(Photo/Eva Blue via Flickr)
Although Reddit is known for its strict posting guidelines in order to prevent spam and self-promotion, the social media site has surprised many of its users in recent months by banning some alternative news organizations from some of the website’s most popular forums, including r/news and r/politics.
The controversy initially began about two months ago when one news outlet, Russia Today, was found to be banned from r/news. The news outlet’s anger over its prohibited presence on the site has been shared by many of the forum’s some 1.1 million readers, who called the ban an “unjustified act of censorship.”
However, the r/news forum’s moderators, specifically the moderator who is identified by his Reddit username douglasmacarthur, defended the ban on some alternative media organizations and said that the ban against RT came because the site was spamming the subreddit.
He said a decision to ban a website domain is related to how frequent a link to that domain is posted. “The rule-of-thumb is 10 percent,” he said. “If you submit a lot, and the proportion coming from a certain domain is way higher than that, you’re probably a spammer. If there’s a lot of users doing that a lot for one domain, you should investigate further to see if it’s people working for that domain.”
But RT’s leading web analyst Aleksey Naumov called the “spamming” accusations unjustified, and said, “Over the last two years, RT’s traffic has increased four- or five-fold. Quite naturally, during this period the number of submissions of our materials to Reddit.com, as well as the number of referrals from Reddit to our website, has increased.
“It’s not difficult to check that it’s not the same people, but different people, who are submitting our stories to Reddit.”
Luckily for RT, douglasmacarthur’s reasoning for the RT ban hasn’t been acceptable for many users, especially after it was discovered that the post alerting Redditors to the censorship was removed by the moderators.
His response also seems insincere after it was discovered douglasmacarthur posted a note about eight months ago in the forum, in which he reportedly suggested banning a number of domains from r/news in order to create “the first large news-related subreddit largely free of the alarmism, bias, editorialization, etc.”
User douglasmacarthur proposed in that post — which has since been deleted — that ‘misleading,’ ‘sensationalist’ and ‘unreliable’ news outlets such as RT and the U.K.’s The Daily Mail should be banned, along with other “blog spam” sites such as the Huffington Post, Gawker and the Raw Story.
But douglasmacarthur had to put his censorship project on hold after users expressed outrage at the idea of censoring news, especially since the site touts itself as “a source for what’s new and popular on the web” where “users like you provide all of the content and decide, through voting, what’s good and what’s junk.”
Mainstream news only
This latest social media censorship revelation not only caused r/news subscribers to call foul, but led to cries of concern from Reddit’s readers in other subreddits as well. Though RT’s domain was banned from r/news in August, on Oct. 28, moderators for r/politics announced — in the name of transparency — that they had decided to ban several domains from the subreddit for three reasons: spam, sensationalist coverage and bad journalism.
What’s most interesting about the r/politics moderators’ concerns about sensationalist coverage and bad journalism is that the list of banned domains largely includes alternative media outlets such as Alternet, the Daily Kos, the Raw Story and Salon, along with other publications such as the Heritage Foundation think-tank, the advocacy group Media Matters, and even Twitter.
While some of the news content on these sites may be left- or right-leaning in nature, one could argue that mainstream media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC and FOX have biases and produce content that “appeals to partisan ideology” and “low-quality content” as well.
The censorship scandal is having a negative effect on the number of people who turn to Reddit for their news. For example, as of Nov. 7, the r/politics forum had 3,112,986 readers — down from 3,136,656 in July, which represents a loss of more than 23,000 readers.
“Propaganda machine or not, a news organization should not be banned from a news subreddit,” user MisterGrieves wrote. “ESPECIALLY if one of the reasons is that they post a lot of their stories here. That is the purpose of this subreddit. Banning a news source is censorship and the mod behavior is appalling.”
“The reader will decide if they want to read them or not but removing that option from the reader is wrong,” he added.
“Is there any way to reverse the effects of such spam rather than simply banning a source?” humanthought added. “We all know that RT can be ridiculously biased, but if you ban this source, you are pretty much banning a huge portion of the ‘other side of the story.’ There has to be a better way than censorship.”
Reddit user datums agreed, and said that it is “unacceptable to bana [sic] major news source without presenting evidence against them.”
“It is particularly worrisome that this particular outlet offers a perspective that lacks the pro-American bias of major U.S. outlets. RT employs many excellent journalists, and their credibility cannot be called into question any more than The New York Times or CNN.”
What datums is referring to is the moderators’ inability to share proof with readers on whether or not they carried out investigations into the banned domains to see if they were in fact spamming various forums.
When asked for proof by several Redditors that these domains were guilty of wrongdoing, moderators refused and explained that publicizing the evidence would allow organizations to get around the forums’ spam rules in the future.
But in an effort to appease the forum’s readers, one moderator said that there was going to be a vote on whether or not RT should be banned and shared a link where users could vote. Unfortunately the link led to a well-known joke website, Zombo.com, prompting many to chastise the moderator for being “unprofessional.”
In mods we trust
In an interview with the International Business Times, Victoria Taylor, a spokeswoman for Reddit, said that subreddit moderators are allowed to make their own decisions about what content will be allowed, adding that Reddit is not involved in the decision-making process.
“[I]t is the prerogative of each individual subreddit’s moderators (like /r/news) to allow or ban domains, users, posts, comments, etc as they wish,” Taylor said. “As we are not moderators of /r/news, we were not involved or consulted on this decision.”
However, many users have pointed out that if RT and these other domains were in fact guilty of spamming the site, they would be banned on the entirety of the website, not just one or two forums.
Reddit’s failures to address users’ concerns has prompted some users to try to resolve the censorship issues themselves. One way users have done that is the creation of a new subreddit — r/news rebooted, which describes itself as a “censorship-free version of r/news.” Though the forum only has about 1,500 readers as of now, that number may increase as more and more Redditors become disillusioned with a censored r/news.
Another user, American-Rebel, submitted a post to the r/Ideas for the Admins forum, writing:
“I know the ‘mod is god’ philosophy has been a fundamental rule of reddit since it’s [sic] inception but given the amount of influence a moderator of a sub[reddit] with over 3 million viewers has on controlling what people see on one of the most popular sites on the internet I think it is time to rethink this philosophy.
“… It is in the best interest of the reddit site that people feel confident that their news isn’t being controlled. Many people come to reddit to get access to a variety of news sources because of the bias that mainstream news is under. Only when you read a story from multiple sources can you stand a real chance of getting to the real news.
“The reddit community is strongly against censorship. To see it being done here on the reddit site is a real slap in the face. In a cruel strike of irony there is a [sic] article on reddit right now from a Reddit Co-Founder: We Must Fight to Keep Internet Free, decrying censorship even though it is happening on this site in all 3 of the main news source subreddits.
“It takes real cognitive dissonance not to recognize that things are going off the rails in the most disturbing of ways. Information has a power unlike any other, it shapes and forms our perception of reality. This is why free press is such a important thing otherwise you are handing over the reins of your cognitive thought processes to the person in control of your information sources.
“If the owners of reddit really want to support free speech and freedom of the press I think it is prudent that they re-evaluate the moderator situation on subreddits with millions of viewers. Just because someone joined the site early and created the subreddit does not mean that person is qualified to decide what millions of people all over the world get to see.”
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