- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
YouTube and Reddit are sued for allegedly enabling the racist mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead::The complementary lawsuits claim that the massacre in 2022 was made possible by tech giants, a local gun shop, and the gunman’s parents.
The article doesn’t really expand on the Reddit point: apart from the weapon trading forum, it’s about the shooter being a participant in PoliticalCompassMemes which is a right wing subreddit. After the shooting the Reddit admins made a weak threat towards the mods of PCM, prompting the mods to sticky a “stop being so racist or we’ll get deleted” post with loads of examples of the type of racist dog whistles the users needed to stop using in the post itself.
I don’t imagine they’ll have much success against Reddit in this lawsuit, but Reddit is aware of PCM and its role and it continues to thrive to this day.
I just took a casual look at that sub and noped the fuck out. Sad to see how active a toxic community like that is, though not really surprising.
PCM isn’t just a Right wing subreddit, it’s a Nazi recruitment sub under the guise of “political discussion”.
You are beyond wrong on that. Go off pauper though. 💅
He wasn’t a participant. I was a mod there before I immolated my Reddit account and day it happened I trudged through his full 196 page manifesto. It mentions PCM exactly 0 times. What does he mention in it? /pol/ and /k/ specifically. With /pol/ taking around 40% of the entire manifesto. He made a single comment on /r/pcm. That comment? “Based.” We have/had nearly 600k users, 150k active weekly. One person making one comment does not judge the community. He was active on other parts of Reddit as well. Much more than ours.
In the USA it’s not a crime to be racist, promote a religion teaching that God wants you to be racist, say most racist things in public, or even join the American Nazi Party. The line is set at threatening, inciting, or provoking violence, and judges don’t accept online arguments that saying racist garbage is inherently threatening.
Who would be the right one to sue? Reddit is hosting it, but they are using admins to keep discussion civil and legal; the admins of PCM are most likely not employed by Reddit, but are they responsible for users egging each other on? At what point is a mod responsible for users using “free speech” to instigate a crime? They should have picked a few posts and users and held them accountable instead of going for the platform. People will keep radicalizing themselves in social media bubbles, in particular when those bubbles are not visible to the public. Muting discussion on a platform will just make them go elsewhere or create their own. The better approach would be to expose them to different views and critique of what they are saying.
There’s admins and there’s moderators (mods). Please clarify which you mean.
Admins are Reddit employees and are supposed to enforce site-wide rules outlined in their policy and terms of use.
Moderators are unpaid volunteers whose identity is typically unknown to Reddit who are in charge of running a sub. Moderators can make up additional rules and enforce them.