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First, I cannot stress enough how stupid this decision is. Blocking an entire country's online presence regardless of their individual circumstances? We noticed this behaviour exactly because our member cannot post any Russian anti-war materials, including "Open letter of Russian scientists and science journalists against the war with Ukraine", because guess what? .ru domain space are used by Russians.
Again, one cannot link any Russian material on Reddit, even if it's about history, culture, language, or science journal.
Second, why is the decision not communicated with mods beforehand? We are unaware that any submission and comments including Russian source materials have secretly been removed by Reddit, which sabotaged our effort to build an evidence-based discussion.
So many piracy sites gone in an instant. What a shame.
We decided to do this due to the heavy cyber component to this war and the chance of manipulated content. Even seemingly innocuous links could be hosted by someone that is less benign. We certainly recognize that this is a pretty far reaching decision but there are generally other ways for most people to share the type of content that is being described.
As to why this wasn't communicated, there is a lot of things going on right now and sometimes moving fast means missing steps along the way (like sharing with mods). We did not intend to hide this decision.
>want to fight misinfo
>recognise that a sub is full of misinfo
>allow it to stay up anyway
You saying that banning the .ru ccTLD is necessary due to "the chance of manipulated content" while knowing about manipulated content and not removing it makes no sense.
Indeed, /ukraine is full of propaganda
so you are only blocking domains that end with .ru?
what about those ending in .su, since Russia still uses that.
anyway that is not ideal because all it does is block sites/links which have setup their IP addresses to have resolvable names (reverse lookup to use the term of the old Internet greybeards).
A lot of companies / sites do not do that. If you truly wanted to block Russia, you need to get with ARIN and RIPE and determine all the IP blocks (both IPv4 and IPv6) assigned to Russia and the former Soviet Union and set your edge routers/firewalls to block them either via ASN or entire IP blocks... then and only then will you be truly blocking incoming traffic from that country.
(still won't stop VPN traffic, but that cannot be avoided unless Reddit wants to block every VPN provider)
I hope you guys also set the algo to ID downstream TLDs that use URL shorteners like Bitly, etc., to evade identifying TLDs (among other uses). I'm assuming you did as this isn't difficult, but just thought I'd ask.
Short links like that have been banned on reddit for a very long time. They can be approved by mods but I recommend against doing so - ask users to use full links so it's clear what the end destination is.
Oh I know that, but propagandists can be mods as well. ;)
I keep finding new short links being used by spammers. How do we report those?
We've reported shrinke me many times to no avail.
Right. Because everyone knows the bad guys stick to the .ru TLD. Could you have been any more lazy? Please let us know when Reddit is ready to actually take action to rid itself of manipulated content.
Back when I was a firewall admin I would find lots of .com addresses in Chinese or Russian IP spaces.
But when countries carry out cyberwarfare they don't do it from inside their own countries because their IP space can be identified. They'll set up shop elsewhere.
For example, one of the key propaganda sources, Russian state media RT uses
.com. I appreciate that Reddit is actually making an attempt for once but this is rather comically misguided.That's a surprisingly blunt instrument for combatting misinformation. I understand it as a short term measure in an emergency, but I hope reddit has a more sophisticated response in mind.
they do not, because this is about punishing russians for putin's crimes and nothing else.
Yes I'm sure all anyone is worried about right now is if Russians can share certain links on a single American website without a shortener
The single greatest crime of our time!
Any smart Russian Troll would specifically avoid Russian URLs and most use fake accounts and pretend to be people from other countries.
A decision like this could hurt innocent Russian civilians who are actually pro-peace.
that is precisely the reason the entire American bourgeoisie have decided to break the geneva convention and collectively punish all russians by cutting them off from the rest of the world. can't encourage russophobia under the excuse of hating putin, and prepare support for world war, if we all learn that the russian people are rebelling against putin. so cut them off from the internet so we can imagine them as a homogenous enemy.
war forever! profits forever!
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I thought you were lying, but then I went through that post
Then where is the official announcement?
There is nothing on either r/announcements, r/blog, r/modhelp, r/modnews, r/modsupport or r/redditsecurity.
