I believe the streisand effect is picking up steam with Pizzagate. I would encourage others as well to approach it with an open mind.
Also, this has potentially far reaching implications not just for comments on reddit, but any comment made on any forum on the internet. Without a way of proving a comment has not been tampered with, how can what you write online be used against you in the court of law?
Without a way of proving someone isn't lying about what you said, how can what you say be used against you in a court of law? How could evidence gathered by police be used in a court of law? It could be fabricated! We are just trusting they found those drugs in that car! They could be from anywhere!
Every online interaction that's ever been used in the history of the internet is malleable. There is crypto technology to prevent this, but it isn't being used.
We still try people just fine, based on trust and belief. You can check to see if something's been altered.
Why are people pretending this is new or a big deal? Of course online forums aren't reliable. Of course they are owned by the administrators and can be modified at will. Did an administrator do it to mess with a bunch of screaming blubbering nasty and horrible trolls calling him a pedophile, and institute a silly find/replace rule as a kind of petty revenge? Yeah. Was it childish? Sure. But seriously, who cares? Who really believes that reddit is serious business? When online forums take your swear word and replace it with symbols do you throw a hissy fit about "freedom of speech"?
> How could evidence gathered by police be used in a court of law? It could be fabricated! We are just trusting they found those drugs in that car! They could be from anywhere!
I think this sarcasm is misplaced given the number of scandals surrounding trust in police and the evidence they put forward.
For example, the mishandling or tampering of evidence in crimina labs:
A lot of these situations have the same parallel of trust - we trust prosecutors to produce all exculpatory evidence, because it is very difficult to determine that they haven't(since the defense doesn't have access to the evidence like prosecutors do). We trust labs to not tamper with the evidence, because the defense does not have the resources to challenge every lab analysis. We trust police officers to not lie under oath, because they are often the sole "untainted" witness of a crime, especially in controversial police shooting cases. When that trust is broken, it is difficult to rein in the backlash - there is no way to know just how often it was broken in the past without us knowing.
Also, this has potentially far reaching implications not just for comments on reddit, but any comment made on any forum on the internet. Without a way of proving a comment has not been tampered with, how can what you write online be used against you in the court of law?