Endless Thread - Turning Hate Into Humor

Episode Date: September 28, 2018

An elite unit of trolls is engaged in an existential battle against hate speech on the internet. This is their story.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. Quick heads up. It's not like we treat you guys with kid gloves by any stretch of the imagination. We do put swears into our podcast episodes for sure, but this episode has a little extra explicit language in it, and it deals with some pretty adult subjects. So, fair warning.

Emery, do you remember the very beginning? Of time? No, I don't. No, the popularizing of the Internet. It was a time of big dreams, of wide-eyed hope, a time of television anchors just talking about stuff that they didn't know very much about. That little mark with the A and then the ring around it.

At? See, that's what I said. Katie said she thought it was about. Yeah. Oh. But I've never heard it. Or around. I've never heard of it.

You know what's sad about it? this? What? This sounds like me. It sounds like... It sounds like us. It sounds like my ignorance about the internet.

So this is when people were like, this is going to change everything, right? And it did. But not really in the way we thought. At least, not exactly. Case in point. Vice President Gore on Wednesday said he'd to foresee the day

when a youngster just home from school, given a choice between Nintendo and the Encyclopedia Britannica, would choose to access the encyclopedia If that is so The Encyclopedia online The Encyclopedia Britannica Maybe a youngster would pick that over Nintendo

Not definitely That didn't happen No definitely not Okay but I have something even better than that You ready? What could be better than that? This Interactive appetite searching for a website

A window to the world got to get online Take a spin now you're in with a techno set You're going surfing on the internet Where did that come from? This is actually a commercial for the internet, which apparently was a thing in the heady days of the 1990s. Because how else would you know to go on the internet? Exactly.

And let's fast forward here now, Amory, to the year of Our Lord 2018, when the most popular imagery regarding the internet seems to be a dumpster on fire. And even the people who created some of the popular parts of the internet as we know it today are acknowledging said dumpster fire. Here's Twitter's Jack Dorsey. Politics Twitter tends to be pretty divisive and it tends to be pretty contentious and you see a lot of outrage and you see a lot of unhealthy debate that you probably want to walk away from. Man, he sounds sad. So sad. And I suppose that's because there are a lot of dumpster fires on the internet.

And you really don't have to look hard to find some dicey stuff. Political, sexual, the whole spectrum. Here's an example of a guy we found on Reddit named Brad. My Reddit name is PM me or Titsgirl. I am from Colorado. Yes, you heard Brad's Reddit username right. PM, as in personal message, aka Reddit's version of email, etc. It's supposedly a joke.

He isn't actually trying to get girls to send him photos of them top of them. Which might be hard to believe when you ask Brad to tell you the list of the subreddit communities he now controls as top moderator. Some of the subredits that I've taken over are fat pussy, pocket pussy, wet pussy, pussy pics, pussy gifts, small pussy, shaved pussy, white pussy, black pussy, hot pussy, guys with huge pussy, skinny pussy, skinny pussy, tiny pussy, chubby pussy. And that is it. That is quite the list. It is. But if you type in one of these communities, you don't actually see anything that isn't safe for work.

you see photos of cats. Cats on cats on cats. So the latest one is hot pussy, which is basically it's going to be cats in front of heaters, fireplaces, windows, cats in warm places. But Brad isn't just a person who loves cats and jokes about the female anatomy, though. Well, maybe he is?

Maybe he is. But Brad also used this phrase taken over when describing these communities. Because while he might love pussycat jokes, Brad is also part of something that appears to be gaining momentum. A fight to lay claim over digital spaces and to prevent the growth of communities that encourage hateful or offensive behavior, online and in real life.

And we're going to talk about this specifically in regards to Reddit, because as Reddit goes, so goes the larger Internet, and vice versa. Also, because we got to talk to several members of what appears to be a group of elite, badass Internet users at the vanguard of these efforts on Reddit. a group of people who are trying to put out dumpster fires before they get out of control by taking over subredits and turning them from cesspools of bad stuff into funny stuff. And while they're definitely doing this for the lulls, it goes a little bit deeper than that.

