Pokemon Go subreddit goes dark to protest Reddit’s stance on COVID disinfo

Over the last few days, the Pokemon Go subreddit has been entirely black to protest the recent banning of the /r/circlebroke subreddit. Reddit’s decision to ban the CIVID subreddit was met with outcry from the subreddit’s users, who have taken action to protest the decision.

Pokemon Go subreddit goes dark to protest Reddit’s stance on COVID disinfo: reddit: the front page of the internet: A subreddit devoted to Pokemon Go has gone dark in protest of Reddit’s apparent inaction regarding /r/coverageofvirginia, a subreddit dedicated to spreading fake news and other disinfo about the shooting at the Capital Gazette in Maryland. The /r/coverageofvirginia subreddit has been banned repeatedly by Reddit’s admins over the past year, but it’s apparently still active, and the subreddit’s moderators have been pissing off Redditors with their posts and posts about the subreddit.

Reddit users have been protesting the recent banning of over 50,000 accounts, which they say were either innocent or not. However, some users have accused Reddit of a witch hunt against a subreddit, COVID, that has been accused of false flagging. There is a subreddit, which was still up at the time of writing, that has been accused of using a team of paid shills to create fake content to upvote their own posts, and users have been accused of being sock puppets. The subreddit was still up at the time of writing.. Read more about reddit pokemon go raids and let us know what you think.

When it comes to COVID, the Pokemon Go community is protesting someone other than Niantic for the first time.

Reddit community leaders started pushing for the Reddit management to address the significant and continuing issue of COVID-related disinformation on the site earlier this month. Reddit appears to have quarantined one sub, but it wiggled out of doing more with a statement on Wednesday that said it would continue to block discussion of fraud and harm (such as faking vaccine cards and drinking bleach), but would otherwise be promoting “debate, dissent, and protest” by allowing health disinfo and misinformation subs to continue.

Many subreddits went black as a result. Some were non-gaming subreddits, such as the NFL, EarthPorn, and RoastMe, but gaming subreddits, such as r/hearthstone and r/smashbros, also participated, some with millions of followers. While many of them only went black for a short time, r/PokemonGo has been dark for days, and it is not alone, according to r/PokemonGO subreddit designer and administrator BootsMade4Walking.

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When we questioned Boots why r/PokemonGO was still closed while other subs reopened, he said:

To my knowledge, Reddit’s position has not changed since Spez’s article a few days ago. Until then, we’ll be in the dark. We understand that some subs may just want to do so for a day or a few hours to raise awareness about the problem, but for us, Pokemongo is a unique community that encourages physical contact with one another, and spreading that knowledge here is not a risk I am prepared to accept.

Users from these disinformation subs have recently brigaded us, and there is a real life danger to our community if they continue to exist.

Interestingly, several of the remaining subs, such as r/FlashTV and r/Arrow, are similarly centered on fandoms. While some Reddit users have claimed that the moderators are holding fandoms hostage, Reddit mods are community members who host their communities on sites in which they have obviously lost confidence. For over a year, social media has struggled with the propagation of disinformation, and when “staff” are unpaid volunteers, it can be a big challenge for a community to fight unscrupulous actors brigading against you when your community-host might take action against them.

Reddit POGO lovers aren’t totally out of luck, since The Silph Road intends to stay open.

The COVID scenario is a hot-button topic for POGO players in particular; as we’ve been reporting, supporters of the Pokemon MMOARG launched a boycott when Niantic insisted on pulling back pandemic-inspired pro-accessibility initiatives as the epidemic raged.

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