Lamar Smith is Reddit’s public enemy number one. He’s the backer of the much-despised Stop Onlne Piracy Act. So it makes sense that redditors in r/politics were outraged when they discovered another bill the congressman from Texas is sponsoring—one that, they believed, would give the federal government unheard-of powers in tracking our movements online.
With calls for porn companies to black out on Feb 23, Reddit was about to take over the Internet again with a popular protest.
Except there was one problem.
Reddit’s outrage was predicated on a major misunderstanding. There’s very little in the act, called the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act (PCIP), that brought about new powers for the federal government. As I wrote on Thursday, PCIP would simply turn a common practice among Internet service providers—holding on to temporary IP addresses—into formal law.
Where did the misunderstanding come from? The culprit is a wildly overstated headline that started it all. Perhaps Dizzy_Slip, the redditor who posted the link to r/politics, didn’t realize that The Kansan is the student newspaper at the University of Kansas.
Or maybe that didn’t didn’t matter.
Outraged protests are so much fun.
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Shipping company UPS almost fell victim to Reddit’s mob anger. A pic on r/WTF purportedly showing a UPS delivery person lazily slinging a delivery onto a front porch went straight to the front page. A wave of anti-UPS hatred was forming. But before it could crest, it dissipated.
Why? A UPS representative jumped into the thread. Debbie Curtis-Magley showed exactly how companies should engage customers on Reddit: directly, respectfully, and honestly. By asking questions rather than getting defensive, she rapidly proved UPS had nothing to do with the sloppy delivery.
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In other news, moderation on Reddit is going robotic, a writer for The Wire did a live interview, and Gawker’s Adrian Chen failed to make peace with redditors.
