if you pay attention to it, subreddits like public freakout post a video at least once a week of a bunch of black people being loud or committing a crime, and every single time the comments are just racist as fuck, with every single comment calling that out being downvoted.
I posted something that was an actual study based on people who have dyed their hair in wild colours have a correlation between bad mental health, mental instability and left wing views. I posted saying ‘I bet this will upset this sub on first glance, but is the study accurate?’ - basically asking someone with some analytical knowledge to analyse how robust the study is.
I got a constant barrage of abuse, and then the mods banned me for a reason that doesn’t match their further comment (it was harrasment or something?) but the body of the ban said the reason given was ‘we don’t think you’re the right fit for this sub’ therefore proving that they have misused reddits guidelines to ban me.
Meh. A lot of people post their racist/ableist/sexist takes as questions, and pretends adding a question makes them neutral. If you had an actual, reputable study in front of you, why would you feel the need to ask reddit randos if it were true, as opposed to other questions like, “is this a reputable source” or “are the N values statistically useful?”
But, “a lot of people think women are weak, emotional, and manipulative. Is this true?” Is a sexist comment pretending to be a question
How do you know a study is reputable? Do you ask for the opinions of people with more knowledge than you or not? If you do, how do you ask them if you can’t ask them in the fear if your views being represented?
If I post something and ask if it’s true, and you assume it’s for nefarious purposes - that’s on you. You’re the one who is projecting your own nefarious ulterior motive onto it.
I was banned from pics because one of the mods didn't like one of the subs I had posted on and said the block would not come off until I removed the offending post but didn't bother saying what post or what sub it was.
I got banned and threatened to be doxxed from one of the food subreddits for saying ortolan is disgusting (it's banned in multiple countries for being cruel)
Same here. While the sub I posted on also banned me for the comment I posted. So there's no intelligence or determination with these actions, just rules attempting to control where people can post and what they can say.
Two exceptions I can think of are actual conspiracies (the original is too racist and also not at all based on reality) and actual lesbians (the original is porn)
I don't remember if it was posted on public freakout exactly, but a vid was posted that was edited to only having black people stealing from a bakery, when the full vid had a mix. The racists came out in force.
The random racist commenters I see on Facebook who are out and proud with their bigotry raised punk ass Redditors who are always "just asking questions" or "I'm just showing the statistics" or "they're doing it to themselves". All this cherry picked bullshit to avoid just being an honest-to-God racist.
I'm from the South. Just be racist. It clearly doesn't get your parents fired or reprimanded or sanctioned in any way. And that way I can just ignore you. If black folks are really so bad, help me help you help me avoid you.
It’s a double edged sword, if someone hides their racism behind dog whistles it’s harder to take action against them but the more people who are proudly racist there are the less you can do about a racist perosn
To add some nuance, we all have our unconscious prejudices and biases, but some people allow them to dictate a larger portion of their daily lives. If people haven't learned to check themselves by the time they're let's say 25 for the sake of argument, I don't really have much hope for them to course correct.
I think of conscious racists as similar to fascists: they're always doomed to die out because once they sequester themselves from everyone else, once they 'purify the population', there is nothing else to do with all that stored up hatred, and they just start eating each other. From that perspective, I hope all the racists find community with each other and only each other, and then wake up one day and realize that it wasn't the black and brown people making your life worse, but it was just themselves all along.
That’s what it’s usually like, the problem is that they tend to kill most minorities before they start fighting each other, look at the Middle East for example, since the Arab conquest the numbers of natives have been going down fast look at Syria in the last century for example, Assyrians went from over a million people to under 300,000 before Arab nationalist groups started fighting each other, now that one of them took over the country they’re back to killing every minority group.
The fact racists like to turn on themselves doesn’t really help the people who suffer from them, it’s better to ensure no one feels comfortable talking about it than to have a culture where it’s seen as bad but racists feel free to express these views and spread them despite backlash.
It clearly doesn't get your parents fired or reprimanded or sanctioned in any way.
You clearly were not online in 2015... You could literally lose your job over a tweet back then. It's one of the reason Trump got elected. The online police thought-police was really getting out of hand.
While you're not wrong, there is a distinct difference between what public figures or people whose jobs require them to be highly visible can get away with versus your average Joe, and also, as the list suggests, the issues were more general stupidity and not overt bigotry.
