A Response to Recent Washington Post Concerns About WayOfTheBern

(Original report can be found here.)

Since r/WayOfTheBern’s founding in 2016, our subreddit has been committed to being an open, community-driven forum where those from all over the political spectrum can visit and discuss the issues. Naturally, this means even tasteless and offensive comments can and will be posted — be it from drive-by “visitors” who normally focus their attention elsewhere on Reddit, or even by a regular with a controversial view on an issue. The presence of such comments does not indicate our approval, by any means — we simply find that, on the whole, allowing and challenging this content in the open better immunizes the left against various arguments and attacks than censorship does. That said, we do our best as unpaid community moderators to hold to account those who flagrantly abuse even the most basic of rules — namely, our One Rule to “do unto others” — and encourage our community, as we always have, to contact us via our mod room when they see abusive behavior.

The criteria the Washington Post cites in its reporting is incredibly vague, however. What, to this tech startup’s research, constitutes “slurs that are directed at people in protected groups”? Does a dark, but obvious joke or cartoon violence qualify under “threats of physical violence”? Could a posting of Tara Reade’s story about what Joe Biden did to her in 1993 be flagged as a “sexually aggressive statement”? And just what, exactly, falls under their scope of “white supremacist extremism”?

I may not be a journalist, but clarification on these criteria and examples of the content flagged strikes me as a basic line of questioning that should have been raised. And I find it puzzling that there has been no visible attempt to reach out to any of the moderators at WayOfTheBern to respond to the accusations made, even as the Washington Post openly acknowledge in its report that Reddit “relies much more heavily on community content moderators to prevent the spread of harmful content on its forums.”

The last time I checked, the Washington Post, for its establishment leanings, was supposed to be a credible news organization, not a billboard for tech startups looking to sell their services to resolve the problems they claim to have found. And in the wake of companies like New Knowledge having been caught in the not-so-distant past manufacturing some of the very thing they claimed to want to protect others against, more journalistic scrutiny towards such companies and their research is not only warranted, but necessary.

To that end, we welcome everyone to visit WayOfTheBern on Reddit, chat or spar with us on the ideas, and decide for yourself what we’re about. Our way of doing business may not be to your personal taste, but Reddit and the internet in general are full of spaces you can happily call “home.”

We wouldn’t have it any other way.

HootHootBerns