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That means he and Beaulac can shape wildly different communities within the same Reddit infrastructure. 'You have to wait for it to hit the six o'clock news, and then Reddit will do something.' 'It's kind of a trope or a cliche among Reddit moderators that the admins won't really do anything until it's on the news,' said Chris Wenham, who moderates 'Aww,' a subreddit trafficking in cute pictures of animals and babies. (The company had also banned an earlier pro-Trump forum, 'The-Donald.')īut for the most part company administrators are hands-off, instead opting to devolve moderation power to users. 6 deplatforming by banning the 'donaldtrump' subreddit. Responding to public pressure, it has banned subreddits including one dedicated to 'Creepshots,' or non-consensual nudity, and participated in Trump's post-Jan.

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Capitol by violent conspiracy theory adherents, calls for the platforms to crack down have grown in volume.įounded in 2005 and recently valued at $6 billion, Reddit has developed around its users' interests and customs, but it hasn't always been able to avoid top-down intervention.

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A handful of companies oversees large swaths of online communication, giving them power to censor politically charged news, push alternative platforms offline and unilaterally kick users-even presidents-out of America's de facto public forum. An open-access, do-it-yourself 'hacker ethos' propelled early technical innovations John Perry Barlow's influential 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' argued for cyber-libertarianism during the '90s dot-com boom and recent experiments in encryption, crowdsourcing and distributed networks have sought to bake democratic values directly into the architecture of new platforms.īut the rise of hegemonic platforms has sapped some of the early internet's anything-goes spirit. Questions of self-governance are woven into the fabric of the internet. Reddit's decentralized model offers flexibility, allowing different communities to set their own standards of acceptability, and puts decisions in the hands of people who understand the context and have a stake in the outcome. Even Facebook's recent efforts to offload some of the toughest decisions onto a third party didn't put users themselves in charge. Competitors such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok rely on artificial intelligence programs and paid moderators to enforce a single (though often very complicated) set of sitewide corporate policies. This quasi-democratic approach to content moderation sets Reddit apart from most other major social media platforms.

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Corporate administrators occasionally ban forums that let hate speech and violent threats get out of hand, but for the most part, people like Beaulac are free to found and govern new communities as they see fit. Meanwhile, 30 or so moderators-ranked in a strict hierarchy, with Beaulac at the top-remove posts and ban users in accordance with the forum's custom rules and Reddit's terms of service.īeaulac's is a familiar narrative on Reddit, where much of the rule-making and enforcement happens from the bottom up and varies between subreddits. Today, 14 basic rules govern behavior on the forum (rule three: accept the judgment your peers give you rule seven: only post about interpersonal conflicts rule 14: no coronavirus posts). Over time, that team crafted an elaborate legal system, adding new rules and tweaking old ones as their vision for the community evolved. But as it moved on from sweater ethics to other everyday moral dilemmas, membership grew to several thousand people and Beaulac convened a small team of moderators to keep things running smoothly. In its early days, the community lacked formal rules, Beaulac said. But now that 'AITA,' as it's known, is the size of a small country-with 2.6 million members, it has a slightly larger population than the United States did in 1776-'I really can't rename it.' 'I have certain regrets about choosing that term,' Beaulac said. Or, as the name he gave his newfound community put it: 'Am I the Asshole?' 'What I was thinking in my mind is, the next stage of this argument should be me saying, 'Why don't you wear a sweater?''īut Beaulac, a New England-based photographer by day, knew it was a touchy subject and was wary of 'mansplaining.' So in 2013 he took to Reddit, the massive network of interest-based discussion forums, and founded a new group (or 'subreddit') to get outside opinions about whether it would be rude to actually ask someone his sweater question. Specifically, it was about the age-old debate in offices between men who want the air conditioning cranked up and women who want it turned down. Marc Beaulac had a question about sweaters.