33 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
I've tried answering a few inquiries here and there, but a lot of people are more inclined to believe this was some massive conspiracy no matter what I say.
The only thing the admins wanted to "silence" was the leaking of personal information. Given that several of the individuals involved were journalists with many parts of their lives already online, that made for some tricky calls. Some things we initially took down for being personal information became irrelevant because so many other "news" sources started running them openly.
I personally didn't know anything about Zoe Quinn before all this other than her involvement with Depression Quest, and then suddenly every detail of her life and interactions with other people was getting regurgitated here. I initially would not have considered her or most of the individuals involved in the situation celebrities but many did have public presences on the internet. That made drawing the lines on what was considered personal information much more difficult and we took down some posts that contained information like home addresses, family names, and information of those who might be involved somehow but were otherwise private citizens.
The mass deletions of individual comments were not done by admins or at our request. We did ban users for posting personal information or vote manipulation. Most of the vote manipulation was in the form of brigades from other sites or other subreddits, although there were a handful of users trying to use multiple accounts to vote.
The situation was further complicated by groups of users from outside sites with their own agendas. We have never sat by and allowed brigades to dictate how posts are received on reddit. Yes, it's a bannable offense. It happens all the time on the site, and we take action against it then too. The only difference is that in those cases, the users tend to message us, figure out what the problem was, and often get a second chance. In this case, very few users contacted us. They are still welcome to do so.
Comment by love_otter at 07/09/2014 at 18:44 UTC
72 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Thank you for responding. First, to make one thing clear,
and we took down some posts that contained information like home addresses, family names, and information of those who might be involved somehow but were otherwise private citizens.
That is 100% okay, you'll not find me complaining about that.
And yes, I've seen some user's screencapped conversations with either mods or admins about their shadowbanning. In most cases, the given reason was "You were involved with a raid from 4chan", but what was happening was reddit users who also use 4chan saw a link posted on 4chan, and came over to it from there, simple as.
It's not like these were one-day-old accounts getting nuked, it's not like they were commenting things like "lol zoe lives at xxxxxx", although I'm sure you guys had to deal with a fair number of those, but those aren't the comments I'm referring to.
This is a screencap of posts that got shadowbanned[1]. It's old, so some of those accounts may be back now, but what were they banned for? The content of their comment breaks no rules, and simply browsing 4chan and reddit at the same time surely isn't against the rules.
1: http://i.imgur.com/5UTd9sT.png
I get that this was a trying time for you guys, but you must see how that looks like random censorship to an outside perspective.
Comment by [deleted] at 08/09/2014 at 03:55 UTC
9 upvotes, 0 direct replies
So out of curiosity, why is it all right for reddit admins to launch "vote brigades" towards other bodies about issues they care about (such as SOPA or the upcoming net neutrality protest later this week)? That seems a little hypocritical. Would you be all right if the FCC turns around and says "yeah, we're going to discard the opinion of anyone who comes to us from reddit, and not only that but anyone who does so never gets to comment on an issue with us again?" Why is it all right for you to do it?