Emery, what's the Smokey the Bear motto? Only you can prevent dumpster fires? Something like that. I have an idea for the title of this episode. It's about subredits and taking them over in the name of decency and humor. Hit me. The League of Extraordinary Trolls. Nice. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you are listening to Endless Thread,

the show featuring stories from the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it is made. I'm here with my co-host, Amory Severson, and we are coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. Amory, let's do like a Reddit and Internet lingo refresher. Is that cool? Yep. Yeah, because we don't always define this stuff or talk about it.

length. Are you ready? Ready. Okay. Sub. Stands for subreddit. It's a community on Reddit. Okay. Ding, mod. Stans for moderator. It's someone who oversees a community. Ding, admin. Stans for administrator, and it's someone who kind of oversees the mods and everything. Ding, email.

An electronic message sent through the waves of the internet. We're surfing on the internet. I think we should talk about this question. that's been plaguing us about today's episode, though. The question of, are we supposed to be doing this? Like, we get serious on endless thread, and we get sad, and we definitely get nerdy. But are we going to march into the inner workings of subreddits? Are we going to get dark, like dumpster fire dark?

I think eventually we kind of have to, because any place that truly reflects the real world on the internet has some dumpster fires. and if we are going to pretend that Reddit doesn't have dumpster fires, we wouldn't be really doing our job, which is to find all kinds of good stories on Reddit. Some of those good stories are going to be about dumpster fires and about the people who try to put those fires out. Which is why we want to introduce you to Drewie Poodle.

Hi, I'm Drewie Poodle on Reddit. Drewie is a super Reddit user and a trans woman with a doozy of a life story. And where are you from? How much time do you have? I was born in Singapore. Okay. Went to the Army there. And went to school there, graduated, came here to the U.S., started working, then stayed, got married.

So you were in the Army in Singapore? Yeah. You really haven't lived life until you've actually tried to cross a river filled with crocodiles and people on either bank with loaded M16's looking out for you. Like almost any other trans person, a lot of us just join because it would be easier to die in the service of your country than it is to come out. I just signed up for the most, you know, the unit that had the most training accidents, let's say.

Singapore is a lot of things. What it isn't is conducive to life for any queer person. This unit that Druey was in is called the Singapore Guard. It is no joke. Elite, versatile, focused on combat. Next time, the volume is not out to standard. This will be the only way you will do your warm-up. Clear.

Also, Drouy purposely got into a river with crocodiles, which means she knows about dangerous situations. I figured if I died in that service, I wouldn't have to go through the rest of, you know, life figuring out how to leave. So, but I lived through that. And the next step was basically coming over here. I got a student visa, came over here. By the time I got here, I was like 24.

I thought it was too late to transition. So I figured, eh, I'll just party as hard as I can. And I was kind of like a lot of other trans people. I didn't expect to hit 30. Can I ask you how old you are now? I'm 46. I came out when I was 39. We call it second puberty because it's literally going through puberty again.

Your body's trying to get used to these new hormones. I literally have the sex drive of a teenager, and it's driving me nuts in this middle-aged body. Tell me a little bit about how you came to Reddit. I came, like almost any other trans person, there's a support sub I moderate now, call our ass transgender. And that's pretty much the first stop for almost everybody. A lot of the other posts that we deal with are for cries for help. And there are a lot of like suicide posts there, at least like one a day.

This tells you a little bit about where Druey is coming from. She has a personal experience of being in a marginalized group. And she's also seen the fallout of that online. And at a certain point, Drouy became aware of some misinformation that was being spread about trans people on parts of Reddit. She wanted to help stop the spread of bad info, so she tried to locate the source. Which kind of led me into the hate subs, right? It was just like there were a couple of anti-trans subreddits.