Yes let's make sure to keep propaganda spammers in the loop with advanced notice. Totally smart
I'm sure this will really win the information war and not muddy the waters at all.
The problem with banning an entire ccTLD is that now any sort of any official reporting on Russian actions can't be linked to or sourced properly. For example, say their central bank takes an action like banning XYZ or forcing ZYX as they have done in recent days. How are people supposed to link to that?
Even reputable news sources do, in some part, report that "Russian state media Interfax or whatever says this" and hiding the initial source is just weird and can cause errors in interpretation (and likely already has). I'm not saying Ifx is reputable, far from it, but not knowing what is said is... weird.
This is not even considering the just completely non-war related stuff like another moderator below mentioned.
As if these "less benign" entities don't have access to other top level domains?
In fact, the odds are much greater that disinformation or malicious content would be published at every other TLD except .ru sites since a .ru domain is a red flag to any functional adult with half a brain.
I don't doubt Reddit staff had good intentions, but this decision is one of the dumber ones they have ever made...
This is an atrocious non-solution. The overwhelming majority of sites with .ru domains have nothing to do with the invasion, and most of the pro-Invasion disinformation spread on reddit doesn't even use .ru domains in the first place. You can block specific websites (ex RT) connected with the Russian government and distribution of disinformation without banning 95%+ of all Russia-based websites.
Look at GenZedong for instance, an explciitly pro-totalitarian, pro-Putin, genocide denying subreddit which actively brigades other subreddits to spread pro-Putin misinformation and which you frankly should have banned years ago. Virtually every post and comment there links to a 'western' sites like Imgur, Twitter, or Reddit itself, even r/russia. If you want to fight misinformation, ban users and subreddits who spread misinformation--don't ban links to innocuous websites.
What "other ways to share the type of content that is being described" do you propose? For full context, I am one of the moderators for r/russian -- I am a US citizen, who happens to be a native Russian speaker with Russian Jewish and Ukrainian Jewish roots, thoroughly opposed to the war. Our sub is apolitical and we explicitly remove all political content and immediately ban users who distribute it.
For instance, today I tried sharing a page from grammar dot ru that describes in great detail when the use of genitive case or the accusative case is necessary with negated verbs. Copying and pasting the entirety of that page would be a blatant violation of copyright, the amount of content there is well beyond fair use. I tried sharing an archive.org version of the page -- that got blocked just as well. Am I supposed to print the page to PDF and host it on my own dime? What do you suggest?
Might be time to get the
pigeons.comout.It's a good thing that there are absolutely no ways to post manipulative content on other TLDs!
Thank y'all for both doing it, and for the speedy reply.
Ha, the irony of a reddit admin accusing anyone, even fucking RUSSIA, of manipulated content.
But hey, thinks for taking time away from forcing subs you want to control to add certain power mods to tell us this.
you suck
This post should be notice enough, and the policy is also in the best interest of the Russians in question- they would be well advised to find alternative methods of making such publications, considering a 15 year prison sentence for said material is about to be rubber stamped by the Russian parliament.
sorry, i can't hear you over the sound of bootlicking
Sorry, I can't hear you over the cliche bullshit that contributes nothing to the conversation, troll.
this is such a stupid decision. you've decided to join all the other american companies in applying collective punishment against russians, a literal war crime under the geneva convention. should american websites be banned by the rest of the world because your politicians are the only assholes who ever used a nuclear bomb? because they raped vietnam? and afghanistan? and iraq? and libya? and syria? should every american be banned from the internet because your country literally destroyed almost every country on earth at least once?
and the worst part of all this garbage? russians are protesting against putin and you are punishing them for it.
none of these idiotic attacks on russian people are going to hurt putin, not one. all you are doing is making life harder for working class russians who oppose this war.
This is a ridiculous hyperbole, a private company deciding to not host links that end in a specific TLD is not "a collective punishment". While you may have a point there somewhere, people would be far more receptive about it if you stuck to arguments that are actually truthful.
