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Social Media Giants Set Up “Free Speech Zones” to Censor Dissent
Preface: Reddit is the 119th most popular website worldwide on the Internet, which is more popular than Digg. Because news stories are submitted and voted up social media style, it used to be one of the best sources on the web for alternative news.
I am personally one of the top 100 or so posters to Reddit. Specifically, I have submitted many stories written by other authors on other websites, and have more than 150,000 “karma” points.
As such, I am saddened to see Reddit go the way of Digg and other sites which have been ruined by censorship.
The Bush administration gutted free speech rights by limiting protesters to “free speech zones” which were often miles away from the meetings or conventions being protested, and well away from the media spotlight.
For example, here is the “free speech zone” for protesters at the 2004 Democratic National Convention:
Obviously, whatever speech protesters made went unheard. Which is no different from censoring the speech.
Social media sites like Reddit are doing the same thing.
For example, a friend submitted the following world news stories to the largest Reddit category, WorldNews*:
Reddit filtered the stories out, and moderator davidreiss666 said:
Please summit those to /r/WorldPolitics or /r/Israel instead.
Thank you.”
Worldnews has more than 1,200,000 readers. Posting on Worldnews means one’s speech will be heard … like protesting in front of a convention.
In contrast, Reddit’s Worldpolitics section has less than 50,000 readers. And the Israel section has just over 7,000 readers. These are back alleys where almost no one goes.
So Reddit is doing just what George W. Bush did: banishing protest to “free speech zones”.
Note 1: See this for background on censorship by Reddit and other social media websites.
Note 2: It is not a lack of understanding of Reddit’s rules which is causing this site to be censored on Reddit. For example, the friend submitting the posts to Reddit is one of the 20 most popular Redditors. Two Reddit moderators – one who is much more popular than davidreiss666 – support the right of this site to free speech.
And – prior to the involvement of 1 or 2 moderators who have decided to censor this site – stories from this site were voted up to Reddit’s front page on numerous occasions.
This proves that it is the political agenda of certain moderators – rather than failure to follow posting guidelines or a lack of interest in stories from this site – which is the main problem.
* The politics category has 1,173,005 subscribers; but you can’t post world news stories to politics. In addition, davidreiss666 is also a moderator of the politics Reddit, he has stated that he wants to ban submissions from Washington’s Blog, and we appear to be censored there, as well.
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George - I like you, so please listen...
When you say things like "Christians want to create an apocalypse" you make yourself non-credible.
You jumped the shark, dude. Back up and regroup.
Peace.
CH1 - Christians are a very diverse group.
Most Christians do NOT want to create an apocalypse. In fact, I attend Church.
I said that a sub-set of evangelicals want an apocalypse. That is fact.
Not to dredge up that old thread, but you make yourself look beyond ridiculous here.
First, the word "apocalypse" does not mean what you think it means. And this is not the only way in which your understanding of the theology you're purporting to report on is very warped, but such a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic vocabulary involved is to say the least unimpressive.
Not to reiterate all that we went through in the other thread, but let me just sum it up quickly:
Every Christian hopes for the coming of the Lord (which is the parousia, by the way, not apokalypsis). Anyone who thinks that this can be hastened by human activity is a heretic. The main species of heresy along these lines is called dominonism, which is postmillenial and non-dispensationalistic in it's echatology, it is the belief (shared with liberal theology) that the Kingdom of God will occur by political means. This is wholly outside normative Christian belief, but it has brought about some rather alarming political rhetoric, as documented by talk2action and similar sites. It has nothing, and I repeat, nothing to do with dispensationalism, another word that I don't think you understand the meaning of, and I'm saying that in all honesty, not to try and offend.
(Obiter dictum: Dominonism holds the belief that Christianity will become a world religion, preceding the second coming. Dispensationalism, inter alia, belives that a world religion will be established by the Antichrist, preceding the second coming. This may make one think.)
Mainstream dispensational premillenarianism has constructed a putative narrative of future events based on Scripture, which does involve a war between Russian and Israel, sometimes Iran, so on and so forth. Many believers are convinced this is the way things will play out, and watch events in that part of the world with an eye towards seeing if said events are coming. This is a wholly different animal than trying to hasten such events.
