Reddit. It’s a website about links, self posts, upvotes and downvotes. One of the most visited websites on the internet. It features pictures of cats, forced memes, funny gifs and AMAs from the president. Its demographics are heavily white and male and feel even whiter and more male than they actually are. The website’s managers and its most loyal users are wedded to a vison of free speech that rejects the idea of censoring even the most genocidal of racist speech.
What they’ve got wrong is that there isn’t a free speech issue here. Free speech is about not being prosecuted by your government for expressing your views. A private company is not obliged to give platforms to racists in the name of free speech. If a private company willingly gives a platform to racists, then they should be prepared to have their reputation suffer accordingly. No-one would be denying the racists of Reddit their constitutional rights to free speech by banning them from the website. Just like you couldn’t go running to the Supreme Court if you were ejected from a houseparty for being racist.
So let’s imagine Reddit is indeed a giant houseparty taking place in a great sprawling mansion and see what a tour feels like, All the examples that follow are from real, heavily-upvoted Reddit Racism.
You arrive at the Reddit party. Food, drink and conversation flow and everyone seems really friendly and almost awkwardly polite. As you walk through the many rooms everyone seems to be having a good time, seems like a pretty great place. You join in a conversation: people are discussing an airline, one that has put in place a policy of not allowing unaccompanied minors to be seated next to adult males. The general opinion in the group is that this is ridiculous: How likely is it for a child to be placed next to some predator? Then one of the group says:
“Statistically its probably less safe for them to sit next to blacks as well.”
Your eyes bulge. Everyone bursts out laughing.
Someone adds: “That’s why they should be moved to the back of the plane!” More laughter. You reel with the shock, and back away.
Shaken from the encounter you decide to go round the party to listen in to some more conversations. And you start to notice a pattern: polite, friendly conversation, corny jokes. And never a missed opportunity to say something racist. Most of the time the racism goes unchallenged, is laughed at, is agreed to, is celebrated and is the spark to whole new threads of racist conversation.
“I asked my dad if he was racist” you hear said, “he told me he doesn’t hate black people, just niggers”
A whole group of people are agreeing that black people don’t tip. “Fucking truth. Here in Detroit, even the black waiters and waitresses don’t want to serve black people because they know they don’t tip.”
You hear the same “joke” about ten times: “I’m not racist. Racism is a crime, and crime is for black people”
More and more of it, you think you’re going crazy.
“It’s a shame that so many black people chalk up using proper English as acting white.”
“Feces are people, my friend…”, “Well, 3/5 of a person…”
Someone gathers a crowd, hushes them down and reads their haiku on the subject of slavery, to rapturous applause:
You run upstairs to try to find a quiet place to gather your thoughts. Instead you find a great room decked out like a church dedicated to the genocidal hatred of black people. On the walls are ridiculous caricatures of black people, with greatly oversized lips, eating fried chicken and watermelon. There’s a group in discussion, and the topic up for debate is “Why don’t we pay black women to have abortions?”.
“I have to find the host of this party” you think. “Have to tell him what’s going on here”.
When you find him, you tell him about the weird cult gathered to preach the hatred, exclusion and elimination of black people, here in his house. He seems unconcerned at the news.
“Yeah, we don’t get in involved unless it has something to do with rules,” He says.
“Rules? Surely they’re breaking the rules. What are the rules?”
“No child porn and no sharing of personal information? That’s it?”
“That’s it. We’re a place of free speech, and It’s not in our interest to make moral judgements.”
I leave you to make your own moral judgements on Reddit.
I actually disagree. no one at reddit is complaining about their reputation. if that’s the rules they want to have that’s fine as long as it’s not illegal. if you don’t like it don’t go there. it’s not like these people wouldn’t be idiots if they couldn’t prove it on the internet. I actually enjoy knowing there is a place where I can go a dig and find all those people I wouldn’t normally meet: racists, perverts, republicans… it’s like a zoo. it also reminds me that those people are out there and how they think. the point about /r/creepshots, the board that sparked the discussion, is that it isn’t just speech, it’s (taking and) uploading pics of people without consent.
there is certainly a tendency by reddit staff to confuse tolerance and free speech with “whatever I, white, male nerd think is fine”, and I think it makes more sense to call them out on that. but I have also seen a lot of sensible, great people on reddit who will call out bullshit by posters and mods alike.
i think that’s the fundamental problem: “no one at reddit is complaining about their reputation.” because they honestly don’t care. reddit, i find, is a safe space for the average white person to exercise their right to casual racism a la lena dunham. my (white) boyfriend complains when i show him something that he saw on reddit a week ago, and each time i tell him why i avoid reddit.
“there are racist people all over the internet.” welp, it certainly doesn’t mean that i have to endorse that bulls*it. nor do i have to invite their ignorant behinds to my dinner parties.
