Alan sez, “According to various media reports (e.g. BBC) the technology subreddit has scrubbed its moderator team after users discovered that the sub was holding a secret censorship list of banned words that included ‘National Security Agency’, ‘GCHQ’, ‘Anonymous’, ‘anti-piracy’, ‘Bitcoin’, ‘Snowden’, ‘net neutrality’, ‘EU Court’, ‘startup’ and ‘Assange’.
On its face, this looks like a list of politicized terms, and blocking them looks like a highly political and partisan act — for example, by blocking “net neutrality,” then stories that are critical of network discrimination would be blocked, while straight news stories that overwhelmingly quoted corporate spokespeople using uncritical terms would make the front door.
More charitably, it may have been the act of overworked (and ultimately irresponsible) moderators to simply ban hot-button topics altogether.
Here’s the Reddit post that outed /r/technology’s moderators.
Once the news got publicized, the moderator team did a ‘U turn’ and removed the auto-deletion software, as well as booting the mods responsible for it in the first place.
Still, as the BBC story notes, the technology sub is no longer “featured”, meaning it doesn’t appear in the subreddits that are promoted to new users and appear on the front page.
Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship [BBC]
(Thanks, Alan!)