Your assertions, along with the patently false identification of Breivik as a "Christian" terorrist are a hodgepodge of bad interpretations of bad theology put together to foment fear, hatred, and further marginalization of Christian believers.
Obligatory comment on above article: Feels like I'm reading the HuffPo, a feeling I got with your piece on eschatology too. I don't mean that in a good way. Again, profoundly, profoundly, silly. The idea that a corporation owes you first amendment rights, and the identification of "free speech zones" with Bush II (who was a gaping asshole, but can't take the blame for everything.)
I haven't been around here long I will admit, but I really don't get what your deal is ... Zero Hedge's quota of pseudo-intellectual left-Demcorats aping the Huffington Post?
P.S. I'd like to make a genuine and heartfelt offer to explain these theological matters to you, including some of the ways in which certain self-identified Christian teachers are advocating some alarming stuff. But your perception of it is very very warped. If you actually want to have a constructive discussion hit me up. If you want to spout off more propaganda, I guess feel free. Unless someone "censors" you by not offering to hold their content on web servers they own and operate. Or something.
your post reminds me of the saying "theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.
i have long arguments with one of the local kind old souls (who advocates dispensationalism) on the nature of political support for isreal and how the scofied annotated bible (lower case intentional) in effect demands it. the seven dispensations:
1 Gen. 1:28 Innocence
2 Gen. 3:7 Conscience or moral responsibility
3 Gen. 8:15 Human Government
4 Gen. 12:1 Promise
5 Ex. 19:1 Law
6 Acts 2:1 Church
7 Rev. 20:4 Kingdom
are enumerated as eras and tests for humans. add human nature, and the inclination to take action, and you have political christian zionism trying to *move things along*.
you may call BS on GW's point, explain its impossible because its herasy, and pretend its not real, but if you want to stick with your thesis, explain this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Declaration_on_Christian_Zionism
lets say for now that i'm calling BS on you for your obfuscation hidden under the crit that ZH is becoming like huff-po. its not.
Excellent post.Made me laugh
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Anyone who thinks that this can be hastened by human activity is a heretic.
____________________________________________
You know, the heresy path has been quite used by Abrahamic religions.
The reality is that these guys are as Christian as you and will or do label you as the heretic.
I think your critique simply added to that marginalisation!! Which, pray tell, flavour of delusional psychobabble do adherents to "mainstream dispensational premillenarianism" fall into?!?
What you wrote was utterly out of my experience... and I've been around a LOT of christians - including just about every flavor of evangelical, in many geo-locations - for a long time. Really.
I'm not trying to bust your chops.I'm telling you because you put good information into the mix, and I want you to know that you lost a lot of credibility of that one. This is not about dragging you down.
The complainant further sayeth naught.
maybe that's why you're here? to get another perspective?
i live in a podunk town in a podunk state, and i've run into people just like GW describes.
if you think the apocolyptic mindset is rare, i suggest you hang out with some of these types, and you'll be much more likely to get the flavor of the thing.
http://www.hccentral.com/gkeys/darby.html
and
http://books.google.com/books?id=8_Kms7h_h0UC&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=scofie...
Only because it's true, religious fanatics(of all sects) always try to hasten their prophecies so that their miserable and worthless lives get a meaning
Was just cleaning out the googtube in advance of the correlation of data and ran into whole swaths of I-vids that had been deleted due to "copyright infringment" (mostly robosigning and Bush-league memories), read political expediency. One was dedicated to this very subject from 2006. Will not go through the labor of retrieving it as the cleaning up afterward is tiresome.
So is the idea that people do not see the noses in front of their faces.
But they don't.
Your story seems highly sensationalized. Reddit is not setting up free speech zones or anything like that. r/Worldnews has always tried to remain fair and balanced. It also says very cleary on the subreddit that:
Please use the following reddits for content related to these topics:
Content that does not belong in /r/worldnews, and is more suited to those and other reddits, may be deleted from here.
As always if you have a problem with a subreddit your best cousrse of action, instead of complaining, is to set up and grow a competing subreddit.
As always if you have a problem with a subreddit your best cousrse of action, instead of complaining, is to set up and grow a competing subreddit.
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How true. You know, infinite growth, infinite resources and all.
