For this journal I will be using the anti bias character that represents diversity from myself through a 13 year old latin girl persona. I am a 20 year old jew so although being of the jewish faith has made me often feel excluded, or less comfortable, or have a lower sense of belonging. I will be pretending for the next two days that I am a person who represents diversity from myself in two ways, while I use my preferred media platform. I will also note instances that might make my anti bias character uncomfortable or unwelcome to the selected digital community. For my platform I chose Reddit.
Reddit is a community centered social platform that in its simplest form a forum of forums. Users anonymously post to these forums while other users either ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ the post based on if they like it. The more ‘upvotes’ a post receives the higher up the post moves in the Reddit rankings (the higher the post goes the more people will see it). A Reddit forum is directly related to one specific topic such as r/memes which is used for posting funny pictures or r/worldnews which is used to see what other countries are reporting about in their media. Although Reddit may seem like a place of reliable sources, posts may also be unreliable or even completely made up.
For two days I paid attention to r/memes, r/publicfreakout and r/politics through my anti bias character’s eyes to see if she might feel excluded, or less comfortable, or have a lower sense of belonging, or in some way made uncomfortable. Right off the bat I noticed a few trends within the Reddit community, one being a general dislike for President Trump. The main joke being a statement from Trump followed by either an image or second statement of Trump showing him going against his first statement (my favorite being his son upset that a news anchor called Trump “A piece of shit” followed by a compilation of Trump calling people far worse insults). In Fact the majority of posts I saw weren’t offensive to anyone and when a post was racist or homophobic it recieved an abounding amount of backlash from the community. Within the forum r/publicfreakout (which where people post videos of people acting out in public) I saw a large number of videos showing someone being openly racist than quickly being beaten up. Ironically the most amount of exclusion came from r/memes, a subreddit forum for making jokes. The majority of the jokes being stupid humor but occasionally I saw a post that would ostracized women or poor third world counties. For example this meme posted yesterday.
This meme received a large amount of ‘upvotes’ and was at the top of reddit for a short while, but it is hard to account for why this happened. Humor itself is subjective so it is hard to tell 8.9 thousand people who ‘upvoted’ it that this is offensive and not funny but for every post mocking one group of people I found an equal amount of jokes towards another group. Since Reddit is anonymous the diversity of the platform is incalculable but to make it more inclusive is as simple as you creating a new subreddit for whatever demographic you feel is underrepresented within the community. Looking at Reddit these past few days through my anti bias character’s eyes I found little to be put off by especially when primarily looking at memes on Reddit. Generally I found the Reddit community very accepting and at times even self regulating to hate or discrimination. This does not mean there aren’t offensive jokes on the platform nor does it promote them but anytime you’re on the internet it is important to not take everything you read to heart, if you let a post preaching hate towards your demographic get to you then the offender gets the reaction they wanted out of you. When discussing political correctness of humor I like to reference a children’s cartoon I watched when I was younger “Comedy should provoke! It should blast through
Peter Vigoda 