Reddit Mods Bury Glenn Greenwald's Story On GCHQ/NSA Use Of Internet To 'Destroy Reputations'
from the what-is-this?-Reddigg? dept
Mike's coverage of leaks showing the NSA and GCHQ using the internet to "manipulate, deceive and destroy reputations" (as reported by Glenn Greenwald at firstlook.org) hit the front page of Reddit yesterday, generating lots of traffic for Techdirt. This traffic truly should have gone to firstlook.org, but never made it there. A look at the top comments on our coverage show why:
Why is this story being removed from all the popular subs over and over by mods?
Message the admins about the censorship of this article by /r/news and /r/worldnews mods. They have never seemed to care about this in the past but if enough users message them it will hopefully at least provoke a response of some kind. Something needs to be done about this or this site needs to be abandoned as a platform for legitimate political discourse.A little further down in the thread:
Important Update: So, it turns out that the /r/news mod /u/BipolarBear0 who has been deleting all the instances of this story has previously been caught running a voting brigade to get anti-Semitic content upvoted on /r/conspiracy to discredit the sub. A fact which he admitted to me in another thread just a few minutes ago (he claims he was doing an "experiment"...) . This guy needs to be banned from the site.
Last night, the original article from firstlook.org was taken down and tagged as "not appropriate subreddit." Meanwhile, another copy of the story was allowed to rise, despite having an editorialized title. Later, the version that had been taken down--which was older and had fewer upvotes because it had been removed--was put back up and the younger version with more upvotes was removed, allegedly because the topic was "already covered."Censorship on reddit? It seems almost ridiculous considering the amount of subreddits available for those submitting stories. But it's there all the same (although not actually "censorship" so much as a bad direction for a community based on meritocracy to go in). According to commenters, both r/news and r/worldnews (two of the biggest subreddits), the firstlook.org post was removed over and over again once they began collecting upvotes, forcing each submission to start over at "0" and face an uphill struggle for visibility.
This tactic has been used to keep other similar stories from rising, such as the one about the NSA sharing information with Israel.
Time and time again, the content on /r/worldnews, /r/technology, /r/news, and /r/politics is manipulated by moderator intervention.
While everyone lets the implications of this kind of content manipulation on reddit regarding stories about online content manipulation sink in, I think it's worth noting that /r/technology has a bot that removes stories about the NSA.
Ninja edit: subscribe to /r/undelete and /r/longtail if you're interested in keeping an eye on popular content that's been removed by mods.
Screenshots and lists of removed posts have been compiled showing the various subs' mods' actions to bury the firstlook.org story. But why? Sooner or later, it was bound to sneak through, like ours did (a link to the Examiner's coverage did as well).
Speculation on this runs rampant, but most commenters agree that too many mods are abusing their power in order to bury anything they don't like. We saw some of this infighting late last year when r/politics composed a very arbitrary list [since rescinded, mostly] of banned submissions sources (including us) in an effort to crack down on overly-politicized articles (on a politics sub no less) and what the mods declared to be "blogspam," a catchall term that somehow included award-winning news outlets like Mother Jones.
The decision to clamp down on news detailing this particular leak brought a whole lot of irony with it. The efforts made to remove an unflattering story about intelligence agencies' dirty little efforts to use the internet to destroy reputations and manipulate public perception led to tongue-in-cheek speculation that Reddit itself is compromised. (And there's certainly no way to be sure it isn't…)
Techdirt may have been the inadvertent beneficiary of bad behavior by subreddit mods, but that's hardly reason to celebrate. If the mod situation is as bad as it appears to be, Reddit is going to start heading down the path of Digg, whose infamous "bury brigade" worked tirelessly to ensure only certain news coverage made its way to the top of the list.
This isn't an easily-solvable problem, thanks to Reddit's hydra-like structure, with hundreds of subreddits and no clear demarcation of command. The corporate Reddit, which ostensibly "controls" the community, has largely taken a hands-off approach. This is still the best option and the reversal of the r/politics arbitrary ban list shows the community still has the power to solve some of its mod problems. But widespread story burial, coupled with evidence of subreddits being gamed by mods, isn't exactly comforting, especially considering Reddit's journalistic aspirations.
Like any platform with millions of users, issues will never be non-existent. But a failure to address the abuse of power by mods of larger subreddits will hurt Reddit in the long run. Power coupled with an almost-complete lack of accountability is always a bad thing. But this problem will need to be solved internally by the subreddits themselves. There's power in numbers, something subreddit subscribers should be able to leverage to start cleaning this mess up.
