Maybe a police investigator should do a little snooping. Prison would be one acceptable outcome.
The problem with jailbait wasn’t that it was illegal, it was just not a good look for a business trying to court advertising money.
Hold up, the problem with jailbait is it was scantily clad little children in sexuality suggestive situations. That was the problem. Whether it was technically legal or not it’s irrelevant, it was intended to sexualized children.
It’s “not a good look” because it’s abhorrent trash meant to skirt child porn laws. Was it illegal? No. Was it just advertisers who had a problem with it? Also no. Users thought it was abhorrent too. There were user campaigns to ban the sub all the same, who do you think kept notifying the media?
Maybe I misunderstood. What’s jailbait? I thought it was underage material.
It was, but it avoided legal issues by:
- Reddit didn’t actually host images or videos at the time, just links and comments
- As I recall, it wasn’t pornography, just pictures of kids in bikinis with creepy comments
Oh god, i didn’t know what jailbait was and just tried to look it up on Reddit but couldn’t find anything, i thought it was some kind of “bad prank” stuff to bait others into doing illegal stuff…
Reddit previously allowed essentially anything that was not either illegal to post or breaking the site by organizing vote manipulation and the like. After getting negative press for subreddits that allowed sexualized (but probably not technically pornographic) images of kids, they banned that kind of content.
Reddit positioned itself as a neutral platform with as few sitewide rules as it could have prior to that, and many didn’t like what the change signaled even if they found /r/jailbait disgusting.
If he posted images of children, even if not pornographic, it is unlikely he held the copyright for them and, in some jurisdictions might still be considered exploitation. I hope a police investigator at least looks at it.
As much as we all think spez is a waste of oxygen, we shouldn’t propagate shit that isn’t real. It draws away from the cause why Reddit is revolting.
He was unknowingly added as a mod before when you could nominate anyone
he was knowingly participating greatly in the sub though.
Do you have any proof of that or are you just making shit up cause thats the first time I even heard anyone say that.
I mean he was “technically” a mod of jailbait.
In the early days you could appoint mods , he was Unknowingly appointed and technically a mod of jailbait.
But he wasnt Willingly nor did he “mod” the sub.
So this is Mostly false what gets spread.
I don’t think he was even appointed as a mod though, I haven’t seen any evidence to back it up other than Reddit hearsay
Could you please provide some proof that he used to mod r/jailbait?
According to the AMA where a lot of this came up, from what I understand, in the early (like, super early) days of Reddit, you used to be able to appoint people as mods if you had X amount of karma - I think it was 100k. I can’t find that comment thread now that fully explained it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was removed. The gist of it is someone appointed him as a mod there and it didn’t last long.
So mostly true, but in that technical and disingenuous way, as he didn’t set out to be a mod of his own free will.
Someone feel free to jump in and correct any specifics I missed or got wrong.
That’s what I’ve been told as well. I think that’s why there needs to be approval to appoint mods now. I think the bigger issue is why reddit let that sub remain for as long as it did. It had to be covered by the media for it to be banned (iirc. or was that a different sub?).
Edit: yeah, it was Anderson Cooper who did an expose focusing on that sub.
Back then they intended to be a bastion of free speech and wanted to stay true to that, despite not wanting the sub
It was only a matter of time before they grew large enough that they had to drop the philosophy for the benefit of PR and advertising.
The original users from those years were split on the matter, because it meant a change in what Reddit was.
Nearly everyone knew it had to restrict itself beyond just what was lawful sooner or later.
As I recall, there was an uproar back then as well when they started cleaning up subreddits. (/r/jailbait was one, /r/beatingwomen another, /r/fatpeoplehate, and a bunch of subreddits about various illegal activities.) People were really into “free speech over anything else” at that point.
In fact the vitrol directed at spez currently really reminds me of that, there were pictures of the then-CEO’s face everywhere along with “fuck Ellen Pao”. Then, funnily enough, spez came in (came back) as the replacement and people were happy again because he was one of the OG admins.
/r/fatpeoplehate
I never subscribed to the original, but the aftermath of that created loads of parody subs, my favourites being /r/fatpapalhat (pictures of the pope with his photoshopped larger), and /r/farpeoplehate (pictures of people a long way off with comments calling them bastards)
Google can quickly find you proof, but the answer is much less satisfying. As much spez has the most punchable of punchable faces, he was not modded by choice, but instead appointed. He was a mod, but for not long, only in name, and named by a 3rd party.
There is so much to hate about this guy, using the jailbait mod angle just diminishes the reasons into just namecalling.
