How The Reddit Debacle Proves Libertarians Wrong
While most of the major players are making their lawyers happy by being purposefully vague in public, Ellen Pao’s resignation as CEO of Reddit has reignited the debate over how to handle the squirming underbelly of the internet. This underbelly consists mainly, but not exclusively, of angry white dudes who want to spew as much hate as possible at women, people of color, and LGBT people. While most of them hide behind the auspices of “free speech,” it’s increasingly clear that these trolls are motivated mainly by a deep desire to silence: to use harassment as a tool to run off anyone who values meaningful discourse or wants an environment that is inclusive to all sorts of people. This silencing campaign has harmed Pao and, as she fears, the “trolls are winning."
While the new CEO of Reddit has promised to keep with Pao’s program to clean up Reddit and make it safe for non-toxic people to use, it immediately became clear that the white male-heavy leadership of Reddit has zero intention of actually doing anything about it. The smart, easy move to make is to just start shutting down subreddits that exist exclusively to perpetuate hate and bigotry. While it’s true that these places don’t necessarily create bigots, it is also true that finding communities of likeminded people in mainstream places like Reddit—which hosted a presidential forum, for god’s sake!—empowers bigots to believe that their views are more mainstream and acceptable than they really are, which is one of the sustaining myths that keeps bigotry going. Instead, the Reddit leadership decided to keep subreddits like r/Coontown open, but only accessible with a login and without ad content on the side, so Reddit will not generate revenue from them. That might initially sound like a good compromise, but as David Futrelle, who runs a blog keeping track of internet misogyny points out, this basically blesses bigots with a higher level of service than the rest of us get: They get more privacy for their conversations and they get to have an ad-free experience the rest of us have to pay for with our ad-laden interfaces.
“So, yeah, Reddit’s grand plan to deal with its bigots is to … subsidize them,” Futrelle writes glumly. Already, bigots are planning to up the amount of bigoted content they put on Reddit in order to get the superior level of service. However this was intended, the reality is that they are getting rewarded for their bigotry.
Why not just ban the crappy subreddits? On what planet are a bunch of white supremacists and woman-haters entitled to have someone else pay for space for them to organize and encourage each other? This debacle demonstrates, above all, that libertarianism is not the coherent ideology that it purports to be, so much as a cover story for protecting or even perpetuating bigoted behavior.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/reddit-controversy-ellen-pao-libertarians
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