The certainty of the global warming crowd: Reddit bans everyone from expressing skepticism of global warming.
In a move that has been described by one British academic as “positive censorship”, a Reddit moderator has announced that Reddit is becoming “increasingly stringent with deniers”. The Reddit moderator says climate “contrarians” were too often expressing “uninformed and outspoken opinions”, and so the site decided to adopt a much more “proactive moderation”. Now, whenever a user makes a “potentially controversial submission” on climate change, the moderators issue that user with a “warning”. If the user persists in posting “potentially controversial submissions”, he’s “banned from the forum”.
The worst part of this is the reaction of Reddit’s moderators:
Reddit’s moderators are really happy with the results of their war against the expressers of “outspoken opinions” on climate change. They found that by “negating the ability of this misguided group to post to the forum” (a long-winded way of saying “banning them”), there has been a “change in the culture within the comments”. “Where once there were personal insults and bitter accusations, there is now discussion of the relevant aspects of [scientific] research”, we are told. In short, having expelled outspoken, controversial “deniers” from its forums, Reddit now finds that its discussions of climate change are more measured – that is, on-message, conformist, uncontroversial.
How convenient. You don’t like the opinions of those who disagree with you, so you ban them. Sure solves the problem of winning debates, doesn’t it?
I wouldn’t object if the moderators just banned insulting and offensive comments. I do that here at Behind the Black. What they’ve apparently done instead is to ban all opposing opinions, which is far different.
