is Asmongold wrong? the WhitePeopleTwitter subreddit is now banned for 72 hours.
"This community has been banned
This subreddit has been temporarily banned due to a prevalence of violent content. Inciting and glorifying violence or doxing are against Reddit’s platform-wide Rules. It will reopen in 72 hours, during which Reddit will support moderators and provide resources to keep Reddit a healthy place for discussion and debate."
Reddit banned it because they were threatened by Elon. And the 'doxing' everyone is talking about is the naming of Elon's rightwing goons who took over federal systems lol. He said the same 'tHeY aRe cOmMItTinG a CrImE' bullshit against wired and other outlets who reported on his goons.
As for violent content on reddit lets be real please. If you want to talk about violence open a Israel-Palestine thread not /r/whitepeopletwitter lol..
there's a whole lot to unpack here, and none of it is good. at the end of the day, you can consider Musk an outside contractor. how exactly is that treason? also, in which part of the constitution does it say anything about the federal payment system? that's not an article I'm familiar
The power of the purse is the authority of the United States Congress to levy taxes and control government spending. It's a key part of the separation of powers in the Constitution and a check on the executive branch. If Musk actually stops any payment that was authorized by Congress then he is violating the Constitution.
DOGE also has no legitimate need or legal right to access the federal payment system. He is in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and should be arrested and put on trial along with any other DOGE employee who has accessed the federal payment system.
If the employee exceeded authorized access or acted without authorization to manipulate the payment system, they could be charged under the CFAA, which criminalizes unauthorized access to computer systems.
Obstruction of Federal Proceedings or Official Duties - 18 U.S.C. § 1505 or § 1913:
§ 1505: Obstruction of agency proceedings or congressional actions.
§ 1913: Prohibits using appropriated funds to lobby or interfere with government decisions, though applicability may depend on intent.
Interfering with congressionally mandated payments could constitute obstruction of lawful government functions.
Theft or Conversion of Government Funds - 18 U.S.C. § 641:
If the payment was lawfully owed and the employee’s actions deprived the recipient of funds, this could be seen as theft or conversion of government property.
False Statements or Fraud - 18 U.S.C. § 1001:
If the employee falsified records, submitted false information, or lied to justify stopping the payment, they might face charges for making false statements.
Conspiracy - 18 U.S.C. § 371:
If others were involved, conspiracy charges could apply to defraud the U.S. or commit other offenses.
Malfeasance or Misconduct in Office:
While not a specific federal statute, general misconduct or breach of public trust could lead to charges under broader provisions or administrative penalties (e.g., termination, fines).
You will need to do some mental gymnastics to find a criminal statute that could be used to prosecute that and it does not appear the US Attorney for DC is at all interested in doing that.
Musk and DOGE employees could be arrested and tried by the DOJ if a democrat wins the next Presidential election. These are the crimes they have broken.
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) - 18 U.S.C. § 1030:
If the employee exceeded authorized access or acted without authorization to manipulate the payment system, they could be charged under the CFAA, which criminalizes unauthorized access to computer systems.
Obstruction of Federal Proceedings or Official Duties - 18 U.S.C. § 1505 or § 1913:
§ 1505: Obstruction of agency proceedings or congressional actions.
§ 1913: Prohibits using appropriated funds to lobby or interfere with government decisions, though applicability may depend on intent.
Interfering with congressionally mandated payments could constitute obstruction of lawful government functions.
Theft or Conversion of Government Funds - 18 U.S.C. § 641:
If the payment was lawfully owed and the employee’s actions deprived the recipient of funds, this could be seen as theft or conversion of government property.
False Statements or Fraud - 18 U.S.C. § 1001:
If the employee falsified records, submitted false information, or lied to justify stopping the payment, they might face charges for making false statements.
Conspiracy - 18 U.S.C. § 371:
If others were involved, conspiracy charges could apply to defraud the U.S. or commit other offenses.
