Week in Review: June 22, 2016

Changes in Reddit Occur After the Orlando Shooting

Many people rely on Reddit for breaking news, but after last week’s shooting in Orlando, some readers felt their trust was broken. Normally, r/news provides readers with real-time breaking news, but this week an argument was brewing in the thread. Members of “the main Donald Trump subreddit,” r/The_Donald, believed that the moderators of the r/news thread “were unnecessarily censoring the discussion about the shooting,” including the information that Omar Mateen, the then-unidentified shooter, was a Muslim and information on blood drives. The Daily Beast reports that nearly 80,000 users left r/news and 11,712 new users joined r/The_Donald on Sunday after the alleged censorship. Members of the Donald Trump subreddit hurled accusations and insults at the moderators in the r/The_Donald forum The volume of these comments, many of which violated Reddit’s Terms of Service, elevated the subreddit to the top of r/all, which displays activity from the entire site. The massive wave of posts and responses arguing about the potential “censorship,” which crowded out much of the actual news posted to the site, illustrate an ongoing tension for Reddit between unlimited free expression and a more carefully moderated environment. Part of the issue is that the moderators are volunteers whose work is supplemented by an automated filter, or “automod,” which “was the culprit behind some of the more egregious post removals.” At the same time, the moderators admitted that there was some human error as well. The other part of the issue was that while people were trying to get news during the Orlando shooting, the Donald Trump subreddit dominated the r/all page. In response to this, “the firm has tweaked the algorithm it uses to display what’s on the r/all page.” Essentially, the more often people “from the same community” post excessively, the less likely their comments are to show up on the “r/all” thread. In a Washington Post article, Hayley Tsukayama notes that a problem like this “pits Reddit’s principles of free expression against its desire to moderate discussion.” The algorithm went into effect on last Thursday, but it remains to be seen if it will do enough to prevent this from happening in the future.

Blockchain for Governance and Social Good

Traditionally, people have used blockchain technology to support Bitcoin, but this week New America, The National Democratic Institute, and The Bitfury Group announced the Blockchain Trust Accelerator Initiative. The new initiative strives to “connect governments with technologists and funders to hasten the adoption of technology for social good and governance.” Although financial companies and venture capital firms have invested $1.2 billion into blockchain technology for financial purposes, there have not been nearly as many investments in using blockchain for other purposes. One of the proposed initiatives is a blockchain voting system, which could potentially stymie government corruption and prevent governments from changing election results. The first actual project will be a land titling system for the Republic of Georgia. Future developments will allow people to send proposals for new projects through a web portal system; proposals will be reviewed by the initiative’s board of directors. So far, the accelerator has attracted interest from many important institutions, including the White House. This effort will test whether or not blockchain can be technology successful in strengthening infrastructure throughout the world. For a refresher on how blockchain works and how it is used with Bitcoin, read here.

New Methods of Online Censorship in Russia

In an agreement signed on June 16, 2016, the Russian government gave Roskomnadzor, the arm of the