The fact he's all over these comments complaining is proof enough it's got them rattled and is working as intended
let's not pretend these companies aren't doing it on instructions from state actors, we're not naive.
also, i'm a palestinian who opposes the blanket boycott of israel on the same grounds. you may not care that the geneva convention found collective punishment of populations as a war tactic so heinous that they banned it, but i do, and i'm consistent in my objections to it.
You don't get to make that kind of statements with zero proof.
Let me reiterate, a decision in moderating content on a website is not "a collective punishment of a population" as detailed under the Geneva conventions. Maybe you should read up on what has historically constituted as collective punishments because equating Reddit's actions here to that is downright insulting to the people who've had to genuinely suffer through that.
This stupidity is on level of antimaskers crying about being taken to concentration camps and it's not making you look good.
7 years too late, frankly.
Realize that your decision to ban all Russian domains have meant that any native effort to identify or dispel Russian disinformation, misinformation and/or false narratives on Reddit, with links to specific examples thereof, are almost certainly ensnared by that censorship.
I've already identified one case that affected me directly, and I'm sure there are and will continue to be more.
I encourage the admins to reflect on Jeff Goldblum's wisdom from Jurassic Park:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRNX6XJOeGU
Those are significantly less common than the disinformation itself. If you are directly removing a huge source of disinformation, who cares about the small amount of anti-disinformation going with it?
By that logic, we might as well just shut down the entire internet and all social media of any kind.
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Reddit almost certainly has cybersecurity experts informing their decision (fuck, they might even have the CIA), so I assume they're considered your position and decided it was worth the tradeoff.
This is a censorship, not a cybersecurity issue.
That's funny, but improbable.
Reddit just explicitly said it's a cybersecurity issue, and unlike most times they say things, they didn't get downvoted to oblivion. Are you saying they're lying and everyone's extremely gullible?
"Experts" funded by the oil and war machines no doubt. Look at the Atlantic Council for example.
Then why not also ban all users from Russian and Belarusian IP addresses? How many users are from Russian and Belarusian Troll factories.
And how do we report suspicious users.
You need to add .by for Belarus.
This blocks all information from .ru, most of which isn't propaganda while doing nothing about the rest of the internet that is still available to spread it. This is simple-minded wishful thinking.
Reddit moment is when you think Russians and Ukrainians will be browsing Reddit in the middle of a conflict.
Many western social media have put restrictions on Russian public broadcasters, but none of them have tried to wipe the entire Russian web space from Internet, Reddit is the first one doing so.
Russian people have contributed countless pages and knowledge to the Internet, and these treasures belong to people all over the world.
Are you really opposing Putin and his dictatorship, or are you just opposing the Russian people in its entirety?
Reddit moment is when a rando from across the globe decides how other people should or shouldn't use the internet.
Reddit moment is being stupid enough to not look at the front page of reddit, where several Ukrainians have posted videos of things happening in their city.
An even bigger Reddit moment is to not realize that Russia has a massive cyber warfare department that is looking to be as disruptive as possible. It's trivial for them to create a .ru domain or link to an existing .ru domain with a malicious file or content.
Even if you don't live in Ukraine, they are happy to infect your computer to use as a botnet to attack Ukraine infrastructure or those assisting them.
This is a pretty huge action, but based upon everything currently happening in the Cyber environment it's a no brainer to do.
It would be trivial for them to create a domain in any other TLD and host malicious files or content, too.
In fact, if I were to host a suspicious file, I explicitly wouldn't host it on a .ru domain.
Sure, but everything in security is attack surface reduction. This is one less avenue that they can use.
You will have to be a very stupid cracker to use your own domain for such a thing. The key way in that security works is by exploiting user AND sysadmin mistakes. Exploiting a compromised server to host something malicious is a much more common technique, because it's a lot more effective, plus being safer for the attacker.
My work (an important hospital) has blocked any connection from Russia or Ukraine because of the cyber warfare they are conducting. This is a lot bigger than communication.
That's standard netsec. No need to have huge log files of script kiddie level penetration attempts.
Blocking sus countries won't stop a dedicated attacker but you're going to have a better chance of an attack being noticed without gigs of noise in log files.
Russia has been extremely active in a propaganda war on reddit, trying to make it look like that terrorist nation isn't at fault for them committing war crimes.