You’re missing the point. The staff at Reddit are allowed to have whatever policies they like and allow/ disallow whatever posts they please. But just because they don’t have to take action against racist posts doesn’t mean they’re safe from criticism. Not feeling an obligation to stop problematic, hateful, and destructive speech doesn’t make it alright. It just makes you into a person privileged enough to not have to care about the ramifications of not taking a stand against racism. This holds true for homophobia, sexism, transphobia, ableism as well.
Well said. The ability to go through life without having to empathize enough to want to stop oppression or without experiencing oppression yourself is privilege. It is a human flaw to follow the path of least resistance in order to survive. If you proceed through life with the sole purpose of survival who are you? Are you human?
This post is terribly unfair. The way you describe this mansion is that everywhere you go you see racism. That is certainly not the case with reddit. I admit it is there, but it is very uncommon. You’ve found like 10 examples of racism in 10 different submissions on a site that has thousands of submissions a day.
Everywhere you go you DO see racism. Look at any board on reddit and you will see casual, offhand racist (and sexist, and homophobic, and ableist) remarks that go unchallenged. It’s fucking insulting. It’s not that there are so many posts dedicated entirely to racist concepts (though they do exist in large numbers), it’s that the attitude of racism is hugely pervasive and accepted. If you don’t notice it, you’re not paying close enough attention
This is true especially with the prevalence of anonymity catered by the internet. Free speech has been misconstrued to be a premise facilitating racism while depriving the victimized population from appropriate procedures due to their exclusion from scripted “formal” rules. The internet magnifies these daily occurrences which maintain invisibility yet dominance outside of the cyber realm. The translation of racism into the cyber world cannot be discredited in demonstrating the pervasion and acceptance of racism; it’s an accurate and candid depiction reflecting the prejudice sentiments of society. The internet is comparable to a masquerade predominantly utilized as a safe space by obscure racists to promote their egocentric and perverse ideologies.
Wanna know how I can tell that you’re white?
What was skipped is the step where you, as a person, point out to them, as a racist, that they are being a total shithead, and should stop. Then you get ganged up on for “trying to censor the internet.” Also for “being too sensitive” to what’s “just a joke.”
Yahoo news boards are just as bad. No matter the story, a subset of posters will start spewing racial slurs and jokes alongside other white readers that write about how blacks live in the past and pull the race card far too often. It’s like, what…? Are people really that oblivious?
Reddit’s a shithole. Plain and simple.
My account there is six years old, and that’s because I lurked for months before making an account. Back then, it was an oasis of intelligence and interesting articles. Or so I thought.
Recently, one of the founders of reddit admitted to creating multiple accounts and posting under all of them, to give the impression that the site was an oasis of intelligence and interesting articles. It was a lie, plain and simple.
Even more recently, that twit “violentacrez” finally got busted for being a general piece of shit. This was long after he received a gold-plated reddit bobblehead from the founders of reddit for creating so much traffic for them. Most of this traffic came from the Jailbait subreddit, as well as subreddits dedicated to rape jokes, dead babies, and other unsavory crap. Check out the Anderson Cooper show where they interview him. What a turd.
Reddit’s a place where you’ll get verbally abused for singling out anyone…except black people, but that’s not really a surprise. They took a poll awhile back on the demographic crusing Reddit, and it turned out to be the same age group who were preteens in the late 90s…the same kids who were all over AOL chatrooms on their mom’s eMachines desktop, calling everyone “nigger” and “faggot”.
The mods, founders, and owners don’t care what goes on, as long as the pagehits keep rolling in.
In short: fuck Reddit.
Ugh, I’m no Redditor and I never wanna be. The format is wierd, the people can be jerks, and thier humor stinks like poo. Pee-yew!
[...] (Originally published by Dion Beary over at The Black Kids Table: http://www.theblackkidstable.com/the-first-amendment-doesnt-oblige-you-to-have-racists-over-for-dinn…) [...]
[...] On Reddit admins’ choice to condone racism: “Free speech is about not being prosecuted by your government for expressing your views. A [...]
[...] On Reddit admins’ choice to condone racism: “Free speech is about not being prosecuted by your government for expressing your views. A [...]
Tumblr is just as bad as Reddit. Tumblr hasn’t banned actual nazis from their site (for example: http://frau-heydrich.tumblr.com/), so Tumblr is every bit as racist as Reddit.
Yeah, that’s pretty fucked up. I can completely agree with you. It’s the same way I feel on websites like, “this is white privilege” or during the time I spent in prison. I can understand prejudice, I became prejudiced after my experiences in the same way you probably became prejudiced for your experiences at reddit. We have to understand though, those experiences in no way justify racism, for you or me. Each person deserves to be treated how they, individually, act and think. I kept that attitude, no matter what, and if I was to think of the two best folks I met while locked up, they were both black, because I wasn’t so narrow minded to write them off immediately for the color of their skin. None of us should do that.