Revamping the Quarantine Function

He manipulated reddit for personal financial gain. But not in a sanctioned manner like native advertising. He ran an actual fraudulent scheme and got caught.

Rabies

He had difficulties with mental health.

It is the subreddit name (not the t5 fullname) that you need. The same happens for private subreddits.

You can query the subreddit, look for quarantine or other such properties being null and then opt in and then re query.

It’s going to be interesting figuring out where the line is drawn.

The line is drawn at the point where it offends advertisers.

It wasn’t satire, the mods genuinely loved Stalin.

Oh yeah the Cx crowd is totally just memes, there's nothing else sinister there! Honest!

I'm almost afraid to ask but.. What happened?

Different laws FYI

The bakery owner offered to sell the couple a regular wedding cake, they just didn't want to make/design a custom same-sex themed wedding cake. They didn't really refuse them service. A KKK member can legally walk into a cake shop and buy a cake like anyone else, but I wouldn't expect the bakery owner to custom design a special KKK cake by request. The two levels of service are very different. Anything that requires artistic expression beyond the usual level of service should not be viewed as a public accommodation. Any customization should be entirely up to the discretion of the business owner.

The analogy with racial discrimination really doesn't hold up. We should expect a hotel to not discriminate, but they also shouldn't be expected to go above and beyond what they would do for anyone else. If a gay couple shows up at a hotel and wants to pay for a special gay-themed hotel room, the hotel should be under no obligation to honor their request. If the couple doesn't like the regular hotel rooms, they are free to ask another hotel for special accommodations.

Free speech in social media is a little different. We don't have a right to gay wedding cakes, but we do have a right to free speech. We also have a natural right to life and liberty. This basic human right is the basis for anti-discrimination laws like the Civil Rights Act. At some point, public accommodations became a necessity rather than a luxury. We live in a developed society and it is no longer possible for most people to make their own way and live off the land. Okay, a few people can manage it, but resources and space are too limited to accommodate our population without the organization of a developed society. Being forced to live without access to public accommodations means we suffer and probably die. Discrimination makes it possible for society to destroy the natural right to life and liberty. Even though the individual business are privately owned, they are part of a new paradigm of privatizing and monetizing the natural order and so basic access became a civil right.

Likewise, social media networks have become part of the new paradigm of privatizing and monetizing the public discourse. This is now so total and pervasive that other forms of speech are quickly becoming marginalized and obsolete. There is a strong argument to be made for viewing free speech in social media as a civil right. It's not the rights that have changed, it is the nature of speech that has changed. The social media companies may be privately owned, but allowing them to form a digital parallel society makes it possible for free speech rights to be effectively destroyed.

I think there is a strong argument for something like a Digital Rights Act. ISPs and hosting companies should only discriminate based on the amount of data being transmitted or stored, not by the type of data (with the possible exceptions of illegal material or malicious code). Likewise, any website that operates as a general forum should be neutral towards content (with the possible exceptions of illegal material or malicious code). Curated forums should still be fine as long as it's clear what the intent is. But if you advertise your company as the "frontpage of the internet", or something similar, then administrative curation should be entirely hands off (i.e. reserved only for illegal behavior). This kind of legislation would actually protect companies like Reddit from advertisers applying pressure for censorship of users.

Just because the public square is now digitized and privately owned does not change anything about our basic expectation of free expression. If a social media company doesn't like that, there is nothing forcing them to stay in the business of monetizing public speech.

But when does one become the other? Why do we say, "Comcast shouldn't be allowed to control what ideas and information I'm allowed to access," but also, "Facebook is allowed to censor whatever news sites they want. It's a private company."?

Comcast has about a 20% market share among ISPs. Facebook has about 30% among social media sites.

If there were only two social media sites over which people communicated on the Internet, would it be acceptable for either of them to censor pro-socialist opinion? Pro-libertarian opinion?

Right, and with reddit there are tons of equally viable alternatives like Voat, right?

For some reason you can only opt-in on the desktop site (which you can probably access through your mobile browser if you know how). Once you have opted in, the quarantined subreddit will be accessible even though your iPhone app.