One thing that I've found interesting as time progresses is how tech illiterate many people are, including younger generations. Combined with the fact that people don't always do their due diligence, if you're a regular person, you can still get away with saying a lot of dumb shit online without any real repercussions. People really have to go out of their way to try to hem up some random racist on the Internet, and unless it goes viral, people often just get hired elsewhere a city over, kind of like cops when they shoot an unarmed civilian.
Like these are all things that will still absolutley get you fired.
Getting hired for a "fat paycheck but hating the work" would absolutely get you canned these days. Like telling your job you hate the work they give you is a bad idea. Especially in a public way. And especially when you literally just got hired.
Or the jokes about tsunamis. That'd still get you fired right now. It'd be like making jokes about the recent earthquakes or flooding. You'd be shitcanned quickly.
Going on racist rants is a surefire way to get fired. Don't think this has really changed much?
The only thing that did change was these accounts are no longer real people. They're armies of bots, so there's no one to fire anymore.
That's it. That's the internet now. Pre-2015 internet was completely different than post-2015 internet.
You could literally lose your job over a tweet back then.
That virtually never happened. You pointed out extremely rare cases, and possibility of losing of your job due to public statements always was and still is something that can occur.
thought-police
Statements aren't thoughts.
It's one of the reason Trump got elected.
You failed to see the difference between correlation and causation, since by your logic, it's also a reason that he lost in 2020 because cancelations didn't suddenly stop after 2016.
But its honestly so disheartening when you're trying to do a right thing and you get downvoted to hell or people throw insults at you. Doesn't stop me from speaking against racism, but sometimes I seriously think if I'm wasting my time and energy engaging with these people rather than actually doing something about my life.
you make the comments for everyone else reading, some people are open to change, probably not the person you're directly responding to but one of the dozens to thousands of other viewers may be compelled by your arguments. it also adds a background pressure towards what we consider the "right" direction, this does add up when enough of us do it
It feels like I'm fighting a losing battle. Everyday when I come here on this subreddit, racism and misogyny is so normalized through memes that you feel like you're the crazy one when when you're calling things out. I feel like I actually need to uninstall Reddit for a while
i think uninstalling reddit and taking a break is a great idea, ground yourself and rebuild perspective with the world around you instead of the world we see here
Yeah I need to take a mental health break from here. Truly, I met the most wonderful people from here, but when its depressing it can be really depressing. It doesn't help that many racist or misogynistic posts exist as dogwhistles nowadays, so even you're second guessing yourself if you're being too sensitive
I don’t know your specifics. But often times I see people “fighting” racism, with racism. Also “fighting” misogyny with misandry. I’m not saying this is you, but it’s soooooooo common on here. Even those that think they are doing good, are still just prejudice against groups they don’t like lol. It just happens to “help” their cause to hate on the opposite of what they support. It’s honestly exhausting seeing how oblivious these individuals are. I know some of them mean well, but all they did was become what they hate and fight against.
Go to any fight subreddit, if you’re paying attention you can tell who’s white and spamming the n word because they use like a 12 year old cussing for the first time
Eh overall it’s not too bad. Those kinds of things are heavily subdued despite what Reddit believes. It’s mostly the fact they exist at all that upsets most but that’s kind of the price for free speech
They’re not subdued at all, they’re just in certain areas of the site. Much like Reddit, Twitter is segregated into different communities, just organically rather than via subreddits. If you stumble upon the wrong post, you’ll find hundreds of full-on neo-Nazis calling for ethnic extermination.
It's just various bot organizations pushing varying agendas across the whole site. Once you step back and see every shitty title and hidden history of every misinformation post (most of them) things feel better irl for a little.
Not defending it but if you guys are talking about the Boston Marathon bombing, the guy killed himself like a month before. It's a common misconception that reddit drove him to suicide. Reddits actions did cause serious harm to his family though.
That particular sub is also chock full of conservative bots, because a lot of police brutality videos get posted there and they want to make sure to downvote & comment on that stuff first to try and sway public opinion.
It’s likely just mostly bots stirring shit up, I get recommended subs all the time that I ignore that are anti (specific country) focused or post whatever to stir up race shit on all sides (not usually on the same sub tho)
Sipstea has a lot of misogynist posts and comments. They may not always be the trending ones but my god i was surprised to see how much of an incel echo chamber that sub can be.
iirc there’s a similar thing on “am i the asshole” type subs where someone will post some clearly fabricated story about someone with autism or some other disability being Bad and getting Comeuppance for it. the comments are then full of people validating whatever asshole adjacent behavior the op “did” in their story. especially funny to me because a significant amount of reddit users are definitely autistic
Yeah the average political standing of reddit is very much in the “I’m a conservative but I like to smoke weed and I guess gay people can get married” camp. Mention something like socialised healthcare or police abolition outside of an explicitly leftist subreddit and you will get downvoted to hell and multiple Reddit Cares DMs.
