On an average day, he might receive 50 messages with the N-word or other racist sentiment. (The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the history of Black people being excluded from country clubs.)Īlthough this tactic succeeded in improving discourse in the forum, Kelley, as its moderator, paid a price. The forum was supposed to provide respite from racism, so Kelley and its other moderators came up with new rules: Comments would initially be open to all, but if the bad faith remarks piled up, the thread would be put in “Country Club” mode, in which only users the moderators manually verified could comment. Users mockingly labeled a Black student’s admission to Harvard Medical School an affirmative action case and promoted misleading, racist narratives about “black on black crime.” Kelley had always noticed the stream of hate on the platform, but when he began moderating the prominent Black People Twitter subreddit in 2017, the stream turned into a torrent. He even started recording a podcast, “Beyond Trek,” with the people he met through the forum. Reddit quickly became core to his social life. After several years participating enthusiastically in the r/StarTrekGIFs forum, he took charge of it, volunteering as an unpaid moderator in 2016. When Kelley first started lurking on Reddit in 2014, he was there mostly for the “Star Trek” content. The math has changed, and tech platforms have seemingly, as one journalist quipped, “decided that the grief they’re getting for tolerating hate is more trouble than the grief they’d get for not tolerating hate.”įor moderators, who had spent years trying in vain to get the ear of Reddit’s corporate leaders, the effect of this sudden shift was as if the brick wall they’d been pushing on suddenly transformed into a swinging door. Hesitant to provoke backlash from conservative critics and far-right agitators, leaders of these companies have often argued their platforms were neutral grounds akin to public spaces, and pointed to free speech values as reason for their inaction.īut the rapid approach of a presidential election amid a global pandemic and a nationwide movement over Floyd’s killing have engineered a tipping point in the tech industry. Reddit and other tech companies have long been under fire for allowing false information and discriminatory ideologies to spread on their platforms, and for weak or inconsistent enforcement of policies against hate speech and harassment. Ohanian, who said he had been moved by the protests over the killing of George Floyd, asked that his board seat be filled by a Black candidate. It also followed the resignation this month of Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit’s co-founders, from the company’s board of directors. The bans - which coincided with a wave of aggressive moves by other large internet platforms including Facebook and YouTube - came after hundreds of Reddit moderators signed a letter urging the company to take racism seriously. To Kelley and other Black moderators, it was a sign that the company might finally begin real work to stem the flow of harassment and abuse they faced on a daily basis. Reddit’s move to overhaul content policy and ban some 2,000 subreddits, or forums, is one of the most sweeping enforcement actions the company has taken to date.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |