Couldn't have said it better, OP. Motion seconded.

I find it interesting that alot of the people who are argueing we need to censor r/conspiracy are very odd accounts. People who normally don't post in r/conspiracy that find their way here to complain. Even the OP of this post is an interesting account, 3 years old, started posting 19 days ago and only 17 comments all in r/conspiracy complaining about this new wave of users.

No its more like people who see how this sub is being distracted by political posts not even related to conspiracies.

The mods chose sides a long time ago and you're just putting yourself on their radar for insta-ban by speaking your mind like this.

You couldn't have said it better

I am not worried about any of these guys banning me. I have been posting here for years.

The only reason for any possible choosing of sides by the mods is because this sub has been allowed to be a dumping ground for political posts and it has infected this subreddit.

There is a legit quandry on the part of the mods here in that /r/conspiracy has a proud tradition and policy of no censorship. It is a policy that matters to everyone who has been in this sub for any length of time. However, people are taking advantage of this subreddit's no censorship policy to the point where this subreddit has been taken over by people who want to post about politics and no conspiracies.

Three comes a point where these moderators need to look themselves in the mirror and decide what matters to them. When they start putting their own politics ahead of what this sub is supposed to mean then they have lost their way.

While I understand and sympathize with you, I have to disagree.

One, most conspiracy theories have a government-coverup element to them and therefore is subject to being politically charged. I understand you said "purely political non-conspiracy postings" but it would be so subjective to implement.

Two, censorship is a slippery slope and it could cause more chaos than benefits.

I don't have an answer other than just to wait it out, upvote/downvote as desired, and contribute to conspiracy-related discussions. The mods here have been amazing. I'm 92.3% sure they are human and I'm sure they are struggling with a solution as well.

Upvoting and downvoting does not work against an army of brigading shills on both sides of the political spectrum. Conspiracy posts are getting drowned off the front page.

I have sat in the new queue and vigilantly tried to downvote political advocacy posts and upvote conspiracy posts and self posts, but it does not matter anymore. When the regular people are outnumbered by thousands of people upvoting political posts then we can vote til we are blue in the face and it will not matter.

I do not think that the mods coming down hard and strict for a week or two so people can move on to where they normally post in their political echo chamber and out of here is a slippery slope problem that censorship normally would be. This is purely about cleansing an infection, nothing more.

I think the brigading is organized over chat forums like irc and discord. This has been targeted.

We need a mole to take screenshots or do some audio recording.

What we really need to do is set up a private subreddit specifically for shilling, get a bunch of leftist piece of shit mods to partake, then leak it.

Ah shit, I'm starting to think like "them".

"Leftist piece of shit", you realize you are part of the problem? Conspiracy is neither right or left, it's just a conspiracy.

They are mutually exclusive terms, I'm talking about leftist mods who are also pieces of shit.

Sorry Misunderstood you

leftist mods

its authoritarian and corrupt mods,

left or right is politics which stands or falls on other criteria. a motivating factor in some cases, irrelevant in others.

conspiracy is about the covert manipulation or suppression of news, political, social and legal things. thievery and corruption, dark deeds.

You're it BigPharma.

Upvoting and downvoting does not work against an army of brigading shills on both sides of the political spectrum.

This.

It's not brigading just because peoples votes do not follow your beliefs.

Its not downvoting belifs. There are people who are try to suppress information by working togeather.

For people who are new to Reddit censorship, what OP is advocating is censorship of this sub reddit - one of the few that remains uncensored.

That's absolutely not true and you know it. I don't understand why you're pushing that. The 4 most up voted conspiracies this sub has ever had were deleted. Actual conspiracies. But because it made the new establishment look bad... Censored.

lol, if you're trying to claim you're not pro censorship of this sub, next time don't use the word censorship in your title. If you want a new reddit to be no censorship, the obvious implication is that this one would have censorship.

Being downvoted is not censorship. People voting on stuff is not brigading.

So, did you deliberately deflect there or did you just not see it. I'll spell it out for you seeing that black and white is considered advanced nuance here these days. I was responding to your comment claiming that this sub remains one of the few that's uncensored. I of course want it to be uncensored but it's not.

