On the off chance you've missed it somehow...
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman finds himself forced to apologize for tampering with user accounts and editing their comments.
Here's the truth of what happened.
As the head honcho of Reddit, he of course has the ability and the right to censor messages.
He was tired of the flood of criticism, and so he went through and edited numerous postings that were critical of himself and his decisions.
This isn't a matter of simple censorship. It is inarguable that as CEO that his job is to act at all times in the best interests of the shareholders.
There is nothing wrong at all with him having complete control over what does and does not run on his site, he's in charge and websites can be held responsible for libel.
But this needs to be a binary. It needs to be clear
"THIS POST WAS CENSORED!"
That's not what he did. He literally edited the comments of the users.
He put words in the mouths of people!
He had no right to do this!
NO ONE DOES!!!
This is a dangerous precedent. Many people's careers and reputations are tied to their social media accounts.
Criminals are tracked all the time by their social media postings and prosecutors have won convictions on the basis of evidence gathered from social media accounts.
All of this is based on the idea that only the user has the right to say whatever the user says on behalf of said user, ergo the user owns it.
It's their speech, it's their words. They own it and they are liable for every word of it.
In his case he limited it to only people critical of himself.
He started flamewars by changing the target from himself to whoever the topic instigator was.
This isn't some silly practical joke and it's unclear how he could have thought it would be.
These were hateful, hurtful things, literally cyberbullying and rather than deleting it, he made someone else feel it. As I said on Reddit and few other places.
More importantly, the act of editing and hitting submit, meant that he felt that same malice about his targets, but wasn't man enough to own his own words. Deciding to put them in the mouth of someone else instead. The CEO hit submit, to my mind that means the CEO approved that message. Is another read even possible here?
It's abuse plain and simple and speaks volumes about the man himself and his suitability for leadership.
If I were a shareholder, I'd be hitting the sell button on those shares as quickly as possible right now.
Yet this is a problem with every social media platform. Sure you can say something, but once you say it, it can be edited because it's just a string of text sitting in a database somewhere and anyone with DB access has the ability to change what's in there.
This is a problem for nearly all computer storage systems, eVoting has the same flaw, but votes don't generally tie a person to an idea or a concept.
Social Media ties you to a series of thoughts, ideas and concepts that define WHO you are to the rest of the online world.
If you say something ignorant, hurtful or stupid, well that's on you. I know I have more than my fair share of those.
But if someone is putting words in your mouth, what recourse do you have? In a society where you are guilty until proven innocent, how do you prove you didn't say something?
The internet never forgets, and these things are going to follow you your whole life.
Having your digital artifacts tampered with is the electronic equivalent of being set up or framed.
Satoshi Nakamoto realized this and it's why he created Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is money that cannot be tampered with!
It's money that can't be tampered with because it uses a concept of digitally signed messages
In the bitcoin world, these messages all amount to "I am Bob and I'm sending 1BTC to Alice".
The content of this message is then fed to an algorithm called ECDSA and ECDSA takes the message content and signs it with Bob's private key.
Once the message is signed, anyone who knows Bob's public key can then use that public key to verify that Bob actually signed the message.
As long as Bob maintains exclusive control of his private key then Bob maintains exclusive control over his bitcoin.
Bitcoins are just messages.
The bitcoin blockchain limits what content those messages contain to strictly financial looking data.
However if Reddit or Facebook or any other social media platform just used ECDSA or the newer EdDSA cryptographic signature algorithms, then it would be impossible to edit a message after the fact. At most a user could send a signed message that says "x replaces y", it's easy to prove the user who sent it and it's considered mathematically impossible to fake.
And this is what makes steem such a powerful tool for social change.
If you read the whitepaper you'll see that steemit is intended to be a flagship for the steem blockchain.
One that is intended for other social media platforms to adopt and use as well.
Tamper resistance is exactly why they SHOULD!
You could still have the ability to censor a person or a message. Just like we do here.
