APOCALYPSE PAO: I fought the trolls in the trenches: Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao describes her plight in op-ed as she warns ‘trolls are winning the battle for the internet.’
You know, if you view your customers as subhuman, your job as the equivalent of hand-to-hand infantry combat in a World War, and the Internet as a pitched battle between good and evil to be ultimately won, rather than a shared communication network for all, you might just be unsuited for the job of CEO of a communications platform.
So what happens next at Reddit? “The news-and-opinion website’s founder may end up destroying the site in order to ‘save” it,'”
Charles C. W. Cooke warns:
Reddit, however, is not a magazine or a repository of a certain strain of thought. Rather, it is an oversized bulletin board, the key attraction of which is its openness. Outside of those prohibitions that are inherently neutral in nature — say, a ban on pornography involving minors; restrictions on the promulgation of sensitive personal information; speech that is illegal under federal law — any attempt to “purge” the “bad” elements from the site will inevitably be open to abuse. Contrary to America’s would-be arbiters of public discussion, there is in fact no objective way of determining which opinions are “dark” and which are light; there is no means by which an administrator can evaluate objectively which sentences are “hateful” or “offensive” and which are to be cherished; there is no chance that a moderator will be able to keep his own preferences out of his job. How long can it be before we hear it said that the management is taking sides?
Viewpoint discrimination is just that: discrimination. At present, Reddit is a place where people can duke it out for themselves without fear of outside intervention. If that changes, the site as it has heretofore existed will be dead, dead, dead. If its owners are set upon getting out of the say-anything business and moving slowly toward sanitization, that is their prerogative. But they might do us the honor of admitting upfront that they have gazed into the ugly side of the open web, and they have not liked what they’ve seen.
Pao has done that, but also exposed quite a bit of her own crusading SJW worldview in the process.
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