A Ray of Hope
by Miki Saxon
Trolls are the bane of the internet and harassing, insulting and degrading women is a prime focus.
This is especially true on Reddit, with extra attention paid to AMA sessions, such as the one held earlier this month.
…to cap off Computer Science Education Week, three women computer scientists from MIT did a Reddit ask-me-anything session to answer questions about programming and academia.
The discussion was flowing until—yup. You guessed it.
But because this is the internet, a few trolls showed up, too, asking bizarre and rude sexist questions, some involving parts of the human body. A PR person from MIT forwarded the links to us [Business Insider], asking us to expose these trolls.
To everyone’s amazement, instead of leaving it to the crowd to vote the yucky comments down, Reddit stepped in.
But Reddit aims for these AMAs to be respectful. Reddit’s policy is that it will remove comments that are “abusive or harassing” as well as “comments where there would be no possibility of a real answer, especially where it is deliberately creepy or offensive.”
Reddit exemplifies the anything goes/no censorship/trust the crowd to police itself internet.
One has to wonder if this is a sign that people have had enough, that anonymous hate and bullying are finally falling out of favor — at least a little bit.
Image credit: Rich Aten