When you flag a post you're just sending a message saying, "I don't like that, so don't display it to the others."
People interested in seeing can still see it.
It's still present on the blockchain, but it's not in your face on the website.
There's no way to edit a user's content though and no way to shadow ban anyone.
Any site can run any subset of the information on the blockchain and display it however they want.
Steemit is unique in the social media world. Because it is backed by the steem blockchain, but it has a set of rules that permit a little bit of community moderation and censorship. Yet this censorship isn't totalitarian. Steemit's censorship can be completely avoided simply by using Tor and pointing your Tor browser to usteempccoapgood.onion or if you don't have Tor you can visit it by going to usteempccoapgood.onion.to This service is provided to you courtesy of @someguy123
From either place you can see and use steem completely uncensored.
This freedom to say what you believe is vital. Censorship is always a tool of oppression. It should never be illegal to speak up about abuse from anyone no matter who they are, no matter how powerful or well connected they or their friends are. No one has the right to silence the voice of another, but while I can accept that some things are just inappropriate and offensive to common sensibility, what we cannot continue to tolerate is the free for all of profit driven moderation, curation and editing that is going on in the broader internet.
Soon it will be a jail-able offense to say anything that hurts the feelings of others.
I would love to see laws like that go away, maybe we can't fight that law right now.
But at least we can make sure that the person doing time for "saying things" actually said those things.
Steemit provides you something you don't get with other social media platforms, a choice.
The real question at this point is why Reddit, Facebook, Twitter etc don't move their infrastructure over to steem.
While that might sound ludicrous at first, it actually makes perfect sense. There is a real value proposition for them.
Yes under the hood is the steem blockchain, the same blockchain as steemit.
But they maintain their site and their service exactly as-is and just have far less infrastructure they need to pay for. For any social media network the choice should be clear.
So here's the deal...
If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.
Let's do what we can to bring our friends, family and followers over from "other" social media platforms.
Share this, resteem it, tweet it, copy and paste it. I don't care how you get the message out there, but get the message out.
Your social media is broken, come here because we've fixed it!
A powerful article about our freedoms of communication, urgently needed. Thank you so very much for sharing and taking the time to write this. Namaste :)
Upvoted followed and shared!
Thank you so much for doing that! Followed back!
Good article. I can no longer imagine a world without censorship resistant social media, thanks to steemit. Very grateful for this community.
Upvoted/Followed/Resteemed
Thank you for following! I think you may be my 666th follower! Followed back!
Holy cow! That's effing awesome
Thanks for sharing! Instances like these will only influence more people towards understanding how important the blockchain is for social media.
I agree. This kind of technology is essential, especially considering the potential for any repressive regime even corporate regimes to suppress or alter the voice of the people.
Thanks for the information!
Please remove one of the tags as their is a bug which means it will only appear under the first tag if you use all 5.
Thanks for the info!
You're welcome:)
No problem.
Many thanks for this piece. I'm a novice here, and really found it useful...AND it has motivated me to share it via FB, Twitter and Gab. Well done.
That's why I post my stuff here. If it's not on Steemit then I myself don't know if I said it or not. I find myself going back on my history on other social media and there are things I don't recognize, which may be because I am growing up and changing, but how can I know for sure?
At least I can learn from my mistakes on Steemit because I know they are my own, if there is anything that drives me crazy is others speaking for me.
Reddit is dead, now it's just rotting.
Freedom of information. Yes! No censorship on information. Yes!
But as a society, we censor behavior, nudity in public, etc. Behavior can be censored. Not all content is knowledge, but only so-called "entertainment" for some. Behavior in content can be censored. Video content of behavior, can be censored.
What needs to not be censored, is knowledge.
Great Post William! Tweeted on the official @Steemit Twitter. Also Pinterest, Tumblr and Google Plus. Later today I will post it on my personal Google Plus which should draw plenty of action.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Wow! Thank you so much for that! I really appreciate it!
