- cross-posted to:
- politics
Edit 2: THIS is the article she posted to, where it states the following:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet
Still, it made the team’s intentions clearer. Jessica Ashooh, Reddit’s head of policy, spent four years as a policy consultant in Abu Dhabi. “I know what it’s like to live under censorship,” she said. “My internal check, when I’m arguing for a restrictive policy on the site, is Do I sound like an Arab government? If so, maybe I should scale it back.”
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/56333
r/ChapoTrapHouse was quarantined in August 2019 and finally banned on 30th June 2020 as part of a ban wave resulting from an update to reddit's content policy. Although over 2000 subs were banned in that wave r/ChapoTrapHouse was by far the most active, accounting for the majority of subscribers and users.
So, who decides Reddit's content policy? The answer seems to be the whole board, but drafting and enforcing it falls under the portfolio of Reddit's Director of Policy, Jessica Ashooh, who as you may or may not be aware, is a CIA plant.
This isn't some grand conspiracy theory or anything, it's not even particularly well hidden. A glance at the employment history listed on her linkedin page is enough to create suspicion and a few public domain FOIA internal CIA documents about her places of employment should prove it beyond reasonable doubt.
When she was appointed to her position at Reddit, Jessica Ashooh never worked at a social media company before, had never held a senior position in a private sector company, and had spent the last 7 years working public sector jobs.
Her immediate past position, from March 2015 - May 2017, was as Deputy Director Middle East Strategy Task Force at the Atlantic Council and before that from June 2011 to February 2015 she was a Senior Analyst at the Policy Planning Department of the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs
As this internal CIA document made publically available by FOIA shows, The Atlantic Council, is a CIA front.
As for how intimately involved she was with reddit's anti-evil program that got r/ChapoTrapHouse banned, well, here's a 2018 interview where she talks about it in her own words and goes through a day in the life.
Still, it made the team’s intentions clearer. Jessica Ashooh, Reddit’s head of policy, spent four years as a policy consultant in Abu Dhabi. “I know what it’s like to live under censorship,” she said. “My internal check, when I’m arguing for a restrictive policy on the site, is Do I sound like an Arab government? If so, maybe I should scale it back.” On the other hand, she said, “people hide behind the notion that there’s a bright line between ideology and action, but some ideologies are inherently more violent than others.”
In October, on the morning the new policy was rolled out, Ashooh sat at a long conference table with a dozen other employees. Before each of them was a laptop, a mug of coffee, and a few hours’ worth of snacks. “Welcome to the Policy Update War Room,” she said. “And, yes, I’m aware of the irony of calling it a war room when the point is to make Reddit less violent, but it’s too late to change the name.” The job of policing Reddit’s most pernicious content falls primarily to three groups of employees—the community team, the trust-and-safety team, and the anti-evil team—which are sometimes described, respectively, as good cop, bad cop, and RoboCop. Community stays in touch with a cross-section of redditors, asking them for feedback and encouraging them to be on their best behavior. When this fails and redditors break the rules, trust and safety punishes them. Anti-evil, a team of back-end engineers, makes software that flags dodgy-looking content and sends that content to humans, who decide what to do about it.
Ashooh went over the plan for the day. All at once, they would replace the old policy with the new policy, post an announcement explaining the new policy, warn a batch of subreddits that they were probably in violation of the new policy, and ban another batch of subreddits that were flagrantly, irredeemably in violation. I glanced at a spreadsheet with a list of the hundred and nine subreddits that were about to be banned (r/KKK, r/KillAllJews, r/KilltheJews, r/KilltheJoos), followed by the name of the employee who would carry out each deletion, and, if applicable, the reason for the ban (“mostly just swastikas?”). “Today we’re focussing on a lot of Nazi stuff and bestiality stuff,” Ashooh said. “Context matters, of course, and you shouldn’t get in trouble for posting a swastika if it’s a historical photo from the 1936 Olympics, or if you’re using it as a Hindu symbol. But, even so, there’s a lot that’s clear-cut.” I asked whether the same logic—that the Nazi flag was an inherently violent symbol—would apply to the Confederate flag, or the Soviet flag, or the flag under which King Richard fought the Crusades. “We can have those conversations in the future,” Ashooh said. “But we have to start somewhere.”
At 10 a.m., the trust-and-safety team posted the announcement and began the purge. “Thank you for letting me do DylannRoofInnocent,” one employee said. “That was one of the ones I really wanted.”
“What is ReallyWackyTicTacs?” another employee asked, looking down the list.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” Ashooh said. “That was the most unpleasant shit I’ve ever seen, and I’ve spent a lot of time looking into Syrian war crimes.”
