takeovers – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Reddit Kicks Out Protesting Mods, As Reddit Users Continue To Find Creative Ways To Protest

from the very-democracy,-much-freedom dept

Reddit CEO’s insistence that the protests from Reddit would simply “pass” certainly hasn’t come to pass just yet. While increasing pressure from the company against protest mods has resulted in some backing down, many are continuing to engage in malicious compliance, making it clear they’re still protesting.

And, a few days ago, after many threats along those lines, Reddit finally started removing protesting mods.

Three former moderators of r/malefashionadvice tell The Verge that they were removed from the subreddit on Thursday. “We more or less have been expecting the removal for the past few days,” one former mod, who asked to go by “Walker,” says in an email to The Verge. Now, the community’s modlist currently has just one moderator: ModCodeofConduct.

ModCodeofConduct is the account used by Reddit employees to share information for mods. In other words, Reddit removed the volunteer moderators and inserted its own employees to run the subreddit. Remember when Steve Huffman called volunteer moderators the “landed gentry?” This is kind of like if the king killed the “landed gentry” and gave their lands to his own kids.

And that wasn’t the only subreddit. According to Jay Peters at The Verge:

As of this writing, ModCodeofConduct is also the sole moderator of:

Reddit officials (and their Iraqi Ministry of Information-style spokesperson) are still trying to claim this has nothing at all to do with silencing protests.

“We are, and have been, enforcing the moderator Code of Conduct. This is not new because of the protests,” a Reddit spokesperson told Engadget. Under its guidelines, Reddit considers a public community that has indefinitely been made private to be “abandoned,” and it seeks “new mods who want to reinvigorate it.” The spokesperson added that “we have a practice of reactivating private, high-subscriber communities that are being ‘camped’ on.”

Look. No one who wasn’t born yesterday believes any of that. These subreddits haven’t been “abandoned.” They’re protesting. Often after having their subscribers take a vote on how best to handle Reddit’s terrible decisions. So, yes, this is new and yes this is because of the protests, and the least that Reddit could do would be to admit reality. Denying it is a bad look.

At least one Reddit employee, apparently Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler (using Go_JasonWaterfalls on Reddit) seemed to finally acknowledge that the company fucked up, and posted in r/modnews trying to smooth things over:

So, we’ve all had a… time on Reddit lately. And I’m here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the “now what?” conversation.

Moderators are a vital part of Reddit. You are leaders and stewards of your communities. You are also not a monolith; mods have a diverse set of needs to support the purpose of each community you foster. Our role is facilitation; to enable all of you with a platform you can rely on, and with the tools and resources you need to cultivate thriving communities. Tens of thousands of mods engage daily on Reddit and, in order to enable all of you, we need consistent, inclusive, and direct connection with you. Here are some ways to connect with us.

I’d say that… it did not go over all that well. Here’s just one response, and there were many more like this:

Your CEO called us “landed gentry” and accused us of failing to care about the communities that we built, which Reddit profits off of without paying us for our work; and then when a bunch of mods directly polled users for what they would like to do and then followed through with the results the moderators were forcibly removed from the communities because the CEO didn’t like it.

So, I wouldn’t say the relationship was tested, I would say it was tenuous to begin with and Spez shat on whatever goodwill and benefit of the doubt that we tried to offer. If the CEO of the company wasn’t interested in hearing what we have to say, I have zero confidence that anybody else cares about our “needs.” Or, if you do care, that you are in a position to do anything. We made our “needs” pretty damn clear over the past two months. Why weren’t you listening then? We’ve made our needs clear for the last decade and had to turn to third-party apps and tools to make up for the deficiencies that you’ve been promising us for years. Why didn’t you make any changes then?

What I need is a functional app that doesn’t randomly freeze up, doesn’t spam me with more ads than cable TV and has basic functions.

