Unmasking Reddit's Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web. Reddit, freedom of speech and the dark side of community. Unless you spend a lot of time on Reddit, the discussion-forum community that more or less took over after Digg sank beneath the waves, you may have missed the latest storm of controversy over content posted on the site’s various “sub-Reddits” or topic pages. Although Reddit has played host to some fascinating journalistic features recently — including the reporting of a mass shooting in Colorado and an open question-and-answer session with President Barack Obama — it is also well known for its less savory elements, such as a page devoted to creepy (but likely not illegal) photos of women. The way that this modern morality tale has played out over the past few days says some interesting things about free speech and the darker side of the open community that Reddit has become.
Banning links to protect freedom of speech “We feel that this type of behavior is completely intolerable. Can we count on communities to self-regulate? Reddit leaders deflect censorship criticism and defend hands-off policies. Reddit prides itself on its decentralized meritocracy —"subreddits are a free market.
Anyone can create a subreddit and decide how it's run," it says. So far this model has been very successful in launching sites: there are tens of thousands of subreddits on any imaginable topic, with an endless supply of new forums open for the taking, all which rise and fall based on the desires of the community. Reddit generally polices just five basic rules, one of which is "don't post personal information. " Other rules include no spam, no cheating the system, and no child pornography — a rule that expanded just seven months ago to include "no suggestive or sexual content featuring minors" after a subreddit completely based on that kind of content gained national infamy from mainstream voices like CNN's Anderson Cooper.
"We don't get involved unless it has something to do with rules. " Given recent events, Reddit's leadership structure looks problematic on the surface. Burn After Reading. Reddit CEO addresses Violentacrez controversy: 'we will not ban legitimate investigative journalism' Reddit doesn't really dictate how its corner of the internet is run, but CEO Yishan Wong has some strong suggestions for dealing with recent events: "We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it," he writes, in a leaked memo posted today and obtained by Gawker.
He's referring to the ongoing Violentacrez controversy, of course. Last week, that very same Gawker unmasked one of Reddit's most unsavory trolls, posting his real identity for all to see. Allegedly, it cost Violentacrez his job. At the same time, Gawker sister site Jezbel ran a story which suggested that naming names was the only way to combat distasteful content like r/CreepShots, a place where "technically legal" upskirt photos were posted. For Reddit, the stories were serious offenses: the site does not permit posting the personal information of its users (aka "doxxing").
Here's the full memo, as well as the TL;DR version: TL;DR: We stand for freedom of speech. Hi everyone. Watch Reddit's Biggest Troll Defend Himself - Entertainment. Michael Brutsch, a 49-year-old man who posted on Reddit under the name Violentacrez until Gawker's Adrian Chen outed him, went on Anderson Cooper 360 to defend himself on camera for the first time. Brutsch's Reddit persona became famous for creating offensive subreddits, most notably r/jailbait. It was Brutsch's masterwork, and it drew Cooper's attention a year ago. It makes sense, then, for Brutsch to attempt to atone for his Internet sins on Cooper's show once he could no longer hide behind Violentacrez.
We say sort of because Brutsch's apology is half-hearted at best. "Well, I am to some degree apologizing for what I did," he tells the interviewer. But it was all worth it for Brutsch. This is, we suspect, one of the final chapters in Brutsch's narrative.