Malfeasance or Misconduct in Office:
While not a specific federal statute, general misconduct or breach of public trust could lead to charges under broader provisions or administrative penalties (e.g., termination, fines).
Again, none of those directly applies to what DOGE is doing. You have to really stretch the meaning of those laws to try to make it fit. Prosecutors do this regularly, but the current US Attorney is unlikely to.
Widespread defamatory allegations and calls for violence aren’t common everyday life but they are routine on reddit.
Banning users with moderate opinions is not normal in everyday life, but is routine in many subreddits. Including users sharing opinions held by moderate democrats.
It used to be that way, with high diversity of opinions between subreddits.
These days, all the default subs are left leaning, most are far-left leaning, which means most users have a partisan experience. This then impacts the overall makeup of the site’s userbase which cascades this bias through every other subreddit.
Sure, there are a small number of relatively low traffic communities that have held out, but they are now an insignificant proportion of the content on the site.
It’s a natural artefact of the voting systems it uses for recommending content. These tend to result in echo chambers because political extremism results in more engagement, and thus more extreme users vote more and have a larger influence on what is shown.
This is then amplified by the echo chamber effect, which distills the user base into ever more extreme positions as the moderate users find their opinions outside the evolving fringe of acceptable opinion.
The reason I class it as far-left now, even though I wouldn’t in the past, is two things:
Firstly, it is now plagued with extremist content, including calls to violence, which are tolerated by users and moderates alike.
Secondly, the opinions expressed have a left bias relative to other members of the left. There are plenty of moderate democrats, including people like Obama, who would quickly find themselves banned from many default subreddits for their more moderate tolerant opinions.
There is no arbiter for the median set point, as you know. I think the problem latent in both the point you respond to, and your response is the lack of desire amongst us all to agree the position of the left-right needle. It's just much more useful to be able to fling the terms/directions around as a pejorative, than to be particularly factual.
It's a very odd time. The USA is emerging into a combination of a Kleptocracy, a Kakistocracy, Autarky and Technocracy. It's like somebody's dream pivot fractured into every ocracy under the sun.
I don't have to subscribe to a belief in a conspiracy to advantage Russia, to beleive the SITUATION will advantage people who benefit from an unstable US polity.
I also don't have to subscribe to a belief it was "the plan" to believe the super-rich will ride over this wave, and pick the cream off as it floats upward. Thats what they do, all the time. This is just a particularly active milk churn and there's going to be a LOT of cream.
I agree on most parts of your respnse, but I was aiming at precisely at how the commenter I responded to tends to make absolute claims for what, it seems to me, are relative to their position and attempt to instate as more common and common-sense than it really is, and betrays a certain blindness to a simple psychological fact that people usually react more strongly to things that pressure them more (a relative phenomenon) and ascribes to this reaction some political valuation (an absolute).
I myself do not find left-right divide that much useful, at least to describe this melting pot of our time.
I enjoyed the question you posed immensely because it goes so strongly to the perceptual bias we bring to the table. I know I look with outrage at how strongly my left wing government has swung right, not for a minute believing I might have got more left wing as I got richer, older, and less exposed to the risks. "Of course I've always been left" I mutter, putting decent french butter on my croissant.
I've been on Reddit since at least 2007. I've not seen any swing in political views. I think it's just that the sort of people that use Reddit are the sort of people who are typically more left-wing.
I'm just glad we have social networks which are left-wing to bring balance to the system.
Reddit has been in a state of hysteria for the past couple of weeks. You’re right that the overall leaning hasn’t changed much, but it was never this crazy, even during Trump’s first term.
It’s a nonstop barrage of nazi labels, overblown news, and comments that “hint” at more direct involvement and violence.
It's so weird that I've even started to doubt whether most of those comments are from real people.
I'm not sure why you're surprised. Reddit has always been left leaning and progressive, and they were making a lot of noise about Trump his first term, especially with the Mueller investigation.
