Highly relevant here would be the GCHQ/NSA slides on the topic of how they've infiltrated positions of power (i.e. moderation) in online communities - reddit is specifically cited. It's all about FUD, discrediting, and censorship on fallacious grounds. It would not surprise me to learn that BipolarBear0 is a plant. It would also not surprise me to learn that he's a pedantic basement-dweller, but I don't think, given what we've learned, it's conspiratorial or paranoid to suppose that this is governmental control. It's perfectly feasible.
Yep. Controlling the gatekeepers of public conversation is a measure that is squarely in the court of totalitarianism-- this leak was the evidence needed to begin calling the USA a right wing authoritarian/totalitarian state. I really wish the mainstream media had picked up this story, because it'd be an easy way to convince the public that the government is targeting them as an enemy. It's blatant evidence that the government is interested in controlling thought regardless of involvement with terrorism or national security.
It's foolish to think that they wouldn't try to gain positions of power in bastions of alternative thought and activism. Admittedly, reddit is extremely mainstream-- but it's still a place for citizens to communicate with each other and discuss happenings. It'd be invaluable control-wise to be able to influence conversations there.
When short-haired, god-fearing and country-loving patriots are the good guys (no cops bust up a tea party rally), while the long-haired hippies are the bad guys (see COINTELPRO, police treatment of occupy or the WTO protests), what else you want to call it?
Yes, there are more dimensions to politics than 'left' and 'right', but it does indeed seem that the security services are always worried about a certain type.
The IRS never specifically targeted right wing non-profits. The list of keywords they used included both right wing indicators like "tea party" and left wing indicators like "progressive".
The tax categorization these organizations were applying for is meant to exclude political activism, so flagging organizations with explicitly political names was a reasonable approach.
Well, let's distinguish between degrees here. Both Occupy and the Tea Party have silly, simplistic solutions to real problems, and aren't violent. The cops really have no business hassling either group, let alone infiltrating them like they want to be secret agents.
Actual militia groups.. I mean, Oklahoma City happened, right? Imagine if there was a group of hippies or, god forbid, Muslims with the level of rhetoric that some of these militia groups have along with the training routines and arsenals to prove they're serious.
My beef with how the police treat hippies and muslims is the well-documented, "infiltrate, keep suggesting violent actions until someone says 'maybe', then arrest them" routine. If someone's suggesting violent actions ahead of time and making actual preparations for such without prompting, then that may actually be a threat. Regardless of politics.
EDIT: This is not to say the ATF acted appropriately at Ruby Ridge or Waco. They shouldn't be the first ones shooting.
Bringing right/left as if it were even relevant to this conversation is a simple way to shut out debate of the topic of the NSA infiltrating gatekeepers - which any libertarian or reasonable conservative would normally not defend, but you've made them by calling it 'right wing'.
I didn't bring it up initially, but there IS a huge cultural divide between 'real americans' and multiculturalism/cultural-liberalism, with security services mostly coming from the 'real americans' camp. That's what the OP was presumably referring to with the "right-wing" comment.
Libertarians are theoretically on the sidelines of that debate if not fully on the multiculturalist side. I guess discussions like this one separate the actual libertarians from the crypto-republicans.
> When short-haired, god-fearing and country-loving patriots are the good guys (no cops bust up a tea party rally), while the long-haired hippies are the bad guys (see COINTELPRO, police treatment of occupy or the WTO protests), what else you want to call it?
The Tea Party generally gets permits for its rallies, and complies with insurance and crowd control requirements. Occupy and WTO protestors generally do not. This is sufficient to explain all or most of the differences in treatment.
The US is far to the right relative to the rest of the world, but I get where you're coming from. I didn't mean to imply that the "right wing" was the crux of the problem-- totalitarianism is the problem.
Right. (hah) The non-establishment right wing and tea party appears just as much angry/worried about the increasing collusion between government and wall street as the non-establishment left, if not even more. Increasingly, big govt and big business are becoming harder to tell apart. Corruption is everywhere, but the scariest part is the ability of US govt to silence and intimidate critics both without and within.
"Right Wing Authitarian" is a term defined by Bob Altemeyer. It does not map exactly to the left/right usually associated with politics. It is intended to refer to the authoritarian personality type, regardless of their political positions.
His book on the subject ("The Authoritarians") is incredible, and has a lot to say about the rise in authoritarianism that has been slowly creeping into today's politics.
Ascribing a single axis analysis to any complex phenomenon is almost certainly a gross oversimplification.
Government can be ascribed a number of properties: overall effectiveness or strength, degree of representation, succession, governing principles, balance of powers (among branches, population sectors, business / religion / laity, etc.), and other factors.
There are also dynamics suggesting that the level of complexity of society is contingent on the resources available to it. Including the freedoms of its government.
You have a point. It can sound like tinfoil-hattery, but there are several examples in which the FBI and other police had so thoroughly infiltrated radical groups that there were practically as many monitors as activists. This was not only a 60s and 70s thing, it has continued up to the present day in some cases.
It's important to note that his role was not just information gathering, but also agent provocateur, riling the group into criminal acts. Also worth noting that in order to maintain his cover he had sexual relationships with his targets... Which amounts to sexual intercourse by deception - also known as rape. Oddly, he was not prosecuted for this. Utterly shameful affair, and the absence of consequence indicates complete state sanction for his crimes.
Rape is not the same as "sexual intercourse by deception." The key variable is consent.
"Sexual intercourse by deception" could cover anything between having sex while lying about your age (definitely should not be illegal) to having sex while lying about your seroconversion status (often is and probably should be illegal). None of those count as rape, though, because consent had been granted before and during the actual act.
