chapotraphouse

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.