Now you have a huge trade war going on, he keeps threatening the soveriegnty of multiple long time allies, a billionaire has extensive access to government data (the same one that did that nazi salute), along with ICE being ramped up all in the first couple weeks of his term. Our president also ran a crypto scam that made him billions right before his term started. He also keeps joking about running for a third term and is challenging a 150 year constitutional law on birthright citizenship with an executive order. Even you have to admit that this is a lot going on compared to anything we've seen before.
I think that the issue with what's happening on reddit is that it's hard to know what's real or what's not. I think that there is a lot that this administration could be criticized for but the criticism has to be precise and targeted, such that most of the energy goes to the topics that are important.
A lot of comments and energy were expended there. Everyone talked as if it were the end of NATO and that the U.S. was abandoning Europe. In reality, it was just a 20% reduction in force (which was the first sentence in the linked article).
On the flip side, the trade war with Canada deserved heavy criticism—and luckily, it was well covered (I count that as a win).
From the list you just shared, I don't really have a good sense of the relative severity of each and I think it's because there is no place where these topics could be discussed (even HN isn't immune as you can see from one of the comments below)
An alternative take on this is that the opposition doesn't really believe that anything extraordinary is happening and hence there is no strong response outside just some press releases.
I personally tried to follow all the news for a week. I tried to read the articles and research what was shared on reddit. Oftentimes my interpretation of these news wasn't nearly as dramatic as what reddit was aligning on. At the end, I figured it's too much work to double check every single piece of news, so I just stopped using reddit for some time.
There are more ways to get news than reading reddit tho. I still get exposure to the "big" events through HN or simply by talking to my coworkers, and those conversations tend to be a lot more meaningful and nuanced than what I'd normally get on reddit.
Not getting every single detail of a story as it develops isn't really a big deal to me and, I'd also argue that following these news on reddit won't really make you more informed (I already shared one example where the news was discussed but the conversation was entirely off from the reality). Reddit only makes you feel more informed, but that doesn't mean that you actually are.
That's an understatement. Death threats aimed at these young DOGE tech nerds flooded Reddit and Bluesky. Reddit even shut down a popular subreddit to stem the tide.
This is simply incorrect. There was no "flood." There were a very, very small number of isolated comments that I spotted and they were removed and/or downvoted.
I truly despise people who gaslight the way you are right now. Musk did two very blatant Nazi salutes and us right now illegally accessing the US federal payment system. These are unprecedented actions and a strong response to them is hardly "hysteria".
It used to be very libertarian (big on free speech, etc) but has since shifted substantially liberal, including much warmer attitudes towards the use of violence.
In 2010 Reddit was center-left, with a high degree of variance between subreddits.
Today it is a far-left echo chamber in most large subreddits.
The process of change was gradual. Like all echo chambers it is a result of distillation, with marginal moderate users progressively leaving in response to seeing the shrinking frontier of acceptable discourse.
Early Reddit had a philosophically libertarian majority (or at least, a significant percentage) and a demographic of mostly STEM-oriented, bookish, nerdy dudes from 18-40. Ron Paul was a popular political candidate. "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" was a common refrain, although in 2008 that usually meant supporting gay marriage and wanting legal marijuana. People were skeptical of big corporations and big government alike, but had genuine belief that technology was changing the status quo in positive ways (remember when Google was a startup and "Don't be evil" felt earnest). The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were unpopular, but a big chunk of the criticism focused on ways the PATRIOT act invaded individual privacy and the wastefulness of DHS spending. Open source software and filesharing were discussed as philosophical stances and acts of resistance against entrenched powers. Race and gender were rarely discussed as being particularly important.
Writing this made me realize not just how different Reddit was, but also the issues of the time and the ways they were thought of and talked about. It's almost hard to map onto contemporary parties, policies or issues.
Mocking != doxing.
Musk was horrid to do that, but it's a different thing.