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Filed Under: gchq, glenn greenwald, moderation, nsa, traffic
Companies: reddit
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Even if they truly had nothing to do with it(possible, but unlikely I'd say), given the content and nature of the story that was being buried, everyone will assume they were guilty anyway.
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For being great at social and technical engineering, the NSA really suck.
Perhaps some subreddit mods are just fed up with the same story being posted again and again.
Or perhaps it is actually GCHQ's JTRIG lot are being really sneaky; posting all these extra versions and comments about censorship - causing distrust of the subreddits' mods, reddit in general, and distracting from the real story. It seems to fit well with was in the leak. But perhaps that is too paranoid of me.
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Having said that, there are lots of folk that cross post the same article again and again in various subs looking for karma. I mean how many times do you want to read the same headline, leading to the same or similar article, in how many different subs? Some cross posters are so prolific at this posting the same article across various subs that it's become a pollution problem of titles. So much so that some of those more prolific posters have been being shadow banned to reduce some of the pollution.
Where and when is enough enough?
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Seriously?
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Re: Seriously?
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Gets trolled.
Makes excuses to rationalize the obvious troll.
#HowMuchDoTheyPayYou
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Re: Seriously?
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Your post will likely be removed if it:
* is an opinion/analysis or advocacy piece
It appears that this is vague enough that the "analysis" clause is the cudgel being leveraged to suppress stories.
Nearly every story linked could be argued to provide an analysis of some sort, and in all honesty analysis is often a key component of good journalism.
There definitely appears to be some disproportionate enforcement of the opinion/analysis clause against NSA related material.
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There are plenty of other places on Reddit for Techdirt content.
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Is anyone REALLY surprised?
How the mighty have fallen, eh, Reddit?
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Re: Is anyone REALLY surprised?
Of course, you're also willfully lying about what the "banning" was about.
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Seriously, Reddit
It's pretty obvious that the entire structure, while being huge and 'uncontrollable', is still a high school cafeteria, with the popular people running it.
That being said, Reddit is not what it could have been, now or in the future. It's a mess, and it's going to get worse.
Want some cute puppy pictures to show off? Then Reddit is good.
But for real news, forget it. If you have any kind of opinion about something it's going to get buried fast by whoever runs that particular sub-reddit.
Now I don't even bother. It's a waste of time. Why was anyone really expecting anything else?
It's being run by human beings, with all of their particular flaws and biases.
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Re: Seriously, Reddit
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Re: Re: Seriously, Reddit
In all my many years on the internet, I have never seen this happen even once.
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This always happens.
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Just trying to see the whole forest...
The bigger problem I see, is that if people loose trust in Reddit as a platform, they "win" anyway. After all, if it gets digged, it'll be just one huge platform less they have to infiltrate.
In the meantime, moderators will get defensive, users'll get mad @ them and @ the site as a whole... and nobody wins, and by nobody I mean not "the good guys", on each side of the browser.
Tactics deployed: instant profit.
Tactics discovered and denounced: Site looses trust and eventually collapses. Delayed profit. (But huge jackpot nonetheless)
Infiltrate > Divide and Conquer 101
What am I missing here?
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Re: Just trying to see the whole forest...
Now, you could argue that that's also going to plan, driving people into separate groups like that, but I'm just not sure how effective it could be long term, as the internet is one of the greatest tools for communication yet created(hence why so many governments hate it with a passion), so even 'spread out' like that, they'll still inevitably interact with each other.
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Re: well it shouldn't be...
Yes, we know it, internet is 99% porn & trolls. Still, that 1% is huge and the impact those virtual oasis can have in real life is proven time and time again.
A smarter(?) move would be to NEVER trash a site that is deemed untrustworthy, otherwise common folks would be doing exactly what those in power want, hopping on the mouse wheel, stuck on an infinite loop of social sites that take a lot of time to develop, spread and establish. (That often takes a lot of time rather than little, and that is LOST time, which they also capitalize).
No, no, a common "base case" would be to get the people in charge of the site to put a system in place that guarantees transparency, at the very least in terms of Moderators and Management. (Yes, I know, guaranteed transparency belongs to the Realm of Utopia... but you get the idea. If I were running the site, or if I were a mod, I would have to answer to somebody for my actions. I would stand by my decision if I ban a subreddit and would have to give all the details as to why I made that call. My actions would then have to be audited by a group of peers or superiors.
Anyway... just some thoughts thrown into the ocean. It can't hurt to brainstorm a little...
