Comment by AMWJ on 30/08/2021 at 17:58 UTC

315 upvotes, 11 direct replies (showing 11)

View submission: Why are subreddits going private/pinning protest posts?—Protests against anti-vaxxing subreddits.

Question: What's the intended end of this blackout? I understand that nobody's bound to any plans, and that all this is fluid, but I guess I'm just wondering about the intended plan right now.

Are the subreddits that have gone dark intending to wait until action is taken? Or are they only committing to staying dark for a certain period of time? Does Spez saying "No." again cause everyone to come out of protest again, or are they all committing to blackout until real change is promised?

Replies

Comment by sjhill at 31/08/2021 at 14:05 UTC

0 upvotes, 0 direct replies

It's going to be interesting to see if the admins start busting these mods for violating the content policy:

While not every community may be for you (and you may find some unrelatable or even offensive), no community should be used as a weapon. Communities should create a sense of belonging for their members, not try to diminish it for others. Likewise, everyone on Reddit should have an expectation of privacy and safety, so please respect the privacy and safety of others.

and the mod guidelines for banning people for participating in subs you don't like:

Management of Multiple Communities

We know management of multiple communities can be difficult, but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community. In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

Comment by Donkey__Balls at 31/08/2021 at 06:18 UTC

7 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I don’t care if NNN is gone - other than we lose the chance to observe and study conspiracy nutters in their natural environment - but this is a *slippery* slope to go down. Where does it end when you silence people for agreeing with accepted theory on any matter of public health? What objective rule do you create? “Don’t say false things”? Who decides what is true?

(I’m gonna be lazy and reuse my previous rant on the matter, so apologies if anyone saw this before.)

Example: under the Trump administration, the CDC specifically refused to acknowledge the airborne transmission of the virus, in many cases specifically stating that it is “not airborne” despite the fact that the overwhelming preponderance of peer reviewed research showed that it was. This has vast implications for health policy, including the fact that the risk of a major transmission incident increases with the number of students in a school regardless of how you separate them in different rooms as long as they are on the same recirculated air system. During this time, the CDC also published the irresponsible statement that “the most important thing is to get kids back into schools”, implying that in person primary education was weighted more highly in policy than mortality reduction, drawing considerable criticism from the most respected epidemiologists and public health experts in the world including former CDC directors.

It took nearly a year for the CDC to acknowledge the reality of airborne transmission, with disastrous results. So this brings us the question of who decides what is “misinformation”? If I were advocating strongly for recognition of airborne transmission during this past year, when my current statements were in direct conflict with the CDC, would I have been considered “misinformation”?

It’s easy to point out very obvious misinformation when it’s simple and qualitative. “Masks don’t work” is obviously misinformation because of the overwhelming amount of research otherwise. However, the opposite statement is also misinformation but it’s one that is very popular on Reddit right now: “Masks prevent the spread of Covid”. This is factually incorrect because masks reduce **but do not eliminate** transmission. With universal mask compliance we would all be better off, but at the same time this type of misinformation is very dangerous because it creates a false sense of safety - the false idea that there is zero risk of transmission if everyone has a homemade cloth mask.

Just so happens that my field of research was applying air quality models to the spread of respiratory diseases, and I could count on my fingers the number of people who have an in-depth technical research background on this tiny topic…and I’m quite certain none of them work for Reddit. And then the same goes for any other field in the hundreds of research areas that make up the body of knowledge in public health. Is Reddit going to hire them all to form a board of review to determine what is or is not “misinformation”?

You can’t create a rule against misinformation without clarifying who decides what is the truth. People have accused me of misinformation often when my opinion wasn’t popular but I turned out to be correct. For months I’ve been mass-downvoted and called a fearmonger, an alarmist and a troll just for saying that we will soon have a fully vaccine-resistant variant. Now it’s all over the news because experts are saying it’s inevitable.

It’s no secret that the way Reddit is run is an absolute mess. Moderators have zero accountability to their communities, but they also aren’t accountable as employees. It’s a system ripe for abuse. There’s no way I see a policy like this, however your a good intentions may be now, to become anything more than an excuse for mods to remove whatever post they don’t personally like. It’s just going to become in practice a rule that punishes anyone for having a dissenting opinion.

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For more info on the year-long uproar against the CDC’s refusal to use “the A-word” see: Marr LC, Tang JW. A Paradigm Shift to Align Transmission Routes with Mechanisms. *Clin Infect Dis*. 2021 Aug 20:ciab722. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciab722. PMID: 34415335.

SARS-CoV-2 This is has been the subject of considerable debate in the past year because the CDC took the same stance although overwhelming researched proved otherwise. In fact this is the whole point of the policy-changing letter[1] authored by thirteen experts in the field of respiratory disease spread, as the culmination of result of hundreds of research papers and tens of thousands of hours of exhausive laboratory and field research on the subject.

1: https://aiha-assets.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/AIHA/uploads/PressReleases/Immediate-Action-to-Address-Inhalation-Exposure-to-SARS-CoV-2_2142021.pdf