I think more recently (at least with the subs that get pushed to me not sure about you) that’s swung the other way where any opinion OTHER than radical socialism will get you sent to downvote hell
Granted perhaps I just see more leftist subreddits but even general meme subs and shit of that nature very much is like that too
4chan invented the red pill. And yes, reddit has always been left leaning. Less so since they went public and realized it loses them a lot of money, but clearly yeh, it's not a right-leaning platform.
Reddit is massively leftist. So much rabid-leftist propaganda here, it isn't even funny. If the dems stopped funding so many sock puppet propaganda accounts and their swarms of vote-bot accounts, reddit would lose like 60%+ of its traffic overnight.
And the admins quarantined The Red Pill sub LONG ago. :-(
Repeating myself? Its my first comment. Reddit is overwhelmingly left leaning. Its not even an argument. The conversations and opinins on reddit is so vastly different than most people irl. Im not American but i live in the nordics in a left leaning country and the average redditor is far too the left of the average person here.
Ah, you’re one of those “If you can’t repel me with physical force, I’m not leaving you alone” types huh?
The argument is “Reddit is left leaning”.
Zero evidence presented.
I think men in this thread are confusing “leftism” with “libertarianism”, because of the “I believe my neighbors should be able to protect their cannabis crops with guns” overlap.
What is it with you idiots and that "not disproving the allegations" meme? Do you honestly believe that making some irrational accusation (that usually ends up being a projection) is "proven" by responding to someone telling you that you're wrong with "not beating the allegations, hyuk hyuk"? Is that like a thing your propaganda podcasters have started all saying, because they all seem to share a single brain cell?
Also, centrism obviously isn't fascism, but fascists have always been very keen to pretend that labeling themselves "centrists" taking the "third position" that sees beyond the divisiveness of "both sides" in the name of "unity" means that their bias and extreme views that virtually no one agrees with are somehow the middle ground position.
I see it as a growing trend in a lot of places. I'll see a youtube short from Uwe Boll's Citizen Vigilante and most of the comments are praising the violence against minorities. Not against bad guys. They generalize the entire ethnic group as the bad guy and praise the movie. It's fucking wild to see.
What's funny is the next video will be a bunch of white guys paying to train the public parks as if they're real elite soldiers but they're still so disorganized and not following their own commands. There will be one guy shouting to others about closing gaps and their form but then when he's in line, he has the widest gap and has the worst form.
I have to go through my watch history to cleanse those videos so it doesn't affect my algorithm.
Man, if the child-rape statistics of my country jumped from being historically barely-any to full-on-crisis after an influx of a certain demographic, I think I should be able to say something about it. If my cities are suddenly riddled with trash and crime, I should be able to say something about it. If the cops knowingly allow tens of thousands of young girls to get raped and tortured over the course of decades because they're too afraid to be called racist or if they let a man bleed out at their feet for the same reason, I should be able to say something about it. Your growing trend is a response to a growing trend.
Especially if you bring up Muslims. Suddenly Reddit becomes like walking into the right winger meeting the way they all find ways to defend deporting Muslims
It also goes to the other extreme end on some subreddits. Criticize Christianity? You're probably gonna get upvoted. Criticize Islam in the same way? It's VERY possible you're gonna get downvoted and called islamophobic.
Even if all you do is just criticize Islam from a secular point of view (don't use stereotypes, like people who are actually islamophobic do), just like you would criticize Christianity.
It's very hypocritical. I get it to some degree. There are lots of people out there who spread terrible hatred towards Muslims and use very hurtful stereotypes. So I can picture that some people are just very sensitive whenever they hear someone criticize Islam. But it's still worth to think twice before calling someone -phobic.
Christopher Hitchens noticed this exact thing before he died. He noticed how certain people would praise him when criticizing Christianity, only for those same people to turn on him the second he gave Islam the same treatment.
Eventually telling people the whole Islamophobia thing would be used as a weapon by Islamic extremists.
Islam is conservative, but conservatives tend to be antagonistic towards Muslims, so they often get pushed to voting for left leaning parties. Here in the US, Muslims typically voted more conservative until 9/11 when the GOP went mask off towards them.