Down voting is not censorship, but mods deleting/removing threads because it's a genuine conspiracy against their poster boy is.

92.3% are you mad? We have automoderator!

I think this is a great idea from the OP. Your alternative suggestion to keep doing what we've been doing is clearly not working.

By the way, before anyone goes hysterical and starts citing "CENSORSHIP!!!" please bear in mind OP had only suggested a TEMPORARY ban of just a week.

OP suggested censorship and you're surprised people are saying "hey, let's not have censorship"?

Not even remotely close to what i said but thanks for your contribution to this important topic!

True true.

What if there was an interim strategy of asking the mods to call out to the long-time conspiracy lurkers here to be active in the voting and discussion? I was one of them until I saw what was happening.

Try that for a few days. If that doesn't work, then a hybrid approach between OP and /u/Git_Off_Me_Lawn to minimize low-effort posts. A temporary rule that each post needs to specifically list out:

1) Conspirators

2) Supporting Evidence

3) Conspiracy Theory

A big fear I have is Mod fatigue. OPs suggestion is only for a week so we are asking them to do more work for a week. Not unreasonable. However, they will be subject to all kinds of crap in that week. And what if we need more than a week... and so on. I can't speak for the mods but at some point it becomes not worth it. CTR/AB/CA is getting paid to do this. Mods aren't.

This is how Mod coups happen.

You made a lot of good points and provided a reasonable framework for your hybrid idea. Nothing wrong with your first idea to get the loyal users to be more active, but unfortunately I see regular posters being downvoted to hell - but it'd still be a good start. We've definitely gotta do something. I absolutely loathe the idea of censorship (even for a short, temporary time) in a sub that's free to discuss things such as the holocaust, something that people in western europe aren't even free to do, but free speech won't really matter once this sub looks like r/politics.

As far as your understandable worry about mod fatigue if we went w/your hybrid idea, is there any way some subscribers (vetted by regulars) could help them out? Especially since it would only be for a pretty short period of time. I would volunteer to mod, but I have zero idea how to do that and I'm not sure I'm eligible anyway. I would be happy to volunteer to help in any way that the mods would have me help, though, like unimportant busy work or something. I have a flexible work schedule and this sub has always felt like a lifeline to sanity in a false-flag/holographic kind of world, and I want it to stay that way.

"This sub has always felt like a lifeline to sanity"

Fuck. That really resonated with me.

Well said.

Agreed! OP for the mod team!

anyone calling for censorship is not a part of the sub period!

You are a babe in the woods noob to this sub compared to me, who has been here since the creation of this sub. I do not call for drastic and decisive action lightly.

This subreddit is hard to recognize right now, and the election being over has not brought the correction that people thought it would. This place is more /r/politics_uncensored than it is /r/conspiracy. But you are relatively new and do not have the same frame of reference as I and many of the mods have.

i am a babe <---TY

I agree OP.

It's so easy to get sucked into the political debates too, at least for me, and I miss submissions about cool conspiracies that are not related to Trump/Anti-Trump.

I like it. It's fair.

I've been struggling with the dichotomy of freedom of speech vs. censorship for a while during my private sessions of lamentation of this sub. It is a similar debate to that of individual freedom vs. security, transposed to the sun that argues about that relationship most. I most strongly voiced my concerns of censorship last week regarding a hive of voting account worker bees, essentially a down-voting behemoth capable of ranking posts to into an early grave.

I love this sub for the same reasons it frustrates me; anyone can say just about anything they like, and no argument is too ridiculous.

One thing I will reiterate from previous arguments is the appeal for mutual cooperation. I remember when this sub was capable of logical debate upon which a group consensus could be amicably achieved. Logging on to PMs of being called a shill (or worse) by people who's post histories are nothing but partisan jargon and doublespeak parroted ad infinitum is discouraging and serves only to embolden the user to post responses from a place of emotion as opposed to logic.

The brigades are here to create rifts; I would have thought we could all see through this and overcome it together, though instead we've allowed these outsiders to ruin what was once a bastion of hope for those who felt things are not always as they seem. I feel if we relearn how to cooperate collectively, we could more easily identify those suspect accounts and simply ignore them into oblivion.

They do not deserve out time, efforts, nor our creativity.