They were called Kuntan and Transfags. And they were essentially a cesspool of hate. Kuntan was anti-black, but again, they hated queers equally. Transfags obviously used to follow all the posts. on all the trans subreddits and they posted, you know, snippets and they would twist our words? Drewie found terrible stuff.

And we should say that the two subredits she just mentioned got straight up banned by Reddit administrators for running afoul of the site's rules. But there are others. Some fall into this gray area. Subreddit's built around offensive topics but that are kind of abandoned.

Still others that aren't anything yet, but could be a thing in the future. Think of it almost like, like how people buy website domain names or grab Twitter handles and then squat on them either so that they can profit or so they can prevent them from being used for nefarious purposes. Right. And then there are other communities where the moderators have been stripped of privileges for bad behavior. And in the vacuum, other people, like Druey, can swoop in and request moderator powers over the subreddit. So there's a small window where there's a chance for you to actually

step in and if you have a good idea, you know, use your troll power for good and not evil, then the chances are they'll give it to you. So I just wrote a really funny post, requesting our faggots and telling them I would turn it into a sub that was all about bundles of sticks. Drewie had this plan to retake ownership of the word by making the subreddit about its less offensive definitions, bundles of sticks, cigarettes. a better way to troll the trolls than to actually take over those subs that they've, you know, that they use for hate.

This trolling for good seems like another version of Drouy swimming with crocodiles. But she's not the only one waiting into dangerous waters. She's part of a unit. A unit of internet badasses. Many of them trans women. Hi, I'm Penny Okin. I go by Bard Finn on Reddit.

Penny saw what Druey was doing, and enlisted. I said, let's do this. Let's make it so that this completely subverts the expectations of anybody who visits this subreddit. There's going to be a lot of people who have a lot of hatred in their heart who type in this URL, and we did. Penny's been involved in a number of other takeovers since then.

There's trannies, which became transmission-oriented about automotive transmission. Also, white rights. which used to be a white supremacist subreddit, but now it's about different shades of white. And whether or not Eggshell is technically a white paint color. Eggshell, by the way, totally not white. I agree. I actually agree. And Penny says this type of humor serves a very specific purpose.

Every hate group, every fascist movement, they all tend to gravitate around a narrative that they have a purpose. And that by doing these things, they are fulfilling this mythical purpose. And the very best thing you can do is to puncture their balloon, show how they're ridiculous, show how they're funny, lampoon them. Do exactly what Mel Brooks did with Hitler in The Producers. The Producers. You know, that 60s film that became a stage musical,

that became a film of a stage musical starring Nathan Lane, as Hitler. The show is about two guys who come up with a highly offensive Nazi-themed musical designed to flop that is a hit when it is mistaken for satire. And in a second, in an instant, just snap, he goes from serious mythological figure to entirely camp. Gay, nelly, complete stereotype. I'll

myself to me the crowd who's out to change our history I'll myself raise your hand there's no greater dictator in the land

I think Penny's point here is that even though this elite team of Redditors is using humor their larger mission is much more serious They want to take power away from people promoting hate. That is what we aim to do is to put in front of people that kind of moment where they can look at anybody that they have set on a pedestal that is spewing hate. And we want them to laugh at them because as soon as they laugh at them, that's the moment at which they change their mind. This is a really important point to get.

Before the takeover, a subreddit might have long lists of pictures or videos of LGBTQ people or people of color being attacked, or articles from dubious news sites encouraging hate, or maybe it's crude, misogynistic pornography. You don't even need to look at the comments to see that what happens in these places is ugly. And a lot of the stuff that gets posted in these communities once they are taken over, the pussycat jokes, the bundles of sticks, even the infamous suburbies. Reddit for the white nationalist website Stormfront being turned into innocuous information about extreme weather patterns.