Some of the comments on the announcement were cynical. “They don’t actually want to change anything,” one redditor wrote, arguing that the bans were meant to appease advertisers. “It was, in fact, never about free speech, it was about money.” One trust-and-safety manager, a young woman wearing a leather jacket and a ship captain’s cap, was in charge of monitoring the comments and responding to the most relevant ones. “Everyone seems to be taking it pretty well so far,” she said. “There’s one guy, freespeechwarrior, who seems very pissed, but I guess that makes sense, given his username.” “Are we gonna have to scrape the Daddy decal off the minivan?”
“People are making lists of all the Nazi subs getting banned, but nobody has noticed that we’re banning bestiality ones at the same time,” Ashooh said.
“No one wants to admit it,” an employee said. “ ‘Guys, I was just browsing r/HorseCock and I couldn’t help but notice . . .’ ”
The woman in the captain’s cap said, “O.K., someone just asked, ‘How will the exact phrase “kill yourself” be handled?’ ”
“It all depends on context,” Ashooh said. “They’re going to get tired of hearing that, but it’s true.”
“Uh-oh, looks like we missed a bestiality sub,” the woman in the captain’s cap said. >“Apparently, SexWithDogs was on our list, but DogSex was not.”
“Did you go to DogSex?” Ashooh said.
“Yep.”
“And what’s on it?”
“I mean . . .”
“Are there people having sex with dogs?”
“Oh, yes, very much.”
“Yeah, ban it.”
“I’m going to get more cheese sticks,” the woman in the captain’s cap said, standing up. “How many cheese sticks is too many in one day? At what point am I encouraging or glorifying violence against my own body?”
“It all depends on context,” Ashooh said.
So there you have it, Ashooh is almost certainly a CIA plant and as Director of Policy was almost certainly the one who both wrote the policy that got r/ChapoTrapHouse banned and made the final decision to bring down the hammer.
r/ChapoTrapHouse got banned by the CIA.
So congratulations to all of you beautiful people.
We posted hard and effectively enough that the feds engaged in a multi-year op to shut us down. Never let it be said that posting isn't praxis, or that communist ideas are inherently unpopular or unpalatable to the people living in the imperial core.
r/ChapoTrapHouse dies with the highest honours a leftist publication in the West can receive, it got so effective the glowy bois had to take action to shut it down. And we lived on to start it again in a way that can't be shut down so easily.
Being a subreddit gave r/ChapoTrapHouse the unique ability to reach reddit's userbase but the brand recognition's still there, and there's nothing stopping us reposting watermarked chapo.chat content to subs which aren't banned.
So stay safe, semper post, keep spreading the word about chapo.chat and remember that our primary purpose is as part of a pipeline. Help make Chapo.chat a fun and welcoming place so that the libs who stumble here bother to stay and be educated by osmosis.
With effort and a little luck we can rebuild this website into the subreddit the feds felt the need to shut down having removed their ability to do so.
Just to tack onto this, I got banned from /r/worldnews for a comment that pointed out Radio Free Asia is US government propaganda and has a history of direct links to the CIA. My post was perfectly civil and cited sources for all my claims, yet I was banned outright and no response from the mods when I messaged about it.
even if you're not banned you'll find your posts getting hidden from everyone but you. The way to test this is to go to a computer or phone where you've never been logged in, and try to find your post. It'll be invisible to all IP addresses but your own. This is shadowbanning, and of course they try to gaslight us about it. The wealthy social democrat podcasts like chapo all made fun of the concept and said it wasn't real but they didn't actually investigate. They just wanted to be reactionary and make fun of people for seemingly "crazy" behavior. I've seen it happen first hand. When I noticed that happening is when I finally gave up on all mainstream social media websites. Better to preach to the choir than to scream into the void.
It took me over a year to realize I was shadowbanned until I was looking at my past comments and noticed that all of my comments on a specific sub had exactly one upvote, no more no less. And no one ever responded.
I pointed out to the mods of r/dankleft with screenshots how my posts were disappearing if I logged out and all they could do was suggest that I remove certain links that reddit admins had determined to be "misinformation". (These were always news sources that had the habit of being too anti-imperialist)
I got banned for the same thing but I made fun of the mods after so they perma banned every account I had ever logged into on my device and preemptively banned a new account I made
Damn. That's pretty awesome tbh. I'd be super proud of that if I were you.
Lol gotta have those mod tools. Need more mod tools. Don’t have enough mod tools. Ban ban ban. Fuck Reddit.
I got banned for what I thought was a nuanced and well sourced take on the Ukrainian famine. They called me a genocide denier and also shadow banned me from r/news
r/HistoryMemes is a cryptofash shithole that will ban you for anything on Ukrainian famine that's not maximalist Goebbels propaganda
I got banned from so many subs during that timeframe by making good faith arguments that didn't coincide with moderator narratives. It was literally like I was being followed.
Yeah, r/nottheonion has more care to accuracy to world news than worldnews.
