Washington’s Blog

March 5, 2014

The giant r/Worldnews and r/News Reddits (5 million and 2 million subscribed readers, respectively) still haven’t allowed links to Glenn Greenwald’s report on government control, infiltration, manipulation and warping of online discourse.

Our write-up on the story – as well as TechDirt’s and Examiner.com’s – were allowed. We are sincerely grateful – as are TechDirt and Examiner.com – for the traffic.

However, we’re all upset that the moderators of the biggest Reddits are censoring Greenwald’s original story:

TechDirt’s write up on censorship is here

The Redditor who posted the Examiner’s story slams Reddit censorship here

And our post on the censorship – written before the links to TechDirt, Examiner and our site were allowed – can be read here

Ironically, our post on censorship has itself repeatedly been deleted by Reddit moderators. In the week since I wrote it, I have repeatedly seen traffic coming from a Reddit link to the story, and then the traffic has suddenly stopped.

Redditors not affiliated with Washington’s Blog have repeatedly submitted the story, and it has been deleted every time.

As one example, yesterday the story jumped to the front page of Reddit over the course of 2 hours:

But then it was suddenly deleted.

This shows that there is tremendous interest among Redditors themselves to discuss censorship. But the moderators keep shutting down discussion.

This isn’t the first time the Reddit community has tried to fight back against censorship. There has been a long and growing outrage over the issue, especially given the history of Digg’s “Bury Brigade” destroying that site:

Postscript: We don’t have any opinion about whether or not moderators should keep removing our story on censorship. We are, frankly, too biased to be objective.

We are, instead, focusing on the fact that there is tremendous pent-up desire among Redditors to discuss censorship.

In other words, the story is not that our post was deleted (again) yesterday. It’s that Redditors quickly pushed it to the front page because there is such an overwhelming desire to discuss censorship.

And the other story is that the big Reddits are still not linking directly to Glenn Greenwald’s reports.

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