Clearly, resources to start a concurrent project can not come short, that US citizen economics 101.
It is empirically well proven that developing an ulterior project takes less and less resources.
Take the Wright brothers. They started, no avionics theory, nothing.
They guzzled and guzzled resources to get that plane in the air.
And today, developing a new plane takes so less resources and it flies so better.
It is impossible to saturate an environment. No, no, no.
what *kind* of bogging idiot are you?
just curious
Isn't the whole point to allow a certain degree of latitude so that news not otherwise available via the MSM might be readily accessible? But to accomplish that, it needs to be in a place where it is noticeable.
I'm with GW here ... If the headline were "81% of Israelis believe in Unicorns" this would be interesting, if substantiated, but not worthy of Worldnews, but in the current environment when the war drums are banging and the buzz is that Israel wants a war with Iran that would have global implications, it seems eminently qualified for Worldnews to disseminate that the Government of Israel is not necessarily on the same page as the nation of Israel. But hey, why should they be any different from us?
Davidreiss666 appears to be at best a politically biased douchebag, at worst a tool of a larger machine.
BTW, the free speech zones in Boston kind of look like the cages in Gitmo. Get used to it, GW.
Apparently all it takes is an email from an intern to make 666 shit his pants.
Agreed. The problem here is that sub-reddit's moderator, davidreiss666, not reddit itself.
How does it work?
Is this guy co opted or somewhat?
You know, it is classical US citizenism to use front guys to carry out the wet work.
Usually, there is a supermoderator or the owner of the site who makes the call and who has several fuses to undertake the dirty side of the pledge of getting people informed.
david reiss 666 has how many passports?
What's with the 666? Is that just a gratuitus poke in the eye?
Does anybody remember this free speech zone?
http://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/usa-maps/maps_of_world_usa_states_city.jpg
I think a few of us old guys remember... and sigh.
Breaking News! Revealing report by Sheriff Joe Arpaio's exposing obama as a liar and fraud.
Huge news explodes today in the Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s report exposing the birth certificate fraud and forgery. This is magnanimous in it’s implication. And scary to think this kind of evil criminality is so exposed and so accepted as all right in a country that used to mean truth and justice.
There are no more Christian values in America.
This report, and the reports about vote fraud are proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that we no longer live in America, rather we are now in some kind of state of evil that is fast headed off the cliff.
WAKE UP NAMERICA!
Ignorance is not bliss!!!
Live now:
http://www.wnd.com/arpaio-report/
Bomb Squad now at Limbaugh's House:
http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/region_c_palm_beach_county/palm_beach/bomb-...
Breitbart, now Rush?
Arpaio must have scared someone shitless.
Arpaio is an four-star asshole and a publicity hound. And, I don't give a rat's ass about politics.
That said, undercutting the legitimacy of a politician is always a good thing.
CH1...you are a 4 star asswipe.
I had respect for Sheriff Arpaio until I saw a BBC special on US toruture in US prisons and his wall of silence
US Torture (Prisons) pt 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfC1T1aVEMU
I recommend the whole series and a good subject for GW
yeah but.... the fake birth certificate is the least of the issues with obomber. to me it seems like something they use to make anti-obama sentiment appear to be right wing delusional types. its a dead end really. I wish people would just focus on what that pos is actually doing around the world and in helping destroy what is left of the US. and its not a left vs right thing... they take turns, lets face it.
Saying obama was not born in hawaii is just as stupid as saying bush didnt win the 2001 election.
Or is it the other way round..............
I still love that a Hawaiian birth certificate is signed by U.K.L. Lee.
Check out how this guy downloads his copy from whitehouse.gov and pulls it into Adobe Illustrator.
Anyone who has used Adobe products like Illustrator and PhotoShop and knows what a 'layer' is should find this very interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s9StxsFllY
Remember, the POTUS bc came out the day before Osama got killed ... again.
"The Heart" (2214305): magnanimous? You lost me right there. I didn't even get to "it's".
(OK, I admit I got that far, but not beyond...)
freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeduuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmb!
As your guts are ruthlessly ripped from your body...