Russia isn't a legitimate nation, and we don't need their propaganda
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Have you even looked at reddits proof of russian propaganda accounts that they published some time ago?
A bunch of 3 karma accounts that never went anywhere at all.
People don't need a Russian for inspiration on insane believes and conspiracies.
All you need is a few of them pushing the same message to be effective in a thread.
I've seen fox news push things that were proven months in advance to vp Russia created propaganda, I've also seen accounts with 1 mill +karma banned site wide for it.
Maybe you're just bad at playing cover
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What's intolerable about that? There are plenty of nations that are terrorists, it's not even controversial.
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Our top post right now is an image supporting Ukraine, are you saying the Ukraine government is paying us to shill?
Your top post is about a cat.
Nah. Israel showed photoshopped footage of Star Wars as pro Ukraine. A solid 30% of images and videos floating around (on reddit) have been either doctored or are from completely unrelated incidents in the past, and none get removed.
Like, go Ukraine and everything, but to claim that this is about "the chance of manipulated content" is just a blatant lie. You're staunchly anti Russia, which is commendable, but you're just as guilty of propaganda as they are. At least be honest about it.
Also, a post takes about 30 seconds to type up. If your entire admin team can't take 30 seconds amongst all of them to send a heads up, consider hiring more people.
Right now the chance that content from a .ru domain is misinformation has skyrocketed. So, given this sudden change, they've responded. That's not favouring one side, it's seeing a low-hanging opportunity to reduce misinformation and jumping on it. I support less misinformation on Reddit.
The admins aren't a single team. The people that made the content decision didn't communicate to the community management team that they needed to make a post. Siloing responsibilities like this makes sense as teams grow (ironically, this growth happens through hiring). Most likely, everyone on the team thought someone else sent that message. Transparently banning domains is rare enough that their procedures around it are probably not very evolved so things like this naturally slip through the cracks.
The chance of disinformation from virtually any other source is equally likely, given the sheer amount that I've personally seen in the last two weeks. It cannot and should not be seen as anything less than sheer political bias. Which I am not against, as I originally stated, so long as the admin team is honest about it. Their current, apparent official statement, is an objective lie.
With regard to the communication chain, someone, at some level, made the decision to ban .ru posts. That individual, who apparently has authority to change the functioning of the entire reddit platform, should be singularly responsible for either directly communicating that, or explicitly delegating that task. This lack of communication is amateur at best, and should not happen to a company of Reddit's size. It's absurd to me that you, or anyone else admit that "the people that made the content decision didn't communicate to the community management team that they needed to make a post," and think that acceptable management behavior from one of the largest social media platforms in the world.
I'm 100% fine with reddit banning .ru links, but the way they handled it, and their reasons for doing so, should be inexcusable.
It's a free platform they owe us nothing.
I found out when a user told me they were trying to make a post about the Paralympics. Reddit is more concerned with this nonsense than properly performing background checks on their employees.
Or sending physical awards to content creators of child pornography, or ignoring police requests for information regarding death threats, or any of dozens upon dozens of other issues the site experiences. It's like they've put no investment into common sense or community outreach. Their mobile platform is difficult at best, and their support is effectively zero, and we've seen firsthand that they don't have enough employees to handle issues, so I'm honestly not sure where they allocate capex. I'd love to see a breakdown though.
It sucks, because I feel like, and I'm sure you agree, my individual community is awesome, and the reality is that I'll never leave because of them. But the admin, top down leadership is genuinely the worst of any social media platform I've worked with.
I also feel they need to be focusing on strengthening their infrastructure, and the fact we are still having ongoing server concerns and daily technical errors. However, they're more worried about a disability article that just happens to end in r and u.
This text overwrites whatever was here before. Apologies for the non-sequitur.
Reddit's CEO says moderators are “landed gentry”. That makes users serfs and peons, I guess? Well this peon will no longer labor to feed the king. I will no longer post, comment, moderate, or vote. I will stop researching and reporting spam rings, cp perverts and bigots. I will no longer spend a moment of time trying to make reddit a better place as I've done for the past fifteen years.