Such a good one. It all may be humorous or absurd, but it's also a form of activism. And sometimes it works. Here's Drewie again. I've gotten PMs from people direct messages that said, hey, you know, it's like, thanks for that post. You actually, instead of yelling, I mean, you actually explained it enough that I can kind of, you know, I've changed my mind.

like, I'm sorry for the hate. And I've had quite a few of those. People like Druey and Penny are in what they consider to be an existential battle. Their group is small, but fierce and committed. One more person we talked to who's fighting this battle

is Melinda Brown of North Carolina, known on Reddit as T. Dumsford. I don't mind linking my real name to my Reddit name. I don't care. I was doxed a long time ago. Yes, doxing. one of our terms we hadn't really gotten to yet, Amory? It's the thing where people post your personal information online,

like where you live, what you do, so that hordes can then harass you or worse. I'm a trans woman. I'm 48 years old, and I spend most of my time on Reddit fighting against hate speech, and I'm very active in activism in real life as well. Melinda's life story is her own, But the challenges she has faced may sound familiar.

I grew up in Charlotte. I'm a pretty stereotypical queer childhood. I didn't have a lot of friends. I got beat up a lot, you know, the usual. But it wasn't really until a couple years ago that I started transition, that I felt completely comfortable and happy with myself. And that's when life began to sort of turn a corner. but leading up to that point, I don't know, I'd had a divorce,

and that's sort of what threw me into that tailspin, and I realized that, you know what, you're going to have to fix this, because I'm not going down without a fight. Part of Melinda's way of fighting was finding the trans community on Reddit, and Reddit, she clearly loves. I mean, there's awesome stuff on there. You can learn about dinosaurs and horticulture, and, I mean, all kinds of things.

It's great. The good out-neutral. numbers the bad. There's a lot of like political subredits that aren't hateful that don't align with my audiologies. And I view them because I don't want to live in an echo chamber. I'm distinguishing between the actual hatred. I mean, sometimes you can't hear the good because the bad is so damn loud. Because the bad is so damn loud, Melinda has become focused on subreddit takeovers. She's part of this elite force. I'd say there's a cohort of about 20 of us who are people. plugged into social justice, we're not all queer, but a lot of us are.

Melinda is a little bit unique, though, because while a lot of these takeovers are about simple requests for abandoned or yet to be claimed hateful communities, Melinda has gone undercover, infiltrated hateful communities to try to take them over from the inside, like a Trojan horse. Take, for example, the subreddit slut justice, which Melinda says used to be all about, quote unquote, slut shaming. It was created by someone who I was aware of, and I literally just asked the guy, hey, could I mod here? And he was like, yeah, okay.

Melinda was part of the subreddit moderator's private conversations. And she says she tried to keep a low profile while participating enough in the chatter as to fit in behind enemy lines. It's often a waiting game because these users will break the rules. And then slowly but surely, because they're horrible people, all their account, started getting banned until I was the last one standing. But the content that we wiped when we took it over was horrible. I mean, it was just horrible, you know, and we just deleted everything.

And then we started posting body positivity and stuff like that. And it made the old subscriber base who used to post the hateful content, it made them so mad. And that's where they start accusing us of being the real. real bad guy, he calls we hate free speech. We don't hate free speech. We don't hate anybody. We just won't tolerate hate. And if people want to spin this narrative that their speech is sacrosanct and what we're doing is horrible and terrible, I can't help them. I'm not going to change their minds. And I'm not going to try to. And, you know, I mean, if someone comes into your living room and starts ranting about black people or gay people or something, you're going

to throw them out of your house. And I don't understand why Reddit doesn't do that. Throw them out. You know? Get rid of them. This is a fair question. So you know what's next, right? We figured we should talk to our partners in making this show. Reddit, about subreddit takeovers. That's coming up in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out. about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human. voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent, reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative

studio. Christine, do me a favor and do what we call a self-ID. So who you are and what you do. I'm Christine Molenbent and I'm a community manager at Reddit. What does that mean? So the best way that I can think of to describe my job is that I'm a bridge between the community and my company. So I bring the concerns of the community to the appropriate teams at my company. And then I explain the company thinking back to my community. So I help my community where they need help and I shit posts with them whenever possible.

