I mean it sounds crazy and people over there likely don’t give a fuck but wouldn’t it be worth a shot?
11% of Reddit is owned by the company Tencent. The company has numerous CPC party members and someone on the board of directors who’s a member as well as a deputy to the National People’s Congress.
Couldn’t we ask them, as fellow communists, if they’d consider putting some pressure on Reddit to, at minimum, push back against far-right and anti-china sentiment as well as try to get some of the leftist communities we’ve lost back?
Again I know it sounds crazy but isn’t this what our movement is all about? Solidarity and internationalism?
I very much agree with this and i think we should strive to maintain at least some form of presence on the “mainstream” platforms. Communists should go to where the people are, not isolate ourselves in echo-chambers.
That being said, this must not become a justification for self-censorship. If the rules and the moderation on those platforms make it impossible to openly express principled progressive, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist beliefs, then it’s not we who are chosing to abandon these platforms.
The response to “mainstream” platforms driving communists out can only be to create, join and support alternative platforms that will not censor us, and to try our best to make these new platforms into ones which are big enough to reach the masses. We have to become the new mainstream for those disaffected with the system.
The increasingly censorious and repressive nature of the big corporate platforms - and not just toward communists but toward anyone who steps out of the ever shrinking window of acceptable status quo - is already having the effect of forcing people to migrate. So this shift is happening either way. Our task is to maintain enough of a presence on those platforms to be able to guide people to the leftist alternative before the right wing captures them.