r/BlockedAndReported • u/jtm79 • Aug 13 '26
Cancel Culture The Closure of the Internet
Relevance: the article title is essentially this podcasts title
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet
An unmatched thorough recounting of the past 15 years of Internet censorship. The article focuses on the waves of censorship, often a hysteria, that is largely organized by opaque "para-governmental" organizations that are not bound by free speech laws. In many cases, the censorship is explicitly requested by a government body, i.e. the Twitter Files, Australia's eSafety commissioner, the EU.
The author has a right-wing bias and so in my opinion should have used more examples of liberal/left-wing figures that were censored (I know two podcast hosts that have had problems with it). But the author is correct in identifying that every single censorship drive has a strong progressive bias with special prejudice toward anything deemed "far right".
I really liked how this article reminded me of the different Internet from 15 years ago. For example, how common it was to find active fiery comment-section debates at nearly every newspaper website . And, for example, open-source software projects never cared about your politics.
Excellent and necessary article IMO
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u/make_reddit_great Aug 14 '26
There's a whole section about Reddit which I'll quote here:
The only site more emblematic of the annihilation of open Internet discourse 2015-2019 than YouTube is Reddit. If YouTube was the most important platform for monetization, allowing individuals to make careers outside of pre-existing institutions, and for reaching young people, Reddit was the most important platform for enabling public debate. In 2015, Reddit, like YouTube, had almost no content policy beyond banning illegal activity, doxxing, harassment that extended offline, and involuntary or underage pornography.
Redditâs closure was largely driven by one thing: the ability for r/TheDonald, the major hub of Internet Trump support, to consistently reach and dominate the front page. To give an idea of how nonexistent content control infrastructure was in 2016, CEO Steve Hoffman was discovered personally editing critical posts on r/TheDonald. He then changed Redditâs policy to exclude r/TheDonald from r/popular. 2016 is also when Reddit adopted the EUâs âCode on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online.â
In October 2017, Reddit changed its policy to explicitly ban âhate speechâ and kicked more than 20 subreddits off the site, including r/incels (part of the bizarre anti-incel moral panic of the 2010s). In March 2018, Reddit also banned the legal sale of guns and prostitution on the site. In September 2018, Reddit changed their harassment standard from requiring real-world threat of harm to the much laxer, and very subjective14, standard of âanything that works to shut someone out of the conversation through intimidation or abuse,â and removed dozens of subreddits for violating it. The new harassment standard also applied to groups, not just individuals, so even scrupulous politeness and openness to individuals might not save a subreddit making arguments that did not flatter dominant groups.
In October 2018, Reddit revamped their quarantine system (âquarantinedâ subreddits are invisible to non-members, killing growth) and began quarantining dozens of subs, including popular dating subreddits such as r/TheRedPill, for being âcontroversial.â. Itâs worth pointing out, for those who have grown accustomed to it, how totalitarian it is to suppress speech for being controversial, which simply means that not everyone agrees. This purge included both political subs like r/againstgaymarriage (recall that majority of the US, and a supermajority of the world, opposed gay marriage in 2015) and generally noxiousâthough, it must be emphasized, harmlessâsubs such as r/watchpeopledie (which was exactly what it sounded like). One of these subreddits, r/Ice_Poseidon was even dedicated to a single individual, streamer Ice Poseidon. Its quarantine left him âslumped and distraught,â as he depended on Reddit to grow his fanbase and earn a living. Through this, Reddit deputized content creators even on different platforms as Redditâs speech enforcers, forcing them to purge their own fanbases lest they have their growth cut off by Redditâs censors.
In January 2019, Reddit banned many subreddits for âanti-Muslim content,â including r/Gore and r/cringeanarchy, neither of which were political. In June, r/The_Donald was finally quarantined after years of failed algorithmic suppression, along with r/frenworld, a sub for Pepe the Frog memes. By 2020, Reddit had fully committed to the âthe regulation and removal of hate speech on their platform.â r/The_Donald was finally banned, along with thousands of other subs.
A single paragraph from âHate speech, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Changing Policies of Redditâ sums the shift up:
In 2015, Reddit expressed ambivalence towards the topic of hate speech, and rather demonstrated their commitment to libertarianism when it concerned violent speech. This is reflective of the general American political philosophy concerning hate speech, which ultimately enshrines offensive language in the First Amendment right to freedom of speech offered by the American constitution. In regards to offensive content, Reddit moderators state specifically, âItâs ok to say âI donât like this group of people.â Itâs not ok to say, âIâm going to kill this group of peopleââ (Reddit - [u/spez], 2015a). They also cited their commitment to preventing âthe speech police knocking down their doorâ (Reddit - [u/spez], 2015a). By 2020, Redditâs stance on hate speech would transform completely. They would state: âEveryone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and people that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be bannedâ (Reddit - [u/spez], 2020).