Oh, can I say shitpost on public radio? Yes, you definitely can. Yay! How did you first learn about how some Redditors are taking part in this idea of like taking over and changing the nature of hateful subreddits? So I kind of found out about it right when I joined Reddit. I think the first one that I came across was R-slash faggots right when the request came in to transfer that over. What is the conversation? How do you decide on how to allow or whether to allow a subreddit takeover? Sure. So we actually have, we have a whole process for this and we have an entire subreddit for it called our Reddit request.

Yep. You can petition to take over a subreddit. And in order to take it over, the subreddit pretty much has to be orphaned. And then we review the person making the request. And if we feel the request is being made in good faith, then we will go ahead and transfer the subreddit over. We'll remove any dormant mods that are there, and then we'll add the new person on. How would you describe Reddit's approach when it comes to policing things like hate speech or moderating things like hate speech on the site? That's got to be a tricky needle to threat, right?

Like on the one hand, the company and the company CEO has been pretty adamant about protecting free speech. But on the other, there are some communities on Reddit that have been, beyond the pale, right, in terms of what they promote. So how do you make choices about who you allow to take over what? So we don't police belief. We police behavior. We believe that community governance works, and our communities are allowed to create their own rules, kind of on top of our own sitewide policies,

and we equip them to govern themselves in the way that works the best for them. What do these types of subreddit takeover say to you about the Reddit community and about the Internet in general? Oh, it absolutely gives me faith in humanity. I mean, yeah, there are people who are going to go out there to sow discord and harm and, you know, be not fun people to be around. Sure. But there are just as many, if not more, who want to take those hateful and harmful places and they want to turn them into humor and flower gardens and cats purring and things that can just bring smiles to people. spaces. Some of the users we've talked to point out a complexity here or an issue here, which is these subreddits are being taken over, but they're not just being straight banned. Why is that?

Well, again, you know, we don't police belief. We police behavior. So when it comes to enforcing, like, we focus on the site where rules and our policies. And if a company, if a, if a, community is breaking those consistently, then we are going to action them. And if it gets to that point, then we have a team, our trust and safety team that can speak to that a little more in depth than I could. Sure. But, you know, if a community has been actioned to the point where that we have banned it, then, you know, that's because they have consistently and constantly broken our rules, and that's it. I guess part of the thing that I worry about in covering this story, and talking about this story

is that in my mind, as hard as this is, the thing that really needs to happen in this political moment that we are in is that, like, people need to talk to each other and find empathy for each other that they don't have right now.

And I worry that this is sort of like a sidebar other than like making the world a better place in a very kind of like, we made this subreddit a funny thing or like we made this subreddit like a better thing. Do you feel like it's actually making some of these people who are hateful

sort of reconsider some of their ideas? Well, one of the things that I really love about Reddit is that it is a place where communication happens long form which it doesn't seem to happen a lot of other places. Places like R-slash Change My View, where people come all the time to change my view on a thing. There are a lot of places where you can go on Reddit to have these kind of conversations.

And if you can't find empathy through a catgift, then I don't know if I want to talk to you. Fair. Thanks a lot, Christine. We really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Like all of the Internet's big platforms, this conversation is complicated.

for Reddit. Because the site really is built around this idea that it's run by and for Redditors. Communities self-police through moderators and Redditors upvote content, so they decide what gets seen. Right. And we should also say that Reddit does have

pretty explicit rules of the road when it comes to behavior, and that they've got people constantly working on enforcing those rules. Things like don't post-sexual content related to minors. Don't sell and buy illegal stuff on Reddit. Don't post someone else's personal information.

Don't break the law. There are also rules against harassment and against glorifying and inciting violence. But these regulations stop short of what Melinda described as throwing the bigots and racists and homophobes out of your living room. There is a small but committed group of people at the other end of the spectrum who think throwing the bigots out goes too far. Who would even say that in its current state, Reddit has bent a knee to the more progressive minded users on the site.

