Reasons why TERFs are wrong about moving off Reddit
Transmisic TERFs are moving off Reddit, and that's a good thing, but they're making hylarous statements about its administration. In this essay, my esteemed colleague Dr Penelope Oaken will explain why their claims are TOTALLY WRONG AND INSANE
As the fediverse allows only posts up to 10Kchars I'll split her thesis in two parts.
if you know any transmisic cockroach, feel free to tag it
Select of their "reasons" and some refutations of them.
In this writeup I will mark some items with an obelus (†) for reasons which will become clear.
1 The mostly male reddit userbase overreports female subs, users and posts creating unsustainable amounts of work for female subreddit mods
This is mostly true; The "manosphere" / MRA & misogyny, hatred, harassment, and violence-promoting audiences on Reddit are responsible for the vast majority of abusive & false reporting - their culture / audience has been harnessed, since GamerGate, to abuse minorities & exploit any vector to silence free speech.
HOWEVER
Reddit has responded extremely well to actioning these false and abusive reports, as well as instances of clear "mass report" dogpiles.
There's now a "Ignore Reports" function that allows moderators to ignore more reports on an item - to prevent having to remove them from queue over and over, and a function to report Abuse of the Report Button.
2 Reddit admins don’t respond to serious and repeated reports of harassment and abuse of female users, mods, and subs.
Three weeks ago, Reddit admins published a RedditSecurity roadmap acknowledging that they're identifying and focusing on hatred aimed at feminine people - https://old.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/tyiymt/prevalence_of_hate_directed_at_women/ - and we crossposted it to AHS and stickied it. It was also crossposted to /r/TwoXChromosomes and other places on Reddit.
So this claim is false.
3 Reddit bans lesbians and lesbian subs for their same sex attraction and paints them as transphobic but not men who fetishize lesbians via porn, who are allowed to be cis only.
The "Reddit bans lesbians and lesbian subs" is spin rhetoric - Reddit doesn't ban lesbians, reddit doesn't ban lesbian subreddits, and reddit protects lesbians and lesbians subreddits from being attacked or harassed with hatred under Sitewide Rule 1.
This "Reddit bans lesbians and lesbian subs" claim is a lie carried forward from the banning of /r/GenderCritical's ecosystem of subreddits which existed to do several things, chief among them promote hatred of transgender people, especially transgender women.
At AHS, they've repeatedly documented how those subreddits were used overwhelmingly to platform hate speech, including violent rhetoric, targeting transgender people and especially transgender women. They've documented how those subreddits were often populated with tracked misogynists, anti-Semites, White Identity Extremists, and other Racially Motivated Violent Extremists and Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremists.
We don't have access to the level of data that would be needed to prove the hypothesis that these subreddits were astroturfed with huge amounts of sockpuppets, but we strongly suspect that should the question of "Why did these accounts get suspended / these subreddits shuttered" ever get litigated over in a court of law, Reddit is probably going to point out that a large amount of these accounts were inauthentic and that the subreddit operators were manipulating engagement and public perception. We can say that because a number of scientific studies have been done to identify whether the "positions" espoused in GC "communities" are replicated in the general public without the introduction of self-selection bias, and it's been found that GC "positions" are not reflected in the general public - and other studies have found that i.e. the GC "community" and positions and PR campaigns on Twitter are highly inauthentic and driven by media manipulation and a significant amount inauthentic, inorganic behaviour.
/r/GenderCritical marketed itself as "the largest women's forum on the Internet", but evidence points in every other direction.
They allow violent female mutilating sexual content (documented partially in r\/BanFemaleHateSubs)
This claim is false. Reddit's Sitewide Rule 1 prohibits threats of violence. One suspects that because the qualifier sexual is tacked on here, that the content being described is consensual BDSM content. However even sexual content on Reddit is not allowed, by Sitewide Rule 1, to threaten or intimidate.
r\/BanFemaleHateSubs does a good job of organising a community to focus on subreddits that are undertaking hatred of women, and getting that activity reported to Reddit under SWR1. They would likely do better by adopting a set of policies that exclude amplifying and engaging erotica content except where such content is clearly threatening violence or hatred and/or is clearly non-consenting, and would likely do better by recruiting leaders who were not core operators of /r/GenderCritical ecosystem subreddits, including /r/LGBDropTheT -
i.e. they would do better if the public and Reddit admins could believe that they are not core to an ongoing effort to platform bad faith claims of victimhood to disguise attacks on the rights, dignities, and liberties of others.
Because Sitewide Rule 1 explicitly states "While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect those who promote attacks of hate or who try to hide their hate in bad faith claims of discrimination." - i.e., Reddit admins listen to people, not to Karpman Drama Triangles.
Most of the subs for women are squatted on by men, fetishists, Men's Rights Activists, or TRA Extremists including necessary info like /r/Abortion, /r/Feminism
Translation: Many subreddits with obvious names of specific women's issues are operated by user accounts not under the control of FDS's clique, and in much the same way that certain white identity extremists, "dirtbag leftists", and sociopathic manipulator groups tried (and failed) to extort control of those communities away from the people operating them, FDS (which we can clearly see is just GenderCritical rebranded) is once again publicly _Going Their Own Way".
hmmm. That sounds familiar.