I agree censorship is wrong , but reddit, and other social media platforms are a business with terms of use. Its not unconstitutional because they are not publicly owned.
As much as I advocate free speech, I also advocate property rights of the owners.
If you disagree then simply don't use the platform they provide.
Some simple food for thought and the true litmus of how liberty minded someone really is.
I never said it was a free speech issue. Reddit is free to censor whatever they want to censor.
I can yell at someone standing in my yard having a conversation. I can call the cops on them if they don't leave. What I can't do is lie to the cops about what I heard them talking about.
It would have been a simple matter to censor the sub, suspend the users, turn evidence over to investigators. Maybe get some really crazy and dangerous people out society for a bit or at least off reddit.
That's not what he did. He acted like a teenager with no common sense. It bordered on criminal. It was an abuse of power when there were far better alternatives available. This isn't even a matter of "hindsight is 20/20". The option he chose was the option least likely to be legal. People are cheering him like he trolled some trolls. But that's not factual. He turned a bad situation into a disaster and ruined what credibility the site had. You literally cannot be sure anyone said anything there. It's no different than if he had logged into their accounts and made the entire thing up. At least not from the perspective of a prosecutor trying to deal with those guys. He opened a HUGE can of legal worms.
If I were a reddit shareholder I'd be looking to sell or at least be moving for his immediate ouster.
No criminal activity occured , at worst it's a civil or tort issue , and again all users of a social media platform consent to terms of use... To win a liabel or slander case one has to establish there was damage to your reputation that causes financial harm.
Like I said earlier I mostly agree based on the idea that its bad business to moderate original content of a poster , but its far from criminal. Basing arguments on emotional appeal rather than facts however does not benefit anyone.
Ok allow me to clarify here...
Another poster put a pretty good summary in place of the events leading up to it so I'll just quote him/her...
You see, there is criminal activity here.
Someone went to a pizza shop and fired a round. They did this because they were told that children were being harmed. This isn't tort, it's criminal. When they were shutdown they got nasty. They were inciting violence. That's not tort, that's criminal.
A psychologist is going to assess this person that fired the shot and at the same time a forensic investigator is going to go through his entire computer, his browsing history and his social media accounts.
His entire digital life. They will also be pulling in the digital footprint of anyone who had any connection to this guy. He committed a terrorist act. If you were in a forum with him, you're going to be looked at. If you encouraged this, it's not civil liability, instigating violence by urging it on is criminal.
As it stands now, there is a very good chance, that this person's history on reddit could be called into question by a defense attorney. Evidence, his history of posts on reddit and the history of a huge number of people he interacted with have been tampered with.
The CEO of Reddit tampered with evidence that he had good reason to believe would be part of a criminal investigation. That's the law that was broken.
Someone pops off a round in your neighborhood, you don't go and collect the shell casing, get it engraved and keep it as a souvenir. If you do then it's tampering with the evidence.
But this isn't strictly about that. This is about the fact that this danger is on every social media outlet. Words can be put in your mouth that you never said and you have no way to prove you didn't. Some words now carry with them extreme liability. Some are just tort.
Frankly I'd rather be certain that anything out there that says "williambanks" was put out there by williambanks. No matter how stupid or inane those words might be, at least they're mine.
Ya know ,it doesn't even have to be this severe.
What if Twitter decided to strike a deal with pepsi to replace all references of Coke with Pepsi? Every time you mention Coke it's replaced with Pepsi. It would imply an endorsement that isn't there. But it will come, if this person walks away scott free with no consequences. In the meantime he made the investigators and prosecutors jobs much, much harder.
You make such a clear argument. both sides are interesting, but from my "newbie" perspective - only one is right. lol
An incisive look into the heart of Steemit!
Thank you! I appreciate the compliments.
UV and RS, thanks!
Thank you for doing that!