I prefer 4chan
i like the old BBS like cricket
LOL.. after getting into the first few paragraphs I was thinking it might be time to start digging out the old 56kbps analog modems and scrounging around for an old copy of TBBS or Mustang BBS...
ha ha, now I recall Mustang. When I implemented Electronic Claims filing for a Dr. in the mid 90's, used BBS to submit the claims from the billing program, and recall is being Mustang.
Not getting to publish what you want via the private media you want is just whining. Will you make this same charge of censorship against Zero Hedge, "George"? Will you make the same charge against the Washington Post for not publishing your letter to the editor?
Note that I am opposed to free speech zones because it is government restraint of free speech.
Censorship is only not bearable when the government does it.
The post theft era, so to speak.
Bullshit XitSam.
George isn't whining. He is taking action in a way/venue left to him. If one blog/site won't publish your message, it makes perfect sense to find another outlet for it.
Sure, he's taking a private enterprise to task - and why not? They have the right to censor, he/we have the right to protest against them/their action.
If a publication such as WaPO were to stop publishing letters/editorials from George Will you can bet he would raise a stink somewhere else.
Oh, calm down. You're acting like I stole Georgie Porgie's food stamps. George has a blog, if he wasn't such a fear monger conspiracy nut he would have more readers. (And didn't cite his prior posts, at length, as somehow proof that his current post was correct.) George Will is a nationally syndicated columnist that people want to read. "George Washington" is crying/whining/bitching/complaining/whatever that he isn't getting the publicity he wants, as if that would magically make him as important as he thinks he should be.
(1) ZH is the best free speech site on the web.
(2) Many private contractors are hired by governments to censor speech critical of the government.
ZH is the best free speech site on the web.
Primarily because Tyler maintains a "hands off" style of moderating. You can post just about anything you want regardless of how stupid it is. Community members will decide on the stupity level. And as a proponant of free speech, I don't want anyone's posts yanked by an overzealous moderator with a biased agenda. The only way you have an intelligent discussion is to allow all points of view -- even those that are written by morons.
As ZH proves, our forum is self-moderating.
"You can post just about anything you want regardless of how stupid it is"
I often do:-)
Your free speech zone is the nearest FEMA camp. Scream your heart out, suckers.
Mmm, kinda like Salon...
"A Salon commenter emailed claiming Salon editor at large and former editor in chief, Joan Walsh, appears to have taken the stifling of dissent at the site to a new level, now deleting comments and banning commenters for civil disagreement when presenting an alternate view to Walsh’s."
I have no dog in this particular fight...just the elitist censorship part.
http://bigjournalism.com/driehl/2012/02/27/joan-walsh-dissent-not-permitted-at-salon/#more-276072
And Face Book (outsourcing, of course) it's own censorship, errr, "moderation" for pennies a day...
"A Morocco native who used to make only pennies a day has come clean with what he learned as an indirect-employee of Facebook, Inc."
"Another important addition on the reveals just how Facebook deals with derogatory comments . “Humor overrules hate speech,” reads one note, “unless slur words are present or the humor is not evident.”
Thankfully, as we all know, humor is easy to spot on the Internet. So is sarcasm (hint hint)."
http://rt.com/usa/news/facebook-blood-odesk-derkaoui-995/
Why, does this mean my comments could be "moderated" down the Face Book memory hole just for saying her fucking tits are killer? ;-)
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN INFORMED WHY YOU AREN'T A VALID SOURCE.
PLUS, YOU SHOULD CITE YOURSELF A BIT LESS. OTHER SOURCES ARE A BIT BETTER.
Are you making the claim that one or more reddit moderators are directly or indirectly working for a government? If so, which government? Or could it be that the moderators just have a different opinion and that upsets you?
Maybe they should tell us what their opinions are so that we can be sure to only post articles/opinons that match theirs?
They very well might be double agents of foreign and/or domestic intelligence agencies, obviously it's a no brainer for them to want to have their agents in such critical public opinion forums
Just look at what Wikipedia has become, it's a literal Political Correctness 1 on 1, try posting something there that does not align with the Status Quo and you'll be edited out and banned in a microsecond
Free Speech Zones - seems Orwell didn't think about everything after all, than again maybe he just went straight to No Speech Zones just skipped this 1 for brevity
ZH is moderated as in the Tylers or clones read through the comments and while it may be the best free speech zone on the net, censorship does occur on ZH as well though not frequently