Oh well
Onward
Powermods
† +1
"Powermods" is a shibboleth that sprang from /r/friendly_society - a "backroom" collaboration subreddit between the leaders of /r/the_donald, /r/cringeanarchy, /r/metacanada, and other hate groups -- including virulently racist, sexist, and violent RMVEs and IMVEs -- with the express purpose of harassing moderators who enforced the Sitewide Rules (Content Policy is what it was called at the time) and who opposed racism and other forms of hatred - to harass them off the site. [Background of /r/Friendly_Society here: https://old.reddit.com/r/TopMindsOfReddit/comments/f9l717/reddit_today_announced_that_it_would_be_removing/fisqsxj/). It's emerged as "five moderators control 500 subreddits" (where the five moderators in question allegedly "controlling" huge swathes of Reddit were a CSS artist, a crisis counsellor, an automoderator regex tech specialist, a community engagement public face moderator, and an anti-harassment bouncer mod) before settling on "Powermods".
"Ironically" the real powermods are the people who were involved in /r/friendly_society and who are still undertaking an at-scale effort to Make Reddit Die.
The amount of exposure to depraved content the subreddit mods dealt with is traumatizing.
Absolutely true. However, this is true everywhere on the Internet except in private or invite-only spaces such as invite-only Discords, Slacks, private Twitter accounts / groups, private subreddits, etc.
This is especially true of any group or individual who is feminine.
This problem is not a Reddit-specific problem; It is a problem which Reddit has committed to addressing (See 2 above)
Additionally, there's entire networks of invite-only private subreddits on Reddit which host robust and mature communities, predicated on various qualifications. There's zero reason why FDS couldn't operate their own private communities / invite-only communities on Reddit ... unless their presence on Reddit is to recruit and be the public face of a media manipulation / PR campaign.
Men are coordinating offsite to report brigade and spam female oriented subreddits with bannable content (even tiny ones) – resulting in the banning of many female oriented communities for no reason.
† +1
While it's absolutely true that there are groups which co-ordinate offsite of Reddit to report brigade and to spam target communities with objectionable content --------
A: Reddit has means built into its infrastructure to mitigate abusive report brigades (as has been mentioned before) and
B: The « Communities being "spammed" with objectionable content to "get them banned" » lie originated with white identity extremist media manipulator groups operating on Reddit with the goal of instigating stochastic harassment of any good faith groups that sought to advocate for moderation and anti-hatred sitewide rules.
Reddit admins do not, and never have, shuttered any communities because they were raided or interfered with by "brigades" posting objectionable material.
Reddit admins close subreddits as a last resort, and only after the admins follow a process to prompt community operators to moderate their communities to a minimum standard of the Sitewide Rules and the User Agreement and applicable laws.
Reddit admins close subreddits practically only when the operators of the subreddit flatly refuse to follow the Sitewide Rules, the User Agreement, or applicable law.
At this point, any individual or group repeating the « Communities being "spammed" with objectionable content to "get them banned" » lie, is simply signalling to their audience that they are part and parcel of the mafia that's been trying to Make Reddit Die over the past six years.
Reddit Admins continue to allow the manosphere to have a presence on their website, resulting in real world abuse, rape, and acts of terrorism.
We have to agree that Reddit admins can and should do more to scrape gender-based ideologically motivated violent extremism and extremists off the service. We have to agree that these gender-based IMVEs have been connected to documented incidents of violence. We also have to observe that Reddit may be under subpoena and/or other law enforcement requirements to not interfere with ongoing investigations, and that in such cases, the appropriate venue for redress of these complaints is to unite to oust the misogynistic and bigoted politicians controlling or blockading the legitimate ends of government, and get government working once more to effectuate actual justice.
Quality posters have been harrassed into deleting their content off the subreddit and have no copyright protection.
Every person that submits their own content to Reddit retains their copyright, and their copyright protections. They license the use of the content to Reddit for specific conditions as laid out in the User Agreement.
And the way to keep people from being harassed into deleting their posts and comments from a given subreddit is to recruit MANY moderators who understand and recognise harassment and take moderation actions to counter and prevent that harassment.
Or, for example, having a private, invite-only subreddit.
FDS subreddit as one of the last female-only subs
It is not.
has been targeted by admins with unfairly applied rules
† +1
It has not been; The admins have required FDS to enforce the Sitewide Rules and comport with the Moderation Guidelines, which is required of all community operators.
with the intent to eventually ban the sub,
This is now at least the third rhetorical talking point in their "reasons" which is directly lifted from the "Make Reddit Die" (†) crowd -
In conclusion:
Their "reasons" for "abandoning Reddit" are directly shown to be -- at best -- outright misrepresentations and at worst are direct manipulation campaigns and lies propagated by a group of media manipulators who are pushing a very public campaign to try to Make Reddit Die, and this is very clearly the second time that GenderCritical op has "quit Reddit" in a public stink.
I really want the anti-misogyny social justice effort on Reddit which counters and prevents harassment of women, to have better leaders and trustees than a group which clearly has been performatively filling the space in order to recruit for a mass-media-manipulation operation and couch attacks on the rights, dignity, and liberties of others in attempts to hide their hate in obvious bad faith claims of discrimination. We all should want this effort to be led and worked on by people with a clear good faith goal to counter and prevent hatred, harassment, and violence aimed at women.
FDS is clearly not that group. So I can only say "Thank Goddess" that they're stepping away.
I hope this clears things out
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Notes -
This is not really what we're looking for here. I recommend reading the rules, especially the Courtesy section. This mostly comes across as a screed against your outgroup.
I'm afraid I've removed this.
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