Author Archives: SalinaR35rp

Reddit’s Faction of Racist Trolls Celebrates CEO Ellen Pao’s Resignation

by SalinaR35rp Posted on July 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the minutes following today’s announcement that Ellen Pao, Reddit’s embattled interim CEO, would be stepping down, users of the site responded with glee. Pao has been widely criticized by many of the site’s unpaid moderators for her recent tone-deaf firing of a popular employee—see here for more on what really happened with that—and for ignoring the moderators’ needs and contributions to running the platform. Yet beneath the celebration lurked a disturbing undercurrent of racism. As of 2:45 p.m. PST, the second most “upvoted” comment beneath the announcement was this:

The biggest problem with the comment isn’t the mocking of Pao’s Asian name. It’s the commenter’s handle, “DylanStormRoof.” Dylann Roof, of course, is the young man accused of massacring nine people at South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last month.

Other Redditors quickly alleged that DylannStormRoof moderates a notoriously racist subreddit:

Reddit’s trolls have been out to get Pao ever since she shut down five toxic subreddits last month, including one called r/shitniggerssay. They also aren’t psyched that she called out Silicon Valley’s misogynistic culture. That’s not to say that Pao’s handling of Reddit’s most controversial communities is the only reason she’s unpopular with users of the site, which is, after all, the 10th most trafficked on the internet. But today’s reaction illustrates the challenges her replacement, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, will face if he wants to rein in the site’s most offensive tendencies.

Update, July 10, 2015, 5 p.m. PT: Cooler heads on Reddit have since taken over, as they often do, burying “DylannStormRoof”‘s comment and up-voting a reply pointing out its racist connotations.

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Reddit’s Faction of Racist Trolls Celebrates CEO Ellen Pao’s Resignation

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Europe Wants To Make Its Memory Hole Global

by SalinaR35rp Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Europe’s infamous right to be forgotten is on track to become truly Orwellian:

Europe’s privacy regulators want the right to be forgotten to go global. In a new set of guidelines agreed Wednesday in Brussels, the body representing the EU’s 28 national privacy regulators said that search engines should apply the bloc’s new right to be forgotten to all of their websites.

….Google may consider a way to apply the ruling on Google.com without applying it globally … by returning different results depending on whether the person is searching from an Internet Protocol address located within the EU. But it is unclear if such a move would satisfy regulators, as it would only make it harder to sidestep the ruling inside the EU, not globally.

“These are fundamental rights. My rights don’t go away at the border,” one data-protection official said of the idea of using IP addresses to apply the rule.

I understand that the EU has a more expansive view of personal privacy than the US and other countries. What’s more, I’m generally on their side in this battle when it comes to truly personal information. Both corporate and government collection of personal buying habits, internet browsing patterns, and so forth deserve to be reined in.

But here we’re talking about largely public information. It’s bad enough that the EU is insisting that people not only have a right to control genuinely personal data, but also have a right to shape attitudes and perceptions that are based on public record. It’s even worse that they’re now trying to impose this absurdity on the entire planet. If they insist on having a continent-wide memory hole, I guess that’s their business. But they sure don’t have the right to foist their insistence on artificially altering reality on the rest of us. Enough’s enough.

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Europe Wants To Make Its Memory Hole Global

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Whistleblower Crackdowns, Self-Censorship, Stonewalled FOIAs: The 1st Amendment Under Attack

by SalinaR35rp Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

America has entered its third great era: the post-constitutional one. In the first, in the colonial years, a unitary executive, the King of England, ruled without checks and balances, allowing no freedom of speech, due process, or privacy when it came to protecting his power.

In the second, the principles of the Enlightenment and an armed rebellion were used to push back the king’s abuses. The result was a new country and a new constitution with a Bill of Rights expressly meant to check the government’s power. Now, we are wading into the shallow waters of a third era, a time when that government is abandoning the basic ideas that saw our nation through centuries of challenges far more daunting than terrorism. Those ideas—enshrined in the Bill of Rights—are disarmingly concise. Think of them as the haiku of a genuine people’s government.

Deeper, darker waters lie ahead and we seem drawn down into them. For here there be monsters.

The Powers of a Police State Denied

America in its pre-constitutional days may seem eerily familiar even to casual readers of current events. We lived then under the control of a king. (Think now: the imperial presidency.) That king was a powerful, unitary executive who ruled at a distance. His goal was simple: to use his power over his American colonies to draw the maximum financial gain while suppressing any dissent that might endanger his control.

In those years, protest was dangerous. Speech could indeed make you the enemy of the government. Journalism could be a crime if you didn’t write in support of those in power. A citizen needed to watch what he said, for there were spies everywhere, including fellow colonists hoping for a few crumbs from the king’s table. Laws could be brutal and punishments swift as well as extra-judicial. In extreme cases, troops shot down those simply assembling to speak out.

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Whistleblower Crackdowns, Self-Censorship, Stonewalled FOIAs: The 1st Amendment Under Attack

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