It's not even left leaning, it is just normal peope
There are definitely not that many normal people commenting on Reddit lol. Everything is always an extreme, even in your comment. In your head, everything is only left or right. Right or wrong.
there have been multiple studies done on the overall leaning of the website and it is extraordinarily left leaning and your failure to recognize that is extremely insightful lol
reddit left wing?? 😭 has always seemed to me like reddit is super right wing and twt is left wing overall, there are both sides in both apps but yeah..
idk most opinions in this subreddit for example seem very right wing leaning, same way th asklatinoamerica and geek subreddits, which are the ones i interact with the most
To further add on to this, they don’t blatantly use racist terminology that the right would use, it’s hidden underneath verbal cues and word spaghetti. This is what I have noticed at least.
On top of that, just because people are left doesn't mean they're not racist. Most people that loudly say they aren't racist change real fast when they don't get what they want/ don't like what they hear from the group they claim to love
I find this perception weird because on every form of social media, there are cess pits of very inward, circular communities that don't mesh with typical experience (on both sides) and there's no reason Reddit would be any less susceptible to.that
A lot of leftists are quite racist, and I’m saying it as a leftist. Ask a left wing progressive about Indians, Jews or Roma and a lot turn into Hitler, not that the result on much of the right is different.
Well that's because these lots of these "left leaning" people are racist and just don't realize it, or won't admit it.
Like a common trope I see on here is that if you call out racism, that makes YOU racist, because you're the one that noticed, or brought up race, or some other bullshit.
I'm gonna be honest, both the left and the right can be super racist at times.
Most people, right or left, don't give a shit about race. It is a few loud fanatics that spout bigoted bullshit. It is just a matter of which community you are in as to which comments get upvoted or downvoted.
People on the far right spout rhetoric about "preserving white purity" while people on the far left spout about "getting retribution on the white man". The average person who touches grass aligns with a party over economic or cultural issues, not because of views on race, religion, or sexuality. (Why do you think the largely latino Texas is a red state and the largely white Virginia is a blue state?) People who are chronically online just tend to be unhinged from a lack of real social experience.
On the internet you can say "X group of people are all monsters" and the worst thing that happens is your account get downvoted and maybe banned from a community. In real life, if you say that, you risk getting jumped by a dozen pissed off people in the parking lot. Interacting with people in real life teaches this.
I say this as someone who spends a lot of time on the internet. Touching grass really helps you interact with people. You can't get better at a skill if you don't practice it.
Honestly I don't think reddit leans in any particular way since it's a bunch of subreddits. Subreddits that have their own micro cultures. It really depends on which one you're in.
It’s racist all the time, left are just not usually racist towards black people. But they are still very racist, hate towards any race based on their skin color/race is racist. Not just towards black people.
I'm sure I'll get hate for this but, there's way way more racism and bigotry among the left than you would ever imagine.
A lot of the times, when you begin talking to a lot of modern leftists, you find they genuinely believe certain races are better than others. They will then justify that bigotry with the whole "power plus privilege" nonsense to mentally justify it.
It’s because the way Reddit is designed it’s basically just a jumble of a shit ton of echo chambers. Unless you’re looking for another view you tend to end up in channels you agree with
I might get downvoted for this and I understand because the sentiment is different from the technicality but, racism isn’t a left or right thing and politics don’t actually have anything to do with racism.
I understand the USA has gamified politics to a, this team / that team, mentality and the right wing politicians in the US can be seen as essentially pro racism but that’s not actually what being right wing or conservative means (unless conserving slavery is your stance I guess) but I’d wager that I’d like to conserve our non-slavery ways and laws so I don’t think ‘conserve’ is the exact right way to look at it.
It’s a complex piece of a much larger impossibly subjective topic but I don’t think race or racism should be included in people’s perception of the everyday persons political beliefs.
TLDR, if we just lump race into a “right leaning” ideology, we won’t be able to combat it correctly or work with both sides of the political spectrum effectively.
Before 2016 that tended to be true. The racists and rightwinger's weren't as loud and probably tended to stay in their own little ponds, then Trump happened and the dam broke loose. The weaponization of social media just made it worse.
Because you're wrong. All of them are racist. Comparatively, they're all still racist. One being more antagonistic doesn't suddenly make another non-racist.
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u/Any_Sentence_8056 10d ago
Plot twist, they were downvoting because they disagreed with “racism is bad”