Recently, dailykos.com became one of a range of left/liberal alternative media and politics websites banned from the politics section of one of the biggest, hottest growing popular websites, reddit.com (see end of story for full banned list). Longtime reddit.com site members have called this a right-wing "coup".
After an initial uproar concerning the sweeping bans, of both liberal/progressive and conservative sites, moderators for reddit.com's r/politics section - which typically has 1,000-3,000 site users online at any given time - announced they were un-banning the web domain for the progressive Mother Jones -- a magazine which broke the explosive news, during the 2012 election, of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's disparaging comments concerning the "47%" (of Americans), who Romney characterized as parasitically dependent on government handouts.
A few days later, amidst disparaging member comments running 10:1 against the continuing wide-ranging website blacklist, r/politics moderators announced they had un-banned the Huffington Post.
Beyond those two grudging exceptions, the sweeping, unexplained blacklist remained in force.
In the overview, reddit's r/politics banning of wide swaths of liberal/progressive media infrastructure can be interpreted as part of an effort, by corporate and conservative forces, to assert control over such traditionally left-leaning and anti-corporate social media sites such as Reddit.com.
The net effect has been to suppress influence of liberal/progressive alternative media at reddit.com, while simultaneously increasing the influence of traditional media outlets such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and other traditionally mainstream media.
According to my surveys over the last three days, in reddit.com's r/politics section corporate and mainstream media sources now amount to over 1/2 of content; and in the more heavily promoted "news" subbreddit, r/news, corporate and mainstream media content is at a whopping 90%, with a mere 5% of content coming from what might, by any stretch of the imagination, be alternative, progressive, or even conservative media sources.
To understand the significance of this development, it helps to understand the scale of reddit.com, which according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project is frequented by 6% of American adult Internet users. In this day and age, that's an incredible market share. A majority Reddit users are also in a coveted demographic, under 35 years of age.
Reddit lets users create their own bulletin board-style sub-communities, some of which have brought considerable controversy to the rapidly growing mega-website -- especially because of reddit's traditionally libertarian-ethic driven "hands off" no censorship policy in which any content that is not explicitly illegal has been permitted.
But in tandem with reddit's rising monetary valuation and growing ability to drive vast amounts of Internet traffic, an apparent editorial drift which seems to prejudice pro-corporate and mainstream media sources over alternative media has become manifest at reddit.com
This has happened in several ways.
First, a few months ago reddit.com changed the default list of "subreddits" that appear at the top of all reddit.com pages and represent the subreddits that appear by default on the home pages of new site members.
Reddit, of course, allows members to change their preferences, including which subreddits feed material to their home pages; in this way, reddit users can create a customized home page with feeds from whatever subreddits they want -- subreddits with pictures of puppies and kittens, subreddits with pictures of shocking gore, subreddits populated by angry atheists or Ron Paul supporters, whatever.
But, redditors have to make a conscious decision to do that, customize their site experience by changing their site preferences from the ones reddit promotes by default.
Over the past several months two of reddit's biggest sub-communities "r/politics" and "r/atheism" (known as "subreddits") - communities that helped build reddit into a powerhouse - were chopped from reddit's default site section list.
What might seem to be a minor administrative decision can have substantial viewership consequences, as a featured reddit.com subreddit with 90% corporate and mainstream media content replaces a subreddit, r/politics, which has between 30% and 45% alternative-source content.
Simultaneously, changes in moderation policy, viewed by many redditors as arbitrary and authoritarian, have torn the two subreddit communities, r/politics and r/atheism, apart.
Mirroring the trend at the increasingly corporate news-friendly reddit.com, a wave of corporate consolidation of local news has swept America, with 223 local TV stations switching hands in 2013, according to a report originally published in the Baltimore Business Journal
[reddit/r/politics Banned Domains list]
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The following is a list of major domains that have been banned by the moderators of r/Politics and listed here in the interest of transparency:
aattp.org
alternet.org
amazon.com
americanthinker.com
avaaz.org
b4in.info
beforeitsnews.com
blacklistednews.com
borderlessnewsandviews.com
breitbart.com
breitbartunmasked.com
change.org
citypaper.com
constitutioncampaign.org
courthousenews.com
crooksandliars.com
dailybail.com
dailycaller.com
dailycurrant.com
dailykos.com
dailypaul.com
democraticunderground.com
deviantart.com
dirtyuglypolitics.wordpress.com
drudgereport.com
eclectablog.com
ecominoes.com
facebook.com
funnyordie.com
Gawker and all affiliates
generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com
heavy.com
heritage.org
hotair.com
inagist.com
indiegogo.com
informationliberation.com
infowars.com
isidewith.com
lifenews.com
linkedin.com
littlegreenfootballs.com
mediamatters.org
minx.cc
myspace.com
nationalmemo.com
nationalreport.net
nationalreview.com
nationsmith.com
Newsbusters.org
newsmakeup.wordpress.com
newsvine.com
newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport
omegle.com
pensitoreview.com
petitions.whitehouse.gov
photographyisnotacrime.com
policymic.com
politicalwire.com
politicususa.com
politilady.com
pollcode.com
powerlineblog.com
prisonplanet.com
rawstory.com
reason.com
reddit.com
redgage.com
rightwingwatch.org
salon.com
signon.org
smirkingchimp.com
techdirt.com
theblaze.com
thedailybanter.com
thegatewaypundit.com
theonion.com
thepetitionsite.com
therightscoop.com
thinkprogress.org
townhall.com
truth-out.org
twitchy.com
twitter.com
upworthy.com
vice.com
voiceblaze.com
wallstreetonparade.com
weaselzippers.us
wikipedia.org
wnd.com
Blogging platforms
wordpress.com
typepad.com
blogspot.com
posthaven.com
squarespace.com
sett.com
postach.io
quora.com
svbtle.com
medium.com
blogger.com
ghost.org
plus.google.com