Playing both the "China bad" and "Something 'Chinese' in the USA couldn't possibly be the feds" cards at the same time must be exhausting I imagine.
tbh it baffles me more that this ivy league moron spends her days sitting around discussing subs named "ReallyWackyTicTacs" or whatever. a true asset for the intelligence apparatus
Yes, and you don't need an Ivy League "expert" to identify that fact.
it is, that fact solidifies her position as basically an immenesly overpaid 4chan mod.
They keep moving the URL around, if it changes again, just look up the following document for context regarding her past employment:
"CIA-RDP88B00443R000100550001-3.pdf"
CIA-RDP88B00443R000100550001-3.pdf
where is this document actually located? I can't find it with a web search.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88B00443R000100550001-3.pdf
Communism is actually in opposition to capitalism, fascism is just a distasteful form of capitalism.
That's why our leaders get murdered by the CIA while theirs get elected, or at least treated with kid gloves.
not many people know this, but CIA stands for Capitalism Insurance Agency
Yep, and the fascists breaking the leash and getting too upjumped in WW2 was just an auto-immune disease from an overactive immune system
We are the wasp eggs in the dying corpse of capitalism. We will consume it, seize it and be born out of it into something new
Buzzzzz
fascism is just a distasteful form of capitalism.
It isn't simply a question of Communism versus Capitalism. Individuals still want to be at the top of the heap. Fascism is a manifestation of conflict among capitalists as much as between capitalists and communists.
"Some ideologies are inherently more violent than others," she said, sitting in a chair on land stolen from indigenous people and stained with their blood, "Manifest Destiny never hurt anyone and capitalism is fully ethical."
2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet
Are ya winning, son?
I think the paid mods are ducktappers, because they ostensibly care about the reputation of and participation in the community. They likely have more on their plates than a single subreddit and they're upwardly focused, so they don't really give a shit about this job long term. They want things clean and sterile and soy.
The unpaid mods are the goons. They're just in the game for the thrill of power. They don't actually care about the reputation of the sub and would be perfectly happy with a handful of lackeys to shoot the shit. They spend way too many hours a day sanding the edges of their little fief to make it pretty. Half of them would just slip into catatonia if Reddit ever shut down.
I'm really hoping Jessica's Hexbear account is a really spicy plot twist to close out the second act (federation). Like if she were a famous poster that would go pretty hard. We'd have a big schism and argue all the time about how the CIA is funny actually. From the two fragments of the old Hexbear website a poster lord is awakened and becomes Martin Luther/Karl Marx 2.0 and unleashes a communist Ragnarok. Jessica's role would be akin to that CP0 agent in One Piece
Originally by @Civility@hexbear.net
Civility, how do you feel now years later about the situation with their abuse of the mods going down? I feel like they've been slowly targeting any leftist ideologies, or more specifically, any ideologies that hurt US-oligarchs.
Edit: Also, please see the article she linked to. "She," or whomever runs the account, took it down VERY quickly after a negative comment arose. Her original quote seems...........slightly racist
From the ashes we will be reborn.
Not as a Phoenix. But as a dirty fucking owl.
Good thing now reddit is only filled with non toxic Nazi War Mongering Ghouls who want to declare war against the whole world because they don't comply with the US. 😊
But dont forget they also want the End Of All Wars Ever because Ukraine. But it HAS to start with Ukraine. Or else they wont do it. This century we're putting an End To Violence while there's still a global bureaucracy shutting down protests.
There's still no actual evidence she's CIA. She obviously has shady government links, and is mired in awful political connections, why the superfluous CIA assertion? These kind of things only serve to make the actual story less credible.
you mean beyond last working for a CIA front org, getting hired to reddit with no relevant experience, and then going after leftist communities?
Is there any actual evidence that shows the Atlantic Council is a CIA front? This is the crux of my point. As I said, obvious shady government connections which can easily explain these.
Does a link directly to the pertinent image work for you?
https://archive.is/tgXRb/66db743718e9277d76256a497f02785d141f979d/scr.png
Certain antivirus software seems to have been blocking the archive sites for no good reason. I assume the real reason is because those sites are the easiest way to bypass paywalls.
Thank you, but nah, everything on archive.is just leads me to a looping captcha page. Looks like poorly put together DDoS protection.
they move the link around so archive is more reliable but direct link is here https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88B00443R000100550001-3.pdf
The atlantic council is a cia front funded by the cia and nato, which she worked at, did you miss this?
It's obviously a shitty organisation with shady links to all sorts of government things that enables war crimes. I'm just saying I can't see any good evidence for it being a CIA front, nor funded by CIA or NATO?
nor funded by CIA
NED is literally the CIA.
The nato funding it receives, like most nato funding for NGOs (that definitely aren't non-government), is laundered through Norway's ministry of foreign affairs.
That doesn't mean you can baselessly assert every organisation that does awful things and has shitty government connections that enable US foreign policy is CIA. I get they won't have a sign out front saying "CIA FRONT ORGANISATION", but without any actual evidence of direct links (and maybe there is evidence I missed?) it's just meaningless to assert it.
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