Wednesday, Washington Examiner reporter Ashe Schow released
an article featuring a story about an Amherst College male student who
blacked out after drinking alcohol and accompanied a fellow student back
to her dorm room where, in his blacked-out state, she performed oral
sex on him.
This occurred in 2012, and two years after the fact, the female
student who performed oral sex would go on to accuse the man – now going
by the pseudonym John Doe – of sexual assault. Receiving no due
process, the man was then promptly expelled from Amherst.
Despite evidence that proves Doe did not initiate the sexual
encounter, or in any way commit sexual assault on his fellow student,
Amherst refused to reopen Doe’s case.
You can read more of Ashe Schow’s article here.
The article in question was posted to Reddit on the r/NotTheOnion
subReddit and quickly made it to the front page, garnering some 3300+
upvotes. It was then quickly taken down under the excuse that it was “tabloid news.”
I reached out to Schow for a comment.
“I was really excited when I realized my article was on the front
page of Reddit, but within minutes it was gone. The reason given was
that the article was considered ‘tabloid news’. There are other articles
in the r/nottheonion subReddit that are similar in content,” she told
me.
While other articles from the Washington Examiner, a
respected news source, still remain on the site itself, this article
from Ashe Schow, a respected reporter who focuses on campus assaults and
radical feminism, is the only one to be taken down. That her article of
female-on-male sexual assault was labeled as “tabloid news” does not
speak well of the direction the website has taken.
As of late, Reddit has undergone a transformation that leans more toward the politically correct.
Where the site was once a bastion of free speech, no matter how obscene
and hateful that speech was – under the new guidelines laid down by CEO
Ellen Pao – the site has targeted certain articles and subReddits for
deletion due to their “offensive” nature.
Pao was brought on as CEO of Reddit last January, and has since set
out to make Reddit a more social justice friendly place by setting a new set of rules for Reddit users.
“Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone
in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that Reddit
is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the
conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around
them.”
This has resulted in the deletion of such subReddits as r/fatpeoplehate, which mocked the overweight. Even the subReddit r/whalewatching
was banned, as it was suspected of being an offshoot of
r/fatpeoplehate, but was actually a subReddit community of actual whale
watchers that had existed for two years.
“It’s not our site’s goal to be a completely free speech platform,” said Pao in response to a question from Business Insider
about deleting offensive subReddits. As pointed out by the publication,
subReddits that call for actual violence are still allowed to exist,
such as r/gasthekikes, an anti-Jewish subReddit.
Pao has not been received well by the Reddit community, and many have called for her to step down as CEO. A petition was created
by a Reddit user on Change.org which has so far reached 7.5k
signatures, calling for her dismissal. Users have given her nicknames
such as “Chairman Pao” and have made Chinese Communist style propaganda art in reference to her, as well as political cartoons. Some users have been banned for merely speaking out against Pao.
Ellen Pao has a history of making trouble, including a failed three year long case against silicon valley firm, Kleiner Perkins, for discrimination. The amount Pao sought was $144 million for punitive damages.
Perhaps not coincidentally, $144 million is around the same amount her husband, Buddy Fletcher, is being sued for by three Louisiana public pension funds.
Long story short, Pao is quite possibly in financial trouble and was very likely trying to use the momentum of today’s social justice movement to get her and her husband out of it.
Pao’s belief in social justice goes beyond deleting content and legal
actions. She uses it to judge who will work at Reddit. She has
eliminated salary negotiations due to a study that shows women don’t do
as well as men do in this area. She even will reject hiring employees
based on their feelings about social justice.
As reported in an article in the Wall Street Journal:
“Ms. Pao, who said she wants to stay long-term as Reddit’s CEO when a
one-year interim period ends, said she has removed salary negotiations
from the hiring process because studies show women don’t fare as well as
men. She has brought in well-known Silicon Valley diversity consultant
Freada Kapor Klein to advise the company. And she has passed on hiring
candidates who don’t embrace her priority of building a gender-balanced
and multiracial team. ‘We ask people what they think about diversity,
and we did weed people out because of that,’ she said.”
Pao has a clear social justice bias. It’s a bias that has strong
roots in the radical feminist movement of today which tends to be blatantly anti-male.
So is it any wonder that Schow’s piece – an article that flies in the
face of popular feminist narratives – was removed from the site? Did
this story run afoul of Reddit’s new social justice friendly mentality,
and thus needed to be discarded? Schow seems to think so.
“The article, which challenges preferred narratives about rape
accusations, was pulled down just when it reached the front page. Given
the state of Reddit and the claims of censorship floating around the
site, this could have been the latest example. Because it certainly
wasn’t ‘tabloid news’,” says Schow.
Editor’s note of disclosure: The author of this article is personal friends with Ashe Schow.
Hailing from Austin, Texas, Brandon Morse has been
writing about politics and culture across many websites for the last six
years, with a heavy emphasis on anti-authoritarianism. Aside from
writing articles, he is also known for voice acting and authoring
scripts. He is an avid gamer, dog person, and has a bad habit of making
vague references to things no one has heard about or seen. Follow him at
@TheBrandonMorse on Twitter.
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