Reddit – Up Next in The Russian Election Probe
Social Media and the Russian Election Investigation
As we all know, Twitter has had to meet with the Senate Intelligence Committee with regards to the huge Russian influence in the 2016 Presidential Election, now Facebook is in the hot seat and looking forward and onward, it appears that the investigation is leaning towards Reddit next.
And just where is this intel coming from? Well a little bird who happens to be a representative of Sen. Mark Warner, the committee’s top ranking Democrat.
What is a surprise to me is that Reddit was not first on the list.
Reddit is not shy about who or what they are and they are for sure no strangers to controversy by any means, whatsoever.
Reddit is after all one of the most popular if not most controversial websites one would peruse for meme’s (I find all of my favorite coffee meme’s on Reddit), but it’s also where viral stories tend to start.
Anonymous users are free to post and share quite a bit although Reddit does have rules, it’s still widely used to spread misinformation.
What’s more is that users take to forums to discuss those feelings, ideas and share input about what is going on in today’s government, which sometimes leads to misinformation being taken as actual fact.
Reddit however has made an honest effort to scale back on the misinformation as well as hate groups on the site which is actually commendable.
In February I believe it was, Reddit actually shut down a channel that was dedicated to a white supremacist group because of repeated violations of the terms of Reddit’s content policy.
Yet, it still doesn’t matter because hate groups tend to rise up and post where they can on the site still.
And that is the very problem with all of social media, since it’s free to signup and post content where do the social media giants draw the line?
Furthermore why should they be held accountable?
It is after all the end users choice to believe whatever he or she really wants to believe.
While I quite agree that hate speech and hate groups have no business on the sites spreading hate, misinformation and the like, at the end of the day, we cannot and should not expect these social media giants to police everything because the sites are free for you and I to use.
It’s all about you, I, my brother, my dad, the end users making a choice to read and believe in whatever.
I still see hundreds of fake news stories, ad’s and the like on Twitter and Facebook (don’t even get me started on gab), almost every single day.
At some point, the end user or in this case the end readers have to be held just as accountable for buying into the fake news, the misinformation, the fake ad’s, and everything else.
It makes me just a little sick to my stomach truth be known to see that as a result of all of the Russian meddling through social media, fake news stories, etc, that we are now looking at potential legislation.
Imposing such legislation is like telling these social media outlets, “You are responsible for the American voters who made the choice to believe in the fake news, the fake ads…”
And quite frankly that does not sit well with me at all.
The reason I feel so strongly about this?
I’ll share a secret with you here, I have had some of the worst, I mean worst relationships in my life, most of which left me as part of a person for a very long time.
I blamed my choice to remain in those relationships on anyone and everyone including everything that I could.
I never wanted to take accountability for staying in those relationships, let alone getting into them in the first place.
All of that changed when I was invited to look at a couple of cold cases, I learned that I was better at working with the dead (part of the reason I write a lot about politics) than I was at being part of interpersonal relationships.
So now, try being a man hitting on me, I have actually made chasing men away a rather unique hobby.
I am happier being single because now my only weakness is coffee.
The point behind that story, is that it’s a choice and blame, we all make choices and the only people that we can hold accountable for that, is ourselves.
We cannot blame the social media giants for what happened here, each reader could have done his or her own homework at any time, they simply made the choice not to, and asking social media giants to do that, well it creates a police state, one in which the US Government approves what I am allowed to read, what information I am allowed to see and so on.
It is not a good situation at all because it is opening doors I do not believe the american people, if they really understood it all, would all that happy with.
Cristal M Clark
IOS users can find The Crime Shop on Apple News
And https://gab.ai/thecrimeshop
thecrimeshop 
What are your thoughts