And… the protests are continuing. In what maybe Reddit brass thought was a good idea, they reopened r/place. r/place is, normally, a giant collaborative art project on Reddit, in which users can place one pixel on a giant canvas every five minutes, and lasts for a few days before closing. It was used twice before, both times on April Fools Day (in 2017 and again in 2022). So it was a bit weird for Reddit to relaunch it randomly in July, but it seemed to be an attempt at “hey, we’re all cool here, nothing’s gone wrong.” In other words, it was desperation.

Redditors made use of the canvas to, well, express their displeasure with Huffman (who goes by /spez on the site). People spent their pixels wisely creating many, many “Fuck Spez” messages on the canvas:

You can watch a timelapse video of how it changes over time. At about 45 seconds in, the canvas is expanded, and almost immediately a ton of new “fuck spez” messages show up:

I don’t think attempting to paper over the failings of the company leadership with distractions like this is going to work all that well.

Filed Under: landed gentry, mods, protests, r/place, steve huffman, takeovers
Companies: reddit

The Latest In Trademark Abuse Is Registering Marks To Obtain Ownership Of Instagram Accounts

from the fake-it-until-you-make-it dept

When one thinks about an Instagram account being taken over by a malicious actor, one usually imagines some kind of hack or social engineering resulting in the theft of an account password. The refrain “It wasn’t me, I was hacked!” that you hear from some whose social media profiles are the subject of social scrutiny relies on this impression.

But there are many different ways to hack a cat. The latest in Instagram account takeovers appears to be done through the avenue of trademark law, interestingly enough. Motherboard has a fascinating write-up detailing an entire ecosystem of malicious actors who are abusing trademarks to convince Instagram to hand over access to accounts.

Scammers do this by creating fake companies and trademarks to convince Instagram they should be the legitimate owner of a username in question, with fraudsters using “trademarking,” as the technique is known, to get ahold of sought-after, valuable handles, according to posts and evidence of the process in action obtained by Motherboard. The scammers can then keep these handles as digital mementos, brag about their acquisition, or resell them at a profit in a thriving underground community.

Instagram allows users to report handles that a person or company believes infringes on their trademark. For example (this is a hypothetical), if the creator of the @disney handle on Instagram was not actually associated with Disney, the company may want to appeal to obtain ownership of the username. If Instagram agrees, it may then hand over control of the account to the original trademark holder. Instagram told Motherboard it has a team that works on trademark and intellectual property issues, and as part of that process, the team reviews whether a complaint may be fraudulent.

Judging by the sheer volume of bad actors that are “trademarking” in order to fool Instagram, it seems the company’s team is at best not fully up to the task of weeding out the fraudsters. And, to be clear, this isn’t so much a problem with trademark law as it is a problem with Instagram putting so much weight on supposed trademark ownership that it acts as the linchpin for account takeovers. That said, while time consuming, the ease with which bad actors can spin up trademarks makes this problem more wide-spread.

Several users on the underground forum OGUsers, which focuses on the theft and sale of high value Instagram accounts, appear to engage in the practice.

“I’m looking to get a trademark or fake trademark that will make it look like I own a word so I can get an insta username,” one user posted on the forum last year.

“Need someone from the uk to file a trademark from me,” another OGUsers member wrote last year. “Willing to pay fees + 20% in bitcoin.”

A previous Motherboard investigation found members of OGUsers often sell handles for thousands or sometimes tens of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency, although most of those account hijackings likely rely on SIM-jacking, where a hacker takes control of a victim’s phone number.

Again, the ultimate culprit here is Instagram using a trademark, or supposed trademark, as the chief justification for handing over an Instagram account. There obviously needs to be more of a check in place to ensure that this exact tactic is not allowed to be abused. It’s also something of a symptom of ownership culture that an individual is allowed to point to a trademark, then to an Instagram account, and claim ownership.

It seems the only barrier to abusing trademark law for malicious actions is one of creativity.

Filed Under: influencers, scams, takeovers, trademark
Companies: instagram