Tools like wordscounterbot and masstagger may be crude and yes, subjective, but they offer a reminder that the internet never forgets.Īmit Katwala is WIRED's culture editor.Opinion Joy Reid: Everyday racism is the small, daily reminders that we're still not equal But free speech doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want with no consequences. Reddit built some of its popularity on providing a semi-anonymous discussion platform – unlike Facebook or Twitter, few people use their real names, which emboldens them to speak more ‘freely’ than they might otherwise.
Split into subreddits, one front page could look completely different from the next, with all the content moderated by users themselves. The site was always prone to such echo chambers. But those users haven’t gone away – they’ve simply migrated to other, more private niches on the website – occasionally emerging to troll, or run organised raids on other subreddits. Reddit has forcefully tightened its community guidelines in recent months and clamped down on a number of subreddits where hate speech was rampant, including pro-Trump subreddit The_Donald, which had more than 800,000 subscribers. This is where users intentionally troll other subreddits by pretending to agree with their point of view, but then engaging in bad faith and subtly undermining aspects of their arguments. “At some point, I found myself baited into an argument only to find out that my opponent was an active member of several (literal) Nazi subs,” they write on their website, explaining the genesis of the extension, which applies a coloured tag to members of certain ‘hate subreddits’ who may be engaged in so-called ‘concern trolling’. The ‘ masstagger’ extension for Chrome and Firefox was created two years ago by a user called ‘morpen’ – building on a previous version that had been around since 2013. “There are also imbeciles that spam comments the n words by commenting on spam posts to get a high ‘nwordcountbot score’.”Īs well as bots, redditors have also built browser extensions that can help them identify suspicious users. “People usually use it when they see someone say something "suspicious,” says its creator, alashow.
The new bot has been summoned almost 1,000 times in three months – sometimes to make a point during arguments about policing in America or politics, but often just as a joke. And so, in June 2020, a new bot – wordscounterbot appeared as its “officially endorsed” successor. But there was clearly a demand for the service.
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