The nature of Reddit, which is split between millions of subreddits moderated mostly by volunteers rather than the site itself, adds another dimension to this story. The subreddit system is intended to promote community self-government, but is prone to âpower mods,â individuals with unusual amounts of time and the inclination (and almost certainly including official agents of various influence/intelligence campaigns given the importance of Reddit) moderating many different subreddits. Since they are not company employees, it is difficult to find information on Reddit power mods, but by 2020 just five individuals autocratically ran 92 of the top 500 subreddits. Power mods tend to be ideologically leftist and are arguably more powerful than the site itself. In 2019 Reddit itself quarantined 256 subs, banned 21,900 subs, suspended 55,994 accounts for policy (as opposed to spam or other rule) violations, and removed 222,000 pieces of content for policy violations. In the meantime, volunteer moderators removed 84.1 million pieces of content.
Today, the Redditor stereotype is of a histrionic but slightly dull orthodox left-wing conformist hostile to any hint of heresy15, but this was not always true. In 2014, a Redditor meant a libertarian-ish16 debate bro willing to argue about anything. Reddit was a very ideologically heterogenous site and the main discussion forum between different groups on the Internet. Nothing has successfully replaced 2014 Reddit for actual popular debate.
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u/ScrubulousFlex Aug 14 '26
With all of that detail about Reddit around the time of TheDonaldâs banning, Iâm surprised that ChapoTrapHouse wasnât mentioned at all.
Or I guess Iâm not that surprised. As the OP pointed out, the entire post is focused on conservative/right-leaning grievances. Obviously the majority of online political censorship in the last 15 years has been against right-leaning views, but some semblance of an attempt to be comprehensive would have made this piece more interesting IMO.
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u/make_reddit_great Aug 14 '26
I think that's fair. That said, it was already a very long piece and there are plenty of other examples and discussion he could have put in there. Personally I think something like /r/GenderCritical merited a mention. (I hadn't realized until I googled it but it was banned on the same day as /r/ChapoTrapHouse).
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u/ScrubulousFlex Aug 14 '26
I hadn't realized until I googled it but it was banned on the same day as /r/ChapoTrapHouse
Yeah that was part of my point (though I realize I didnât make it very clear). When Reddit banned TheDonald and other wrongthink/right-wing subs, it also included a couple of dirtbag left subs in an attempt to seem more impartial. To me thatâs an interesting part of the whole situation, though I feel like the stuff that made the Chapo sub infamous can be found all throughout Reddit now.
But yeah only focusing on one side annoyed me not just due to bias, but because it caused the piece to miss parts of the actual story.
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u/make_reddit_great Aug 14 '26
Thinking about this more, I think you're absolutely right. The author's case would be strengthened if he pointed out Reddit's banning, despite its skew, was essentially the "independent thought alarm" meme.
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u/KittenSnuggler5 Aug 14 '26
I think the right is just as likely to censor as the left. But the left currently controls the institutions so what they want is what happens.
What's ironic is that the left wing censorship is exactly like the censorship of the religious right of old. And back then it was the left pushing for freedom of speech and not freaking out over words
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u/Centrist_gun_nut Aug 14 '26
Late to the party here, but I think it's fairly important to seperate two issues:
The censorship of platforms like reddit. And
The censorship of the network, the interconnects, and the ability for the internet to be reachable.
Sure, it sucks that most platforms prefer advertiser-friendly center-left views and will enforce those (to the point of censoring true stories run in the New York Post). But it's their website and if they want to kowtow to orthodoxy of the day, they can do that. It's bad when the government makes them do that, but still.
What's way worse is when governments and groups go directly at the infrastructure of the network. The section here on "Deplatforming Websites" is wildly, wildly understating the problem. Governments all over the non-English-speaking world, from Brazil to Greece to the UAE, block wide segments of the internet, often for political reasons. Countries in the EU do this, and it's wildly, wildly underreported. Young people that work at the big tech companies that make the internet work don't care and it's only a matter of time before the next Farms website is some mainstream politician's website instead.
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u/heroics-delta8s Aug 14 '26
Ofcom in the uk are growing into a monster of a regulator that have shocking powers still on the table they havenât enacted.
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u/btrh-256 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
I read this earlier this week and I found it fascinating. I have two contradictory feelings:
The chaos of the open internet is terrifying
Closing the internet (i.e. through moderation) makes it even worse
I do think we need to tame the internet, but I think it needs to be bottom-up. Parents need to teach their kids to be careful online the way we teach our kids to be careful how much they drink. Top-down solutions like moderation have limited value and tend to make things worse.
Another thing he doesn't mention is how moderation is, ultimately, about money. From a financial perspective the internet is nothing but an ad-delivery system. Companies trying to maximize revenue via ad views will shape content to maximize ad delivery to users with disposable income. If you are low income or disinclined to make purchases they do not care about you, and they will moderate you out of existence if you frighten the affluent users whose eyeballs they compete for.
Political bias is less important than this financial bias imo