5 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: What would I do?
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Comment by deleigh at 05/06/2020 at 08:47 UTC
11 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thank you for reaching out and I value your insight and input.
1. Technology, at least as it currently exists, requires human input in order to adapt. I think of self-sufficiency as being able to make independent decisions for preservation. In other words, instinct. Could technology someday have instinct? I'd like to believe that anything is possible, but I think so many other things would change along with it that our current understanding would be obsolete several times over.
2. I don't think this needs to be changed, it just needs to be enforced. As it currently stands, if someone sends you a PM wishing extreme violence on you, you PM the admins and you either get no response, get a response saying they'll look into it and nothing happens, or they'll look into it and the person gets suspended. 80% of the time it's the first one, 15% the second, and 5% the last. There's no direct way to report things to the admins, and that's by design. They don't want to see it.
3. The President does not have unilateral authority to override Congress. Congress already has a law on the book saying tech sites are not liable for what their users post, which is why Trump's narrative shifted to "repealing Section 230." For what it's worth, I agree, but for radically different reasons. Owners of torrent sites can be arrested for hosting those files. Sites like Backpage can be seized for allowing adult classifieds. Tech sites, on the other hand, enjoy what Trump would call "absolute immunity" from liability for what their users post, even if that content would be illegal otherwise. The Communications Decency Act was passed in 1996. I can expand on this point if you'd like, but the long and short of it is that the Internet of the mid 90s is incredibly different from the Internet today. Freedom of speech ends where illegal behavior begins. Hate speech is not free speech. Harassment is not free speech either. Reddit shouldn't be liable for hosting edgy memes, but it should be liable if they are made aware of a violent community, do nothing, and then someone commits a crime and it can be shown that the violent community influenced them to commit a crime and reddit knew about it and did nothing.
4. If I understand you correctly, you're asking how you could get tech people into humanities and vice versa. If the project is very lean, then there isn't much you can do. A small, open-source project isn't going to have the means to hire a dedicated community manager. But, there are free resources in both directions that can certainly help people learn. If the scope grows, and the project warrants more hands, and that project becomes influential, then I think the need for specialized workers becomes more important. Hopefully, a small project isn't going to run into so many snafus as reddit has. It really only happens where tech intersects with humanities. When was the last time you expected social commentary from the developers of Rainmeter? Probably doesn't cross most people's minds. Snapchat, on the other hand? I definitely expect them to be a part of the conversation.
Again, thank you for taking the time to respond to me and if any of my points are unclear or you have more questions, I'm happy to clarify and answer them.
Comment by KaiserBob at 05/06/2020 at 08:52 UTC*
2 upvotes, 5 direct replies
Building on #3, it’s not just right-wing communities - what do you do about subs like BlackPeopleTwitter? Or TwoXXChromosomes? Or ChapoTrapHouse? Where exactly does the line for bigotry fall and how does it not end up being just as arbitrary?
I don��t make a distinction between rhetoric “We should gas all the Jews” and “Kill the rich” - both are equally reprehensible, but I doubt the Reddit hive mind would agree based on the rhetoric I see regularly on default subs. How do these hypothetical arbiters being brought in not just become culture police?