Quantcast
Channel: Internet – Samizdata
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 78

The Streisand-Challenor effect

$
0
0

On the evening of the 22nd March, visitors to the main UK politics subreddit, /r/ukpolitics found a mysterious message saying that the subreddit, which has nearly 400,000 members, had been set to “private” by its own volunteer moderators.

It was the beginning of a cascade. The lights are going off all over Reddit! Subreddit after subreddit was set to private in sympathy with /r/ukpolitics. Most of them dealt with topics unrelated to politics. At its peak the wave of protest closures affected subreddits collectively having tens of millions of members all over the world.

To understand why this protest against Reddit by its own users gained such traction, we need to go back to the 8th of March when the Spectator published an article by its unlikeliest new writer, the radical left wing “gender critical” feminist Julie Bindel, called “The Green party’s woman problem”. It contained the lines,

The formidable feminist author and journalist Bea Campbell, a former Green party candidate, resigned from the party last year after being disciplined, in part for refusing to keep quiet about the shocking and disturbing Aimee Challenor case.

That brief reference to “the Aimee Challenor case” was to have dramatic consequences. A hyperlink on the word “case” linked in turn to this Independent article dated 13 January 2019:

Aimee Challenor: Green star failed to properly alert party of father’s child rape charges Independent investigation found transgender activist only alerted two colleagues in ‘informal’ Facebook message

Having parted ways with the Greens, Aimee Challenor joined the Liberal Democrats. Once again her association with the party ended as a result of child safeguarding issues related to someone with whom she lived. This time it was her fiancé Nathaniel Knight. He claims his twitter account was hacked.

A point to note: these events were widely reported. Given a prompt about a person who had left both the Greens and the Lib Dems under a cloud, anyone who follows UK political news would probably be able to dig up her name in half a dozen keystrokes.

Getting back to the main story, at about quarter to eleven on the morning of the 23rd, the ukpolitics subreddit reappeared. It now carried the following announcement:

As you will have noticed, the moderators set the subreddit to private last night. This is not a decision we took lightly, but one that was made to protect both the users and moderators of /r/ukpolitics.

A moderator posted an article from the Spectator – which contained a three-word mention, in passing, of a minor British public figure (expelled from both the Liberal Democrats and Green Party) – and was permanently suspended from Reddit (and later reinstated after we contacted the admins) for “doxxing” as a result.

As we had no idea what had happened, or why posting this article resulted in a permanent suspension, we took the emergency step of making the subreddit private and immediately contacting the admins for clarification. We took this step to protect both the users of the subreddit, and ourselves, from further action by the Reddit admin staff. It later became apparent that Reddit has hired this individual as an Reddit admin, and were banning people from discussing her past to protect their employee from harassment.

Subreddits are moderated by unpaid part-time volunteers. Those who take on that task tend to be longstanding members of and frequent posters to the subreddit concerned. For them to be thrown out of Reddit forever would be to lose part of their identity. It would be a double blow to find out that Reddit, the organisation to which they effectively donate some of their time, is willing to eject them and falsely label them a doxxer simply for repeating a particular person’s name, even if they did so only because that name was cited in a magazine article. To find out that this was being done on behalf of – or actually by – a specific individual within the Reddit hierarchy in order to censor any talk of that person’s discreditable past felt very like the old horror movie trope of “the calls are coming from inside the house”.

I think that what most outraged /r/ukpolitics was the general censorship to protect one person and the idea that people could be banned for an “offence” they did not even know they were committing. For many of the subreddits which joined the growing protest the burning question seemed to be more “why did Reddit give a person with a history like this the power to police the speech of others?” Here I have to say that I have not been able to confirm this, but it was widely claimed that Aimee Challenor (or, as she now is, Aimee Knight) was involved in the administration of subreddits aimed at children and young people.

I often visit some of the non-political subreddits that went private in solidarity with /r/ukpolitics. I have not seen any objections to Reddit employing trans women in general. In fact the ones I know best have a high proportion of LGBT members, including the T.

Whatever Aimee Knight’s exact role at Reddit was, she no longer has it. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, posting under his username “spez” posted a statement saying,

As of today, the employee in question is no longer employed by Reddit. We built a relationship with her first as a mod and then through her contractor work on RPAN. We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her.

We’ve put significant effort into improving how we handle doxxing and harassment, and this employee was the subject of both. In this case, we over-indexed on protection, which had serious consequences in terms of enforcement actions.

On March 9th, we added extra protections for this employee, including actioning content that mentioned the employee’s name or shared personal information on third-party sites, which we reserve for serious cases of harassment and doxxing.

On March 22nd, a news article about this employee was posted by a mod of r/ukpolitics. The article was removed and the submitter banned by the aforementioned rules. When contacted by the moderators of r/ukpolitics, we reviewed the actions, and reversed the ban on the moderator, and we informed the r/ukpolitics moderation team that we had restored the mod.
We updated our rules to flag potential harassment for human review.

At this point some of you will ask, what has this to do with the issues that usually concern Samizdata? Is not Reddit a private company, free to permit or forbid speech as it sees fit and to employ or ban whomever it wants? Apart from the fact that it is an interesting example of spontaneous popular pushback against Big Tech censorship, I respond that some of the political relevance of this story arises from the answer to the question so many were asking: why did Reddit employ this person in the first place? The Babylon Bee‘s headline, “Reddit fires Aimee Knight after apparently failing the simple task of Googling her name”, wears only the lightest veil of satire.

We all know why. It was because for a human resources manager at a politically correct company like Reddit to dig too deeply into the past of a transgender candidate for employment would have been seen as transphobic. Did I say “dig too deeply”? They do not appear to have even scraped the spade along the top of the soil. The commendable desire to avoid prejudice has become a refusal to be judicious at all. As I have said many times before and expect to say many times again, this unquestioning attitude is bad for everyone including members of the allegedly protected group. You see the same pattern in many contexts. Take asylum seekers and refugees: In 2018 the news that an official report said that “Nearly two-thirds of ‘child’ refugees who were questioned about their real age after coming to Britain were found to be adults” caused a great increase in public suspicion of genuine child refugees and of refugees in general. Another example of the phenomenon was pointed out by Thomas Sowell:

…progressives widely see criminal background checks for employment as racist. But in reality, employers that use background checks employ black workers at a higher rate. This is because without the checks blacks with clean records suffer from the fact that they belong to a group with a higher crime rate. Ideally, one could argue that employers shouldn’t take group tendencies into account, but until that happens, background checks are a solution that actually works.

If people are forbidden or discouraged from checking up on individual members of a “protected” group it does the very opposite of allaying suspicion of that group. Not only that, bad characters within the group exploit the absence of normal checks and balances.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 78

Trending Articles