I feel if we relearn how to cooperate collectively, we could more easily identify those suspect accounts and simply ignore them into oblivion.

We are being brigaded. Ignoring them or voting down or up makes little or no difference.

Politics and Conspriacy are inseparable. Maybe you should make a new sub.

Some of us have been here since before the Digg migration. Since before Reddit had subreddits. It was pretty good. Now, not so.

Yeah. Me too. This sub was created to divert the 9/11 Inside Job crowd so why would anyone expect US politics to get removed from this place now. It's hilarious actually.

This sub was created to divert the 9/11 Inside Job crowd.

Says the user with 1-year-old account, lol.

It was. Check into it. I've also been around for years.

I checked into it and can't find any connection, so I'll just assume that you're reporting alternative facts with no source, like your other claim of being around here for years.

I'm not wrong. You just don't know how to look into things that the mass media doesn't tell you.

So, you have no source and can't even provide a lead. Thanks for the contribution...not. Have fun with those alternative facts, Brother.

Thanks for your contribution. LMFAO.

Did you even write what he wrote?

purely political non-conspiracy postings

I did. Does reading what the op wrote mean I have to ageee with it?

You didn't write something that disagreed, then told him to make a new sub.

I might have misread your previous comment. Did you mean read what op wrote? If that's what you meant did you read what I wrote. Here you go in case you missed it.

Politics and Conspriacy are inseparable.

Right, but there's a difference between posting political articles and things about conspiracies related to politics. Surely you can tell the difference between the two?

I think too many conspiracies just involve politics by default to clamp down on them for just that reason. What I might be in favor of is a ban on low effort posts.

If you scroll down New you'll see dozens of "Trump does a thing" articles posted without any sort of commentary or conspiracy even mentioned. It's just left there for a few random users to either praise or denounce it in the comments.

Even then though, the good stuff is still around. 9/11 discussions, aliens, chemtrails, etc. You just wade through a stream of crap to get to it sometimes.

articles posted without any sort of commentary or conspiracy even mentioned

This especially.

If you scroll down New you'll see dozens of "Trump does a thing" articles posted without any sort of commentary or conspiracy even mentioned.

This, so...so...this.

I am not against people posting something related to politics if it is clearly something conspiratorial in it's nature, or if the person posting makes a plausible effort to tie it into an overarching conspiracy of some kind. You know, come up with a theory of their own as to why their post belongs in this sub.

It is the posts that are advocating a political position of one kind or another, low-effort political newsfeed links, or one side of a political spectrum or viewpoint bashing the other side, political posts that are not about a conspiracy at all that need to be culled from the subreddit. It is those kinds of non-conspiracy political postings that I see flooding the subreddit and are drowning out the real conspiracy posts, the posts where someone puts in their time and effort to research were the posts that were the backbone of this subreddit.

When you can look and see that there are 5,000+ active users in the sub (ffs today there were over 7,000 active users here at one point!) when normally we are closer to 1,000 active users, or closer to 2,000 on a really busy day then something is off. That many users who are normally never here are the ones re-defining this sub, they are the ones brigading all the non-conspiracy political to the front page every day and mucking up the sub.

If the low-effort non-conspiracy related political posts that really do not add value to the sub, and are not related to the primary conspiracy theme of this subreddit, are diligently removed for a short period of time then people will move on and stop posting and brigading this crap on to the front page.

After a time the strict interpretation and deletions can stop once the sub regains it's equilibrium. I am not advocating a permanent change to this sub's no-censorship tradition. I am advocating that the moderators do their job and stop people from taking advantage of the spirit of our no-censorship policy here so they can advocate a political position that has nothing to do with conspiracies at all.

Oh. Well this makes sense.

I had a hybrid suggestion in reply to /u/thesadpumpkin comment below.

Sorry I took so long to respond. I am fully onboard w/your idea.

No worries. I just posted here to let the commenter above (sorry - on mobile can't see name) know we drafted off his idea.

Shills trying hard to shut down this sub.

They almost had it with the $10m extra CTR got, but it wasn't quite enough. The newest funding round is $40m which will be more than enough to shill up every sub that's left.

BULLSHIT.

