William Shatner has had it up to here with reddit and he’s letting them know about it.
The former Captain Kirk, who has been an active user of the site for a couple of weeks now, made a suggestion on the ideasfortheadmins subreddit to allow for private messages to be turned off. (He is understandably annoyed that his mailbox filling up with fanmail obscures more important functions of the site.) That suggestion, which was relatively well received, bubbled up into Shatner expressing his dismay at the less-salubrious aspects of the site, writing that:
Reddit has been the first ‘mainstream’ site that I have been to that actually appears to allow racists and other hate mongers to group, congregate, incite and spread their hatred. There’s entire subreddits that allow it.
When reddit’s free-speech brigade — the same wing of the site which is so dedicated to “free-speech” that the Gawker network remains banned from posting links to a lot of subreddits over Adrian Chen’s unmasking of shock-poster Violentacrez — took Shatner to task over this, arguing that banning for racism would be against the site’s rules, he pointed out the site has other rules too, which are never enforced:
- Remember the human. When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself “Would I say it to the person’s face?” or “Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?”
- Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life.
The general reddit view of the right to anonymous free speech trumping all other rights has got the site in trouble before. Subreddits focused around creepshots (sexualised pictures of women taken without their consent), jailbait (sexualised pictures of under-18 year olds) and beating women have all hit the news in the last few months. Bizarrely, this has happened at the same time as the site has become a standard fixture on the PR trail for celebrities in all walks of life. The “Ask Me Anything” format reached its apotheosis when Barack Obama turned up shortly before the election, and a growing number of visitors stick around afterwards.
The problem is that reddit runs itself like a social network while presenting itself like a monolithic site. Few blame Twitter or Facebook for the content they host, because the sites are so clearly run by the users. The question for reddit is whether, as its mainstream acceptance butts heads with its putrid underside, that decentralised nature will become common knowledge. If it doesn’t — if the site and its admins continue to appear responsible for everything they allow — there could be trouble ahead.
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