There is no question that some of the people making this argument are racists and bigots and homophobes, the people participating in the communities being taken over. But there are others who say they aren't any of those things. They're just committed to protecting free speech. So we should define the argument for protecting those other perspectives, really all perspectives, the quote-unquote free speech argument. We did get in touch with a few Reditors who believe an adverbs. for more free speech across the site.

And their philosophy goes like this. The more that Redditors takeover subreddits and the more administrators facilitate these takeovers, the more they're endorsing a certain set of beliefs. And even though they might find a lot of this icky stuff, homophobic, racist, bigoted stuff, personally offensive and abhorrent, pushing it off Reddit is equivalent, they say,

to silencing opinions you disagree with. One of these Redditors said that it's like the Reddit equivalent of, of using noise makers to drown out controversial speakers on campus. And that getting rid of offensive subreddits doesn't actually eliminate offensive perspectives. It only eliminates opportunities for engaging with and challenging those perspectives. Another described takeovers as going against the Wild West feel of early Reddit, which he described as a, quote, universal platform for human discourse.

Of course, many people would argue that allowing bigoted hateful speech isn't helpful for human discourse and actually makes it more difficult. And the women we talked to said over and over again that this isn't about erasing ideas they disagree with. It is about erasing safe spaces for people who are threatening their existence. Also, there are real consequences even for just cleaning up the mess. Druey says she got doxxed for the role she was playing in subreddit takeovers. And it interfered with her job. I had to go to my HR department to give them a heads up because they knew, where I worked, where I lived. The death threats were not fun in the beginning.

But after a while, you grow with skin, right? It's like you get used to it. Have you ever had any interactions around your hate sub takeover activity or just your activity on Reddit in general that makes you feel like you're helping to push the conversation forward among people who don't feel the same way you do? Conversation is always good, right? I would like to sit down with people who are open to it, who said, I have been taught this hate, but you seem like a decent person.

You know, it's like, tell me more. I would love to have conversations like that, but a lot of the times it's not. It's just the trolls want to be trolls, and the trolls want to hate, because it makes them feel good putting other people down. So, talking only goes so far with these people. But you just have to keep trying. As we've said before, Drouy is not afraid to swim with crocodiles, in real life and online. Online, she and the rest of this League of Extraordinary Trolls are wading into this teeming environment of users and moderators on Reddit,

these real disputes over digital spaces and the challenges of trying to keep that ecosystem healthy. And even though Drewie's fighting a battle online in a way that's humorous, It's also dead serious. Everyone we talked to for this story in this elite subreddit takeover unit, it struck us that they're trying to rid the internet of bigotry and ignorance, but they're also trying to make progress at home. They're pushing forward, even when they're pushing against a wall. Tell me just a little bit more if you're comfortable doing this about your own life.

Like, how did your parents react to you when you realized you were trans? That's one of those, like, uncomfortable questions. I don't have that many like trigger points that's kind of one of them. My wish for my parents, it's really simple. It's, it's, I want my dad to acknowledge me as his daughter. I want him to use my pronouns, which he hasn't done yet in the six years that I've been out. He hasn't called me by my name in the six years that I've been out. So I would like to have him say that before.

before he goes. Drury Poodle, thank you so much for talking with us and telling us your story. Thank you so much for having me. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who one day might take over

bread stapled to trees. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and when asked about that time she used Reddit, she said, That happened. Mix and sound design by Paul Vycon, and John Parati, and whenever we ask them to do anything, they say, hold my beer.

Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who suggests we start putting out dumpster fires with eye bleach. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and his alt-account Reddit username is not PMMe or high-quality gifts. Even though you don't always hear his voice, it's important to point out that our fellow producer Josh Swartz can also say that endless thread is... Something I made. Extra production assistance from James Lindberg.

Our intern is Candice Lindberg. Our theme music is by Squelcher. Thanks to Redditor Akamum for this week's artwork. It is called Escape from Destruction and is very apropos. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and awesome producer is Amory Sievertson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson.

I'll let myself out.