"Freedom of speech" is the philosophy that no one can silence your thoughts or ideas (so long as those thoughts or ideas do not impinge upon the freedom of speech of others: "I think everyone should buy guns and shoot my neighbor Joe he's a child molester and a blood-sucking incubus" is not protected speech under American law). "Corporate responsibility" is the philosophy that a commercial endeavor should not act in opposition to the basic beliefs of its stakeholders (above and beyond profitability and value: Union Carbide might have helped their revenues through slack maintenance schedules, but they also killed two thousand people.) If the issue were freedom of speech, the rank-and-file activists of society would be yammering for indictments. The issue is corporate responsibility: no, there's no law against Reddit hosting nazis. But yes, hosting nazis is fucking terrible and hiding behind "well, but they're not breaking the law" only serves to encourage the creation of bad law.
I'm slightly more sympathetic to Reddit. We all want to think of the Internet as it was in ye olde days when John Gilmore was first getting cranky and no single entity was really in charge and the trouble with shutting up anyone was that someone would have to be in charge first. The Internet we've built isn't the Internet we want though, Reddit is absolutely in charge of Reddit and pretending otherwise is just dodging responsibility. But I'm perfectly happy to assume they never wanted that responsibility, they just wanted their wild west and to collect the ad revenue too. I'd prefer having the actual wild west Internet back, but the railroads without the sheriffs is the worst of both worlds.
That's because you didn't spend hours at a time, year after year, patiently explaining to one "community manager" after another that ease-of-use and ease-of-sharing were vulnerabilities every bit as bad as ActiveX and that if they did not choose to promote the content they valued and discourage the content they reviled, they would end up with whatever content the most passionate and antagonistic community wanted. SomethingAwful basically built out the Archangelles to demonstrate how sensitive to subversion Reddit was and Reddit did nothing. I've got chat logs going back to 2007 wherein I argue with one or the other of those naifs that unless they figured out a way to steer the conversation away from toxicity, they'd end up with a toxic swamp. And now they have a toxic swamp. And they have no idea what to do. No. No we don't. A thousand times no. Ye Olde Days was populated by IT professionals and college students. Kim Kardashian has 105,000,000 Instagram followers. not a one of them is suited to survive in the internet environment of Ye Olde Days. This isn't fucking Pangea anymore and a lot of that is the negligence of shitheads like the guys who run Reddit.I'm slightly more sympathetic to Reddit.
But I'm perfectly happy to assume they never wanted that responsibility, they just wanted their wild west and to collect the ad revenue too.
We all want to think of the Internet as it was in ye olde days when John Gilmore was first getting cranky and no single entity was really in charge and the trouble with shutting up anyone was that someone would have to be in charge first.