actors' Association and the respective rightsholders.

In response to the controversy, several clips were removed by Reddit, but that doesn't end the problem as the scenes can simply be re-uploaded.

The Rights Alliance responded urging Reddit to take its responsibilities seriously under Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive. Article 17 requires large platforms to ensure that copyright-infringing content does not reappear after it's removed. This can be achieved through upload and other censorship technologies, which are already in place on YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere.

On Monday, online discussion platform Reddit permanently took down its largest community of Donald Trump supporters, r/The_Donald.

The community had more than 7,000 active users per day (although this has previously been much higher). The ban was on the grounds that some posts incited violence, and the community had engaged in harassment on other subreddits. It will have removed hundreds of thousands of posts, and millions of comments going back many years.

The r/The_Donald subreddit is a themed, online message board where users can submit, comment and vote on posts. The decision to ban it comes as several other platforms censure racist and violent material from Trump and his supporters.

According to the New York Times, Reddit also banned another 2,000 communities across the political spectrum alongside the pro-Trump community, including left-leaning groups.

Started in 2015, r/The_Donald was the largest and most controversial subreddit dedicated to supporting Trump. Before the ban, it had more than 790,000 subscribers and was at times one of the most popular subreddits on the platform.

In June last year, Reddit quarantined the subreddit over posts inciting violence. Several months later it purged most of the community's volunteer moderators, arguing they weren't upholding the platform's policies, particularly through allowing banned content to stay up.

These shifts mirror changes in Reddit's overall governance approach. Historically, the platform has sold itself as a democratic space for free speech, with administrators resisting censorship in favour of a hands-off philosophy. However, like other platforms, Reddit now faces pressure from advertisers that don't want their brands associated with political extremism. Advertising is a growing part of Reddit's economic model. And with major partners such as L'Oreal and Audi, advertisers' preferences undoubtedly hold sway in how the website is regulated.

... Read the full article from theconversation.com

Reddit Ireland has taken the decision to shut down in the early hours of the morning, to limit content posted from the US during daytime hours there.

Moderators said having to check every comment on the group had pushed them to breaking point. The page is now seeking to expand its team of moderators and add filters that can spot posts that require censorship.

In a post on the page, which has 280,000 members, it said:

We're taking the very difficult decision today to shut down Reddit Ireland temporarily between midnight and 08:00 each day in order to stem the flow of racist/extremist content which is being posted at these times.

Reddit said it would install software to racist comments including common phrases used against traveller communities and any other minority groups.

Social media site Reddit has announced new censorship rules to target bullying and harassment. It explains in a blog post:

These changes, which were many months in the making, were primarily driven by feedback we received from you all, our users, indicating to us that there was a problem with the narrowness of our previous policy. Specifically, the old policy required a behavior to be continued and/or systematic for us to be able to take action against it as harassment. It also set a high bar of users fearing for their real-world safety to qualify, which we think is an incorrect calibration. Finally, it wasn't clear that abuse toward both individuals and groups qualified under the rule. All these things meant that too often, instances of harassment and bullying, even egregious ones, were left unactioned. This was a bad user experience for you all, and frankly, it is something that made us feel not-great too. It was clearly a case of the letter of a rule not matching its spirit.

The changes we're making today are trying to better address that, as well as to give some meta-context about the spirit of this rule: chiefly, Reddit is a place for conversation. Thus, behavior whose core effect is to shut people out of that conversation through intimidation or abuse has no place on our platform.

We also hope that this change will take some of the burden off moderators, as it will expand our ability to take action at scale against content that the vast majority of subreddits already have their own rules against-- rules that we support and encourage.

We all know that context is critically important here, and can be tricky, particularly when we're talking about typed words on the internet. This is why we're hoping today's changes will help us better leverage human user reports. Where previously, we required the harassment victim to make the report to us directly, we'll now be investigating reports from bystanders as well. We hope this will alleviate some of the burden on the harassee.

You should also know that we'll also be harnessing some improved machine-learning tools to help us better sort and prioritize human user reports. But don't worry, machines will only help us organize and prioritize user reports. They won't be banning content or users on their own. A human user still has to report the content in order to surface it to us. Likewise, all actual decisions will still be made by a human admin.