This is the Alternative News site for the Reddit Media, this is the balancing act between the Right Wing Faux News echo chamber (/r/the_Donald) and the Left Wing Fake News echo chamber (/r/politics) and that is GREAT BLESSING to have right now in this day and age of nonstop nonsense on the news that really matters and the information that must be seen. This place MUST ABSOLUTELY stay since it is more visible and would be harder to choke out if it started news. Politics (the shadow government and its dealings) is a MASSIVE slate to discuss conspiracies (9/11, Princess Diana, the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department, JFK, Pearl Harbor, Pizzagate and Political Pedophilia cases like Jimmy Savile and the Boystown Incidents, etc,,,) and no way should these things not be talked about.

Fuck off CTR.

All the people crying about censorship are missing the point by so fucking much it's laughable. Political posts unrelated to any type or form of conspiracy in nature should be removed.

This is not r/politicsunleashed.

This not r/breakingnews

This is not r/leftvsright

People said this kind of crap would cease after the election, they were so wrong.

A conspiracy sub should delete political conspiracy stories?

That's a pretty weird position to take.

Political posts unrelated to any type or form of conspiracy in nature should be removed.

I am a little perplexed at how many people are reading so selectively, or are just not understanding what is being said. You are far from the first person here who is choosing to not see this primary point.

It is not all political posts we are talking about here, it's the lazy political advocacy or information posts, or posts where one side of a political spectrum is attacking the other or disagreeing with a position of the other side, posts that are just echoing boilerplate MSM talking points, or political posts that are not even tangentially relating to conspiracies or trying to make a case for a conspiracy, that we are talking about.

Those posts are few and far between and easy to ignore or downvote.

The mods are doing a great job - no changes needed.

I currently count 6 of them in the top 25 on the front page. Almost 30% is a little more than "few and far between", and I consider today to be a relatively good day.

In the end, if this discussion keeps the regulars and true supporters of the sub vigilant and voting. If this conversation causes other people who are here for reasons more politically inclined to have a respect for this sub and the desire of the more core users to cut back on all the political fluff, and perhaps choose to not post something that is not related to a conspiracy, then maybe the post-election correction that so many are looking for can occur without the mods having to take any action.

Ideally I would like people to respect this subreddit, appreciate and honor the spirit of our policy of non-censorship, without taking undue advantage of it, then, to me, that is a perfect outcome.

In my opinion it's maybe 1 out of 25.

Pretty good ratio if you ask me.

The non-stop concern trolling and attacks against this sub are way worse than a 1 out of 25 ratio.

There is no such thing as concern trolling unless you are a shill trying to hide an agenda.

Yes, yes, but I'm not hiding my agenda, it's out in the open.

It's called the agenda of not wanting to censor this sub.

its not censoring the sub, its just bring it back to its original intent which is to talk about conspiracy related issues of all types, not be overwhelmed by narratives that distract, divide and deceive.

Downvoting to you, sir.

Boo.

.

Some of the conspiracies are political in nature though?

And you wouldn't be suggesting...a temporary...ban...on anything...to prevent..abuse?

I agree to many shills trying to post controlling narratives. I made a recommendation on another post to start filtering out controlling narratives. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/5qs9h0/with_the_influx_on_this_sub_of_fake_news_and/

I dont like the line that this draws.... So many times i can clearly see how a post could tie into conspiracy and I see several comments along the lines of "what is the conspiracy?" This a very broad sub and i like the lack of censorship we have now.

delete the UFO and similar supernatural crap also.

no way dude, the UFO cover-up is a classic example of a massive government conspiracy to hide information/"the truth" from the people.

I agree.

However - there are conspiracies about politics and those should be allowed.

Also remember - there is a report button beneath each post. This is anonymous reporting to the mods. It will flag the post in the moderator queue and make it easy for the mods to find and remove. You can also report threads that aren't conspiracies.

I feel if we relearn how to cooperate collectively, we could more easily identify those suspect accounts and simply ignore them into oblivion.

We are being brigaded. Ignoring them or voting down or up makes little or no difference.

This sub was created to divert the 9/11 Inside Job crowd.

Says the user with 1-year-old account, lol.

"Leftist piece of shit", you realize you are part of the problem? Conspiracy is neither right or left, it's just a conspiracy.