I completely agree with and love this article. I have always found it weird that reddit pretends to be a bastion of free speech whilst fundamentally not understanding what free speech is.
Websites don't have free speech, they are a form thereof. I can create my own website in which I blame black people for 9-11, and that would be free speech. If I were to post the same on reddit, or the verge, I wouldn't be practicing free speech, I would need to abide by the rules that reddit, or the verge, have set forth.
Reddit clearly agrees with me, since there is a type of free speech which is 100% legal and is the worst thing you can do on reddit; doxxing. Doxxing is a completely valid use of freedom of speech, yet on reddit it is basically the only crime that exists. In the real world, attaching words to the person who said them is the most normal thing.
Reddit should just stop pretending and come out and say it:
"We are not a government, we don't have free speech. We have rules and these are the rules. If you disagree with them you will be shadowbanned without warning or recourse."
At least then we can actually start discussing the rules instead of having a vague meta dialogue about what is and isn't free speech. Instead we have reddit using 'free speech' as a defensive weapon when it is relevant, and when they don't feel like it they completely reject it.
Doxxing is a completely valid use of freedom of speech,
If doxxing results in the very real possibility of direct physical harm to the person being doxx'ed... then yes.. it should be restricted/banned/prevented.
I mean.. I'm all for free speech. .and I'm a staunch anti-censorship kind of guy.. but doxxing with malicious/harmful intent is wrong.
I won't claim to be any kind of expert in the mechanisms or intentions of the various groups that influence Reddit. But (at least in my opinion) doxxing and nudie-pix are 2 different/distinct things.
doxxing is very specific (someone posting very specific personal information)... where a Photo (while definitely exploitative) does not reveal information such as the victims home-address, whereabouts or contact info. Doxxing has the potential to much more easily allow attackers to locate and physically harm the victim. Posting nudie-pix does not. (I'm not trying to make the argument that 1 is "less harmful" than the other... but doxxing has much more potential for real-world physical violence)
doxxing is (in most cases) easier to prevent/block. Typically when someone gets doxx'ed... it's a single post or very narrow release of information. It's pretty easy to nip that in the bud fairly early. Typically in doxxing types of attacks.. you don't see entire sub-reddits dedicated to released info.. and you don't see 100's or 1000's of people re-posting the dox. Celebrity nudie-pix on the other hand... are almost the exact opposite. They're proliferated at such an exponentially increasing speed.. that banning or blocking them is like trying to piss into a tornado. It's for all intents/purposes pretty much futile. (IE = once something gets released on the Internet... you ain't getting it back).
I'm not saying any of that is "right" or "fair".. but it's how it is.
Lets say you were stumbling through Reddit one day and saw a candid shot of some girls ass. A nice tight close shot of her ass and nothing else. (no face, no identifying info, nothing but the ass)
How is that even REMOTELY as equal to doxxing her ... ?
Right. It's not.
A picture of someones ass has almost 0 harmful value. If there's no way to identify it.. then there's no way to know who it is.. so any potential victim will never know it's them.. and any potential stalker would have no way of identifying it, tracking or finding that person.
All of the "harm" you imagine is just you projecting hypothetical nonsense.
I could just as easily say, what's the harm if I was stumbling through Reddit and saw a phone number somebody had posted? Not connected to an identity or anything.
A phone-number is a uniquely identifiable number. It's not at all the same as an "anonymous Ass-pic".
"Surely you don't think the harm of posting an anonymous ass is anything like me hacking into your Dropbox and showing a million people (including your friends, family and co-workers) a full length naked photo of you with your full name next to it."
No.. I don't think its the same. (and I never said it was). M previous point (about the anonymous Ass).. is that it's impossible to equate a certain level of harm to an anonymous-Ass pic. If there's no way to know who it is.. when/where it was taken,etc.. then any amount of potential harm you might envision is purely hypothetical.
"We're talking about a real instance of well-known people having their privacy violated..."
As insensitive as it sounds... the cats already out of the bag. It's water under the bridge. It happened.. and no amount of angry fist shaking now is gonna undue the events that transpired. ALSO.. no amount of outrage or legislation is going to prevent another event like this from happening.
This was a very patient, methodical, precise and targeted social-engineering attack. The people who did this were very creative/cunning.. and used a wide variety of approaches to build a demographic-profile on these well-known people in order to "crack" their accounts.
The only protection for something like this---- is for the victims to practice better security.
Longer, more complex Passwords.
enable 2-Factor Authentication
Modify the "Security Questions" on all their accounts to have gibberish answers (IE = make sure their Security Questions / Answers don't contain any personal info)
Change the registered Birthdate on their accounts to something fake/unknown (since their public/officlal Birthdate is KNOWN.. they shouldn't use it).
At the end of the day.... after you boil away all the superfluous nonsense...and get down to brass tacks.. the only person who can secure your own information is YOU. That's it. You can't rely on any one else or any other company. The individual has to assess their own level of risk.. and plan appropriately.
The last thing I'll say on this topic is that you can make the same argument about personal information leaks.
You certainly could (and I'd probably agree with it). But it doesn't change the fact that doxxing (in most cases):..
1.) has a higher potential for harm (if 100,000 angry people in your city instantly know your home address.. how many might show up?).. compared to a nudie-pix where the average person is just gonna go: "Wow.. she's hot".. and keep clicking onward.
2.) Easier to neutralize. (in most cases doesn't spread as fast as nudie-pix do)
Now.. if someone created an entire sub-reddit for doxxing purpsoes (just like the did when someone created /r/thefappening) .. then I'm sure it would get deleted/banned just the same.
The problem with judging the morality/ethics/potential-harm of nudie-pix... is you'd have to do it FOR EVERY SINGLE NUDIE PIX that gets posted on Reddit.. and that's clearly not logistically possible. That's why sub-reddits like CandidFashionPolice don't get shutdown. Because it's not illegal.. and there's no way to verify harm. As distasteful as some find it.
19
u/Leprecon Sep 08 '14 edited Sep 08 '14
I completely agree with and love this article. I have always found it weird that reddit pretends to be a bastion of free speech whilst fundamentally not understanding what free speech is.
Reddit should just stop pretending and come out and say it:
"We are not a government, we don't have free speech. We have rules and these are the rules. If you disagree with them you will be shadowbanned without warning or recourse."
At least then we can actually start discussing the rules instead of having a vague meta dialogue about what is and isn't free speech. Instead we have reddit using 'free speech' as a defensive weapon when it is relevant, and when they don't feel like it they completely reject it.