For sure, really appreciate your insight. Getting turned on to all sorts of new things since joining Steemit 6 weeks ago...
Resteemed.
Thanks for resteeming it! Followed you now!
It's a lesson for all of us: Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. Let's keep our integrity intact!
Excellent commentary and I would add an old Chinese (possibly Japanese ) proverb.
wow i had missed that! thanks for sharing!
You're very welcome!
Me too!
Thanks a bunch! I really appreciate it!
Here is the link to my tweet in case anybody want's to retweet it:
#freedom #freespeech #liberty
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Wow! Thanks for the retweet!
NP.
This post is chalk full of misinformation!
WOW
First of all, This all started when Reddit, shutdown r/pizzagate after someone with a gun went inside of Comet Ping-Pong ( a pizza shop caught up in a lot drama stemming from a fake news article about Hillary and Co running a child pronography ring in the basement), fired a round, and refused to leave until he was certain there were no children being harmed.
The shutdown of r/pizzagate, a sub-reddit mainly consisting of believers in pizzagate and seemingly propagating violence, caused members from r/TheDonald (another seemingly problematic subreddit) to, en masse, create hundreds, maybe thousands of posts full of hate speech and obscenities specifically targeted at Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman.
Steve, in retalition, went into the reddit database, and changed all instances of his name in these posts, with "r/thedonald". essentially redirecting all of the hate speech back to the perpetrators as a group. He didnt change anything to any single persons name as you stated, but to an entire subreddits name.
He trolled the trolls essentially
I think its genius. Not exactly ethical, but its trolls. who wouldnt take the opportunity to troll a massive group of trolls like that?????????
He tampered with the speech of others.
Put words in their mouth, or at least changed them.
If there is a criminal investigation into the pizzagate thing, this would be literally tampering with evidence. Speaking as someone who has performed IT forensics for a living, if there was evidence of a crime in there, he's now contaminated the crime scene to the point nothing there could be admissible.
He proved beyond a doubt that he is not acting as a neutral carrier. He has now made reddit liable for everything posted by any user. After all, if he can change someone's unflattering words about reddit on whim, why shouldn't he be forced to change unflattering reviews of a powerful politician or a popular celeb? Heck they could start selling it as a service.
He could have shut those posts out by simply labeling them censored. As it is now, an investigator looking at that database cannot in any way prosecute, the data's been tampered with.
I stand by every word I said. The fact that he edited the message to reflect it back on the Attackers rather than using his censorship powers, means that he approved the messages to run on his website and just didn't have the courage of his convictions to stand up and own it.
There's no misinformation here at all. The fact is that if you are on any social media site you are vulnerable to exactly this kind of tampering. The things you say can be altered. This is true for everywhere except steemit, because steemit's blockchain uses cryptographic signatures as a sort of tamper proof seal.
i admire your mind!!!
I have been on the Diaspora network for 4 years, wouldn't be on Steemit if not for one of the users recommending Steemit for my art and giving me 20 mBTC so I could sign up using AnonSteem.
It takes time and a lot of effort to move people (or at least make them also use an alternative), but I have actually done it with my family. Most of them are still on Facebook, but they use Diaspora for private family-stuff and are actually enjoying the privacy of Diaspora. But it was a long, hard journey and I would not have been able to do it alone. I drafted two other family members to help and even then you are up against peoples insecurity, even hostility to anything that is not mainstream. I never tried to push Linux on them, even though my wife and children are using it without any problems.
With Steemit is is a little bit different. I guess that the promise of the money-game will make it fun for some, but the lack of privacy (everything is public in the blockchain) makes it less attractive as a place for private photos and family chit-chat.
As for now I am satisfied with using Steemit as a place monetising my art, and Diaspora as the privacy-aware family network. As the Diaspora-user that introduced me to Steemit wrote: "Diaspora can be seen as the artist's home, their commune, and then they go to the market, bazaar, shopping mile of steemit where they can showcase their artwork."