Disclaimer: I've never used Reddit, I find that format particularly confusing. I do acknowledge however the potential it has to gather people and minds from all walks of life. And that's a huge power. And those corrupt in power know that far better than us. Sites like that should never be given up easily. To pin point the rotten apples and expose them should be a must. But never to burn the entire box.
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Re: Re: well it shouldn't be...
Lack of accountability is reddit's biggest problem. It sounds crazy, but the only thing that could change it would be a sort of elections system for moderators. Again, sounds nuts, but that's the only thing I can see that could change this.
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Lack of accountability is the name of the game
That's why it's paramount to defend against such a critical and vulnerable aspect of any social entity.
On that token, there's good news and bad news: On the bright side, many strategies can be put in place and should be enforced 24/7, and you pointed out some of them. If I may I'd like to expand where you left off; I would argue that having a "small" group of people as the "Accountability & Transparency Police" is not a bad thing per se. Actually, if implemented correctly it could be very efficient. (Of course the mere total would have to come up from a ratio of the total users and some other meaningful metrics so as to be able to keep up with the data flow, but this whole point is a matter of a long debate).
As far as the community's role, I think it's essential that it complains, not once or every now and then, but every single time. And that property of a community, the ability to pin-point and address wrongdoing is not something to be taken lightly. On top of that, I posit that if anything, a group of commons has three powers that are both rights and obligations: to complain, to be vigilant that best practices are observed at all times, and to denounce/report wrongdoing WITH evidence (such as time-lapses, screen-caps, logs, etc).
All that falls under the responsibility of the entire community, and it should be. Of course, if that community perceives no upper structure of accountability, no system that will look into these things, it all falls apart. So every layer has duties to fulfill.
Admins, Mods and Managers can not do the "job" of the community and vice-versa.
On the Dark Side, It's just another canonical example of an arms-race, a never-ending battle between measures and countermeasures, because as you can imagine, even IF (huge if) a strong-organic-dynamic system is put in place and it actually works, it's just another big target to conquer in the eyes of these pseudo-soldiers without a war or a real enemy to fight. And they have endless money and time to hack at the problem. Of course, that should never be a deterrent for trying.
The Ultimate Facepalm is that in the Information Age, with one foot in the 21st century, Sysadmins, Mods, as well as Regular Systems/Networks Users, we all have to get proficient in the Sun Tsu's Art of War, and very fast.
So far that's been a must only for Management and Military, but as information has always been and always will be the ultimate power, we all have to catch up. That is, of course, if we innocent and free people of the World would want to stand a chance.
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"Going to start"? Reddit is a long way down that path.
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Business
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reddit ....
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Who reads Reddit anymore?
I don't trust any source with amateur "moderators". Those sites are always worthless.
I can decide for myself what's important, which is why I read this blog. The comments are open, and I can decide who's real and who's flack.
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Obviously, Reddit is compromised
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New Sub
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About the Reddit mods being involved
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Disappointing, TechDirt. Disappointing.
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The firstlook article was being deleted because it wasn't a news source - non-news sources are deleted from the news subreddit. The firstlook article was a post about a story. Eventually it came from a factual news source, examiner.com, and was let through just fine.
Secondly, the mod talked about in that quote, BipolarBear0, was accused of deleting the post but it was based on nothing - there's no evidence that he did. Techdirt has reported on this as fact, though! The mod gives his side of the story here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1z51r2/rconspiracy_is_calling_for_bipolarbear0_to_be /cfqorke . The mod also wasn't caught upvoting anti-Semitic content in the conspiracy. He posted some racist threads but it was the readers of the conspiracy subreddit who heaviliy upvoted it.
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Platform for Legitimate Anything?
LOL. Reddit? It's like one rung above 4chan and on the social network ladder...
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I'd like to comment but I'm censored...
And InfoWars.
You know, the big 1st amendment advocates.
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Drop Reddit Now
DROP REDDIT NOW.
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Reddit mods MORONS says 247 News
Just click their user name on reddit, GONE
haha
Could be all the new NSA back door stuff they have on prime spirals and how the NSA backdoors all crypto today
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Most are going to a Reddit clone at https://voat.co/ . After near 8 years, I've left Reddit for earlier events very similar to those described here.
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It will not get deleted there. We welcome any news story from a legit news site. No censorship of such posts. Up and down votes decide if something should live or die on this site. All are welcome. It is still small, but you will not be censored. Help me grow it into a true replacement for the insulting nanny/dinosaur of /r/worldnews, /r/news, /r/politics.
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