Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship

[Jazzy]

Social news site Reddit has downgraded the status of its "technology" section after a censorship row.

The category is no longer a "default subreddit", meaning it stops being one of two dozen communities promoted to new account holders.

It follows a report by the Daily Dot that revealed headlines posted to the area had been secretly deleted if they featured certain words.

The site is majority-owned by media group Conde Nast's parent Advanced Publications, and has proven particularly popular with 18-30 year-old males.

This audience-profile closely matches that of many of the major tech blogs and, as such, articles that have attracted interest on the technology subreddit have helped drive traffic to these third-party sites.

However, the section will now be much less visible to people who have either not edited their "subscriptions" to include it or have visited Reddit without logging in.

Banned words
A Reddit user nicknamed Creq highlighted evidence that more than 20 terms had been banned, in a post to the site a week ago.

He said the list of censored words included: "National Security Agency", "GCHQ", "Anonymous", "anti-piracy", "Bitcoin", "Snowden" and "net neutrality".

It later became clear that other terms, including "EU Court", "startup" and "Assange" had also been blocked.

When the Daily Dot questioned one of the section's volunteer moderators about this, he confirmed that software was being used to automatically delete posts that featured "politicised" words in order to avoid the links making it to the core list of most popular topics.

Full article

Any Reddit users: What's your opinion on this?

 

[gaze-universe]

Not a user, but that sucks. The only censorship there should be anywhere is for rude words and putting it off or on should be the users choice.