There are some great Reddit mods, but there are also some truly awful ones and the corporation does not have a proper arbitration process for managing things.
Example fictional scenario, but entirely plausible as variations of this do play out, on a computing sub you could write "I like Windows" and the Apple Mac-loving Reddit mod could immediately ban you. No rules were broken, you just expressed a contrary opinion to theirs and that is it. So if you wish to continue participating in that sub, you would need to generate and use an alt account.
Reddit threatens that having more than 1 account is against policy. Ignore this. You are the product on a free platform that generates corporate revenue through ads and selling digital awards, etc. If you do not engage with the platform by putting up posts and writing comments, there is less incentive for others to come visit as well, and ad impressions will diminish, revenue will diminish, etc. They will not actively seek out preventing access to the site if you are not breaking any laws or upsetting users. Do not get invested in accounts, were you to die tomorrow, nobody at all would remember you or care about anything you wrote there.
It is negligent on the part of Reddit to not have a proper arbitration process to grieve improper content moderation on the part of mods.
So yes, Reddit absolutely does take an active and direct hand in promoting the visibility of anything on the platform and should not be exempt from section 230. I am active in a sub that every day sees a lot of posts that I find interesting deleted by the mods. They are just curating. Sometimes things are deleted for the dumbest of reasons. Corporate interests come into play too. I remember the other month when Kanye said that Kim Kardashian and CP3 got together while both were married, the NBA Reddit mods for over 24 hours were ACTIVELY deleting every single post mentioning or linking to that. It was certainly basketball news, it was certainly salacious. Why was this happening? Good question! Was the suppression due to receiving an order from the NBA? Was it under orders from Reddit Corporate? Was it just simply a group of Reddit mods working overnight in a coffee shop deleting posts? It was far too targeted and for too long a time period to not be an active attempt at speech suppression until it was already out on too many other news sites, at which time an "approved" site like TMZ would be allowed through where they could presumably get ad-click impressions from diminished traffic to their story about it. They should tell the Supreme Court who gave the orders to suppress the Kanye story on a sub with 6 million+ subscribed accounts. You see this news-story preferences on other subs too, where some sites seemingly often have their links given preferential treatment, and others do not get to come through. Why? Is there a kickback? I don't know, but stories coming through are worth money as traffic is directed.
I love old Reddit, but I despise how it was set up to have little anonymous dictators for life seemingly entrenched forever in their little fiefdoms. No elections, no votes, no recourse other than having more than 1 account.
If Reddit is serious about wanting exemption from section 230, then if they want to be a social commons with community moderation they need to implement an arbitration process OR allow users to hold elections on which mods they want to represent them for fixed terms.
Dictators-for-life from anonymous mods (who also have alt accounts and are probably Reddit employees on the largest subs) is not it.
The anonymous mods giving Supreme Court testimony should state whether or not they are now, or have ever been an employee of Reddit or its investors or associated companies.
I don't know anything about /r/nba but from observations of other subs it seems just as likely that a few mods had a private discussion and said "Should we allow this?" and decided no, and then just went ahead and tried to enforce that. Once they've come to decision to not allow something they're not going to let it pass just because a lot of people are reposting it. If you give up after deleting the first 100 threads it makes you look pretty stupid.
On /r/soccer what's happened a few times is some story will come up like the one you mentioned, every single thread on the topic is deleted and then a day or so later there will be some announcement they had another discussion and have changed their mind so will allow one or more threads to be posted. There was a similar thing on /r/worldnews a few years ago when there was a spate of sexual assaults in Cologne at a Christmas/New Year parade. Initially all threads on this were removed on the grounds this wasn't really world news, but since it made the front page of many international papers was the main story on the BBC, etc - that initial judgement looked pretty stupid and threads were allowed.
I mean, it could be "kickbacks" driving this thing but honestly a lot of it is easy to explain without recourse to that. It's still arbitrary but not necessarily corrupt.
Example fictional scenario, but entirely plausible as variations of this do play out, on a computing sub you could write "I like Windows" and the Apple Mac-loving Reddit mod could immediately ban you. No rules were broken, you just expressed a contrary opinion to theirs and that is it. So if you wish to continue participating in that sub, you would need to generate and use an alt account.
Reddit threatens that having more than 1 account is against policy. Ignore this. You are the product on a free platform that generates corporate revenue through ads and selling digital awards, etc. If you do not engage with the platform by putting up posts and writing comments, there is less incentive for others to come visit as well, and ad impressions will diminish, revenue will diminish, etc. They will not actively seek out preventing access to the site if you are not breaking any laws or upsetting users. Do not get invested in accounts, were you to die tomorrow, nobody at all would remember you or care about anything you wrote there.
It is negligent on the part of Reddit to not have a proper arbitration process to grieve improper content moderation on the part of mods.
So yes, Reddit absolutely does take an active and direct hand in promoting the visibility of anything on the platform and should not be exempt from section 230. I am active in a sub that every day sees a lot of posts that I find interesting deleted by the mods. They are just curating. Sometimes things are deleted for the dumbest of reasons. Corporate interests come into play too. I remember the other month when Kanye said that Kim Kardashian and CP3 got together while both were married, the NBA Reddit mods for over 24 hours were ACTIVELY deleting every single post mentioning or linking to that. It was certainly basketball news, it was certainly salacious. Why was this happening? Good question! Was the suppression due to receiving an order from the NBA? Was it under orders from Reddit Corporate? Was it just simply a group of Reddit mods working overnight in a coffee shop deleting posts? It was far too targeted and for too long a time period to not be an active attempt at speech suppression until it was already out on too many other news sites, at which time an "approved" site like TMZ would be allowed through where they could presumably get ad-click impressions from diminished traffic to their story about it. They should tell the Supreme Court who gave the orders to suppress the Kanye story on a sub with 6 million+ subscribed accounts. You see this news-story preferences on other subs too, where some sites seemingly often have their links given preferential treatment, and others do not get to come through. Why? Is there a kickback? I don't know, but stories coming through are worth money as traffic is directed.
I love old Reddit, but I despise how it was set up to have little anonymous dictators for life seemingly entrenched forever in their little fiefdoms. No elections, no votes, no recourse other than having more than 1 account.
If Reddit is serious about wanting exemption from section 230, then if they want to be a social commons with community moderation they need to implement an arbitration process OR allow users to hold elections on which mods they want to represent them for fixed terms.
Dictators-for-life from anonymous mods (who also have alt accounts and are probably Reddit employees on the largest subs) is not it.
The anonymous mods giving Supreme Court testimony should state whether or not they are now, or have ever been an employee of Reddit or its investors or associated companies.