This election season, /r/politics has exploded in popularity here on SRC. I think it's useful to collate and document the cancerous tactics deployed by the mods there, especially because they're indicative of the new trend of reddit censorship which I call "censorship by a thousand cuts".

Censorship by a thousand cuts is a strategy in which you don't so much directly stonewall content, but rather you harass and impede its spread enough that most people give up and, if they don't, they fight an uphill battle.

/r/politics deploys this strategy by 'mistaken' or biased application of its removal rules:

• rehosted content (when the content isn't rehosted, or it's rehosted on a site that actually syndactes it)

• unsuitable source (when equally as partisan sources going the opposite way are allowed)

• all caps in the title (when it's actually justified, such as US states abbreviations)

• not exact title (when oftentimes the title is actually exactly-copy pasted, or all-caps have been removed as per above rule)

• already submitted (when the previous submission is often not the same article, or has been itself removed)

• megathread (when content damaging to one candidate is collated into a megathread and then shot straight to second page by unsticking it, whereas multiple submissions on the same topic that is damaging to the other candidate are allowed regularly)

If you point out these injustices, you face a gauntlet of spurious excuses, requests for correction, new removals by other mods that supposedly weren't informed or by the overzealous moderation bots. If you invest hours into getting past all of this, your submission is finally allowed... hours later, with that much less impact. And that's just to get one small submission published.

This system means that the mods have endless excuses for their censorship, and can always point to their 'willingness' to correct their 'mistakes'. Meanwhile, people are faced with such a barrier to posting that for the most part they simply give up, leaving the subreddit to the crowd and ideology the mods don't harass.