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.
I’ve always maintained R-CTH didn’t get killed as fair cover for TheDonald banning; TheDonald (etc) got killed as cover for R-CTH banning
Td was dead for months before they banned it bc the mods stopped allowing submissions and stickied a link to their own site. Tbh chapo mods shouldve started working on this site as soon as the sub was quarantined
Yeah, i think this was the consensus at the time, too.
I don’t really remember but I don’t think the original devs for Hedbear were the /r/cth mods.
the highest honor the CIA can bestow on a platform
I’m just now learning about this. This makes even more sense in light of their censorship practices as of late.
I ran out of characters in the post. Here are my sources for further reading/copypasta purposes.
The role of Reddit’s Director of Policy: Here’s a video of Jessica elaborating on the role of Reddit’s policy department, of which was created when she joined in 2017 as its director and first hire at a 2017? panel at Santa Clara university in. Jessica starts speaking at 1:06:00. In her own words:
We’re continuing to scale and you’ve seen the result of that scaling in some of the policy updates and enforcement actions that we’ve taken in recent months. A good example of this is the update to our policy against inciting violence that we took last october that you may have seen. So some of the key stakeholding teams in this process include of course our policy team which sets the rules of reddit. Now policy oversees both content policy and advertising policy and we also work with our enforcement teams to ensure that our policies are enforced consistently and fairly.
Policy is a new team it was started last June; I am the initial policy hire for reddit and policy reports to the general counsel. Our legal team is obviouisly a stakeholder in this process as well. Legal consults with policy on updates and our legal team also manages any takedowns with special legal liability; copyright things, child exploitation imagery things of that nature.
Jessica’s employment history is from her linkedin profile
This is the internal CIA document that shows the Atlantic Council is a front for US intelligence agencies. It’s a 13/1/1984 memo to William Casey, then Director of the CIA from his staff giving him background on an off the record briefing scheduled that day with fellows of the Atlantic council. The memo details which fellows of the Atlantic Council are controlled by which US intelligence agencies, they’re not all CIA, some are agents of the Department of State, Office of the Secretary of Defence, Naval Intelligence, USIA and CRS, so basically spook central. The document outlines that director is to brief the Council fellows on organisational and budgeting changes he’s making in the CIA and the Council is going to brief the director on research they’ve done into cold war policy issues and “interactions” they’ve had with “distinguished individuals” in the Italian government, NATO high command, and various prominent academics the CIA had an interest in. Relevant takeaways: Atlantic Council (where Jessica worked for the past 2 years) is spook central and reports directly to the Director of the CIA.
The ridealong interview with Jessica is from this article in the New Yorker magazine titled “Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet” and first published 19/03/2018.
Thanks for sharing this, Comrade Civility. :fidel-salute:
You should post this to some leftist subs or any large left-sympathetic subs that care about the goings-on of the reddit administrators
would go straight to trueanon if i could still post
Do you mind if someone else does it for you?
not in the slightest
r*ddit adulation means less than nothing - steal others’ post ideas early, and steal them often
:fidel-salute-big: I was skeptical but fair play to you. It also makes sense that a CIA that historically infiltrated newspaper editorial would do the same with the moderation of some of the biggest social media sites.
Idk if it even makes sense to say it’s “The CIA” doing it, so much as modern western media exists as part of an ecosystem of interacting, co-parasitic control systems that include public politicians, private business, social media, intelligence, police, and military.
Damn, so there really was a leftist on CTH.
Glad to see the sub got the last laugh on Will after all as he has never done anything remotely cool enough to be banned by the CIA
It’s like the… what is below copper medal… like the CIA Aluminum Medal Award in Shitposting.
“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.”
I’m surprised there wasn’t a twist at the end that makes the whole story a fake story because LMAOOOO
i wanna tell assad that hes no match for reddit minion memes hes gotta step it up
I had this idea yesterday, but it felt too stupid and out there to look into it. It’s amazing to see the CIA forced us off for Hog Posting.
:cia: :gui-better: :chapo:
There had a been multiple posts/comments in r/cth alluding her links to NATO shortly before the ban, and spez was looking for an excuse anyways because of his slavery comments.
Holy shit I thought that was a bit the entire time. The old subs influence was massive, the way we went out paired with the sacrificial banning of an already dead /r/donald sub always rubbed me the wrong way.
Hella glad to be out of reddit’s clutches. Viva chapo.chat!
got DANG that’s what I call a POST
And all this time I thought it was the kill slaveowners stuff that got the sub banned. Turns out it was the zootopia erotica