In the words of The Hound, fuck the king. The years of contributions by your serfs do not in fact belong to you.
reddit's claims debunked + proof spez is a fucking liar
see all the bullshit
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This text overwrites whatever was here before. Apologies for the non-sequitur.
Reddit's CEO says moderators are “landed gentry”. That makes users serfs and peons, I guess? Well this peon will no longer labor to feed the king. I will no longer post, comment, moderate, or vote. I will stop researching and reporting spam rings, cp perverts and bigots. I will no longer spend a moment of time trying to make reddit a better place as I've done for the past fifteen years.
In the words of The Hound, fuck the king. The years of contributions by your serfs do not in fact belong to you.
reddit's claims debunked + proof spez is a fucking liar
see all the bullshit
Reddit doesn't want you to know that Russians also want peace, Reddit doesn't want you to know that Russians are also opposing Putin, Reddit doesn't want to see people of two nations united against oppressors.
Reddit wants you to keep hating Russian people, Reddit wants Russian people to be isolated and alienated, Reddit wants to keep Putin in power, Reddit wants the conflict to last forever.
Weird because I've seen quite a bit of content to the contrary on Reddit. Is someone at Reddit wringing their hands in frustration because those pesky Redditors keep posting all that awful content?
Those are very serious accusations and I would like you to either provide us with a source or shut up.
Why the fuck would Reddit want that?
citation needed
Were you given orders from a nation state to do this? Was it major shareholders? Wall Street?
Who is giving these orders?
How many times in the past have we "cleansed" things in the name of 'safety and security'?
It is very consequential, this segregating of the world community.
Who are these Hands of God with their writing on the Wall?
This type of thing breaks the Tower of Babel, the internet. Which will result in a more hostile world. Do they want borders drawn on the internet like we have physical and economic borders too?
It isn't just Reddit, but we are seeing this all over. Immediate.
I fear we are in the midst of a 3rd Red Scare.
Pretty cool way to choke out the remnants of Russian independent sources on this website! Well done, you guys. Playing directly into the regime’s hands with this. Incredible.
While I'm fairly certain you've got notifications for this post turned off for this one, I'd like to share my view.
First, a question: is this retroactive? ie: will all links to .RU domains no longer be visible or removed?
We have a web game developer who's Russian. He has his own domain. We can no longer link to his games for people who are looking for them. The games are apolitical, being focussed entirely in numbers incrementing eternally upward.
RT - mouthpiece for Putin's government, has a .com domain. I can link to that bollocks all day long.
What, precisely, were you thinking?
Are comments posting ru domains allowed?
It is very disappointing decision. We in r/RussianFootball use a lot of links at Russian sources.
As a Russia resident I have to fight our gov that blocks Twitter and Facebook and other social important services, has to fight sanctions which block VISA/MasterCard and other services for us, and now I have to seek how to fight this one more obstacle on the way to free communication.
Basically screams, "this site is for babies".
The proper response to negative speech is to counter it with positive expression. It derives from the theory that audiences, or recipients of the expression, can weigh for themselves the values of competing ideas and, hopefully, follow the better approach.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis established it in his classic concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927), when he wrote:
“If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
This is horrendous censorship of the worst kind. This is the stifling of speech with the idea that reddit is another arm of the US State Dept's and Ukrainian MOD's info war. Not only is this ineffective as Russia's information will get disseminated via other routes, but you also will have limited understanding of you "enemy."
And being as blunt as this is, it reminds me of the amateur administration of the likes of Chairman Mao who during the Cultural Revolution also gave blanket rules like everyone going on vacation resulting in deaths when doctors, hospital workers and others did so. There are thousands of sites not related to the war that could be combating poverty, human trafficking, natural disasters, differential math, etc, and they are all banned because they are Russian? I mean this borders on xenophobic racism. And if there is some earthquake in Russia, and thousands die tragically should Russian sites on that topic be banned, too? Moreover, who knows how long this war last. If by next summer it doesn't end or if Russia "wins," are ru sites banned forever? That's literally worse than than the authoritarian Chinese Communist party that only bans specific cites like the NYT and Facebook because they don't like the narrative those specific institutions.