Lying about your long term intentions in order to have sex with someone, or using sex to manipulate someone? That makes you a bad person, but it's not illegal, and you have a really long line of people to arrest if you think it should be.
Also, since /r/conspiracy was discussing this topic heavily in the last couple of days, BipolarBear0 started flooding the subreddit with anti-semitic content. Here he is admitting it:
BipolarBear0 is a name I recognize from reddit. He's always there, and on Snoonet (unofficial Reddit IRC network).
Now, he could be a plant but more likely he's just another kid power-tripping on Reddit over some silly policy. If you scan subs like the mentioned /r/subredditdrama, or /r/shitredditsays, you can see how deeply people are invested into what others say in throw-away comments on the Internet. Off-colour jokes can lead to discussions with hundreds of participants across multiple subreddits.
Well, then. That suggests, at the very least, partisanship - which has no place in news moderation unless you're an overtly partisan outlet. To be clear, I don't mean partisan in the traditional GOP/dem fashion, rather pro-apparatus and anti-apparatus. It also means easy contact with intel types - he may not even realise that he's being influenced, if he is.
> he's just another kid power-tripping on Reddit over some silly policy
The primary purpose of the subreddit moderators is to enforce the rules. If the moderator does not enforce this so-called "silly policy" then he is not doing his job.
It is wrong to accuse people of being plants without strong, specific evidence of their misdeeds. Being an opinionated Internet commenter, I have seen unjust charges levelled against others and myself, and it absolutely destroys productive discourse.
I'm not saying that GCHQ or the NSA don't have moderation positions on Reddit, but you should listen to the user's explanations of their actions before calling them traitors. The explanations brought forward in the updates to the Salon article do not seem unreasonable; let's not jump to conclusions.
> It would not surprise me to learn that BipolarBear0 is a plant.
If he is, I hope he's fired. Removing an article like that to cover your ass seems like an inordinately stupid thing to do.
> It would also not surprise me to learn that he's a pedantic basement-dweller
This characterization bothers me. "Basement dweller" and "neckbeard" seem to have become the way that fellow nerds can insultingly call each other nerds.
Basement-dweller was intended to rather more mean "person with a lot of time on their hands" - no slight was intended. Hell, I live a basement, albeit not my mom's!
Anyway, he appears to be a DoD contractor with far too much time on his hands.
This may be too much of a tangent, but I think there's a line between being a nerd who functions as a normal citizen and one who doesn't. For me, that's what the "basement-dweller" thing is pointing at, as I think the long version of that is "mom's basement".
I think if anybody's equipped to usefully judge how people deploy their nerdiness, it's other nerds.
If someone is being a pedantic asshole, it's enough to say that.
> I think if anybody's equipped to usefully judge how people deploy their nerdiness, it's other nerds.
I think my point is that calling someone a basement dweller or a neckbeard isn't useful. It doesn't help the point being made; it just insults the other person -- it stands out, in my mind, of nerd being thrown around as an insult in high school.
And, no. I don't think nerds will usefully judge how people deploy their nerdiness.
One of the reasons I'm cynical about online communities is because certain users will seem to have invested their entire life into participating, e.g. spending 12-16 hours a day online (per their post history). Basement Dweller is an dumb insult, but some useful distinction could be made about these people.
I guess it might be worth $5 to the government to occasionally bump a page off the front of reddit, but they should probably spend that money on cute pictures of kittens or donate it to AdviceAnimals before they spend it on infiltration.
That's the problem with articles like these. They're written by people who, at best, only have a vague understanding of how reddit works. This article in particular isn't too bad, but the previous ones I've seen were laughably ignorant about reddit and it's infrastructure.
Making things worse are the commentors who see "censorship" and get all worked up and start frothing at the mouth. This submission is only an hour old yet there are already comments here by people who honestly believe that the mods were infiltrated by the NSA and they're the ones who pulled the submission. The tin-foil hat crowd completely ignore the fact that the submission was only pulled in a single subreddit and that it wasn't pulled in dozen other subreddits, including /r/worldnews which is a larger subreddit with more subscribers.
There are hundreds of thousands of subreddits on reddit and only one pulled the submission because it broke their rules. The other subreddits had no problem with the submission. But why report that? Because it doesn't generate as many hits.
“As it stands, the Firstlook story is almost entirely comprised of analysis and a lack of objectivity. Not to say that’s necessarily a bad thing—in fact, the Firstlook story by Greenwald is, at least in my opinion, a great piece of investigative journalism.”
This, honestly, seems like a perfectly reasonable response.
It does sound like a perfectly reasonable response. But any competent censor would be able to justify his actions with a reasonable sounding response.
We want to hear a response like this, since it sets our minds at ease. But we should resist that urge and be objective ourselves. We can ask:
* Is the article in question, in fact, composed entirely of analysis and does it lack objectivity?
* Does the article lack objectivity to the same degree as other articles banned from r/new?
As to the first question, my opinion is that the article in fact contains significant objective reporting. A major component of the article consists of the slide themselves, which are inherently objective. There are additionally quotes, responses, and factual contextual information presented on the parties involved.
But the article also contains some analysis. Though the content analysis itself doesn't seem particularly bold or controversial, it does present a viewpoint.
So if r/news only allows articles that present a litany of facts and provide no analysis, I suppose this article wouldn't fit the bill. But I'm not familiar enough with r/news to know whether if that's the case.
How are these wild accusations? The story in question is about how GCHQ infiltrates and disrupts online communities to discredit and bury unfavorable stories.
