The "What happened in your state last week?" Megathread, Week 23 - Politics

The "What happened in your state last week?" Megathread, Week 23
June 2019 Metathread
Kushner’s Company Received $90M From Anonymous Foreign Investors, Says Report
Poll: 74 percent of Americans say former Trump officials should obey congressional subpoenas
Watergate Figure John Dean Testifies On Monday And Trump Is Already Freaking Out
'Corruption in Plain Sight': Jared Kushner Firm Took in $90 Million From Unnamed Foreign Entities Since 2017
Catholic Church spent $10.6 million to lobby against legislation that would benefit victims of child sex abuse
Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017
Georgia congressman refuses to read Mueller report because he no longer trusts investigations
Holding William Barr and Don McGahn in Contempt Must Be Just the Beginning
Impeachment Fever: The Freedom Caucus Reaps What It Has Sown — Far-Right House Members Spent Years Trying to Impeach Obama Appointees. Suddenly They’re Concerned With Civility.
Chao Paved Way For Husband To Get Funds For Special KY Projects Before 2020
President Trump has made 10,796 false or misleading claims over 869 days
Justice Dept. Agrees to Turn Over Key Mueller Evidence to House
GOP Senators Join Dems To Block Trump Admin’s Saudi Arabian Arms Sales
Chao created special path for McConnell’s favored projects
Ocasio-Cortez Suggests 'Powerful People Trying to Bribe' Trump Into Iran War
Elizabeth Warren Is Winning Over Left-Wing Hearts In Iowa
British Politician Boris Johnson Hung Up on Donald Trump's Call Because He Thought It Was a Prank
Alabama law still protects rapists’ parental rights while abortion banned for victims
Trump and Macron's symbolic friendship tree 'has died'
Grants for projects favored by McConnell raise ethical questions for Elaine Chao: report
GOP group urges Republicans to speak out on obstruction claims against Trump in new ad
Bryan Cranston slams Trump’s ‘demagoguery’ at the Tony Awards
US embassies defy Trump administration orders not to fly LGBT+ flags
Embassies worldwide are defying Trump & flying the Pride flag without permission.
Fox News Stars Begin Pushing Rumors About Joe Biden’s Health

The "What happened in your state last week?" Megathread, Week 23

Posted: 10 Jun 2019 09:00 AM PDT

Welcome to the 'What happened in your state last week' thread, where you can post any local political news stories that you find important in the comments. This is a weekly thread posted every Monday, in order to facilitate more discussion on local issues on /r/politics. Since this is intended to be a thread about local politics, top-level comments that are exclusively about national issues will not be allowed. When commenting, please include the state you're living in, and don't forget to link sources. Also, please actually describe what happened. "I live in X, you know what happened" isn't helpful to users and will be removed.

If someone from your state made a news round-up that you think is insufficient, feel free to comment to that round-up with further news stories. Enjoy discussion, and review our civility guidelines before engaging with others.

submitted by /u/optimalg
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June 2019 Metathread

Posted: 10 Jun 2019 06:59 AM PDT

June 2019 Meta Thread: State of the Sub

Hello, /r/politics community! Welcome to our meta thread. The purpose of this thread is to discuss the overall state of the subreddit, including recent rule revisions, recent and upcoming changes, and suggestions you have for improving the sub.

Reintroducing Temporary Bans

We have reintroduced temporary bans for incivility directed at other users in order to tamp down on unruly behavior. Users who are uncivil towards others will be issued a 1 day or 21 day ban after their first offense, depending on the severity of the comment. Longer bans will be issued for subsequent violations. Even if someone is uncivil towards you, please just report and move on - being rude just isn't cool.

Please keep our civility rules in mind when engaging within the community. You can attack ideas without attacking the user.

The importance of accurate reporting

Please refrain from using the report function as a "super downvote" for posts you may not like or you may disagree with. We lean on our users to report things for us but when there's an abundance of false reporting, it makes our jobs very difficult and diverts our attention from legitimate rule-breaking content.

Reporting something will not cause something to be removed, it still needs to be reviewed by someone first.

New Age Gate

To combat bots, trolling, and ban evasion, we have introduced an age gate on all new users. This means that new users will have to wait a certain period of time before they can post or comment within the sub. New users will still be able to post in AMA threads however.

Queue Flooding Automation

As a reminder, users should allow at least 10 minutes to pass between each submission and they should submit no more than 5 articles within a 24 hour window. We don't want users spamming our sub and we want other users to have the opportunity to submit content too. This rule will now be enforced automatically with polmodbot.

Looking for new moderators

We are always looking for new moderators to join our team, especially now as we enter into the 2020 campaign season. If you're interested, submit an application here and we'll get back to you if we think you're a good fit.

Generally we want people who can really devote time to moderating each week, who can moderate and enforce the rules objectively, and who have a long and healthy post history in this sub.

A quick note on civility:

Political tension seems to be at an all-time high, and the rhetoric is getting more heated by the day. Our goal at r/politics has not changed, however: We have always sought to provide a space for users of all political stripes to participate, and the most important component of that is civility.

We want to remind everyone that no matter what side of the aisle you are on, no matter your specific political beliefs, the ability to have civil and reasoned debate with another person is the cornerstone of our subreddit. Take a moment to consider the wonderful opportunity this community provides all of us not only to learn but to educate, to bridge the divide through civil and meaningful discourse.

It's a lofty goal, especially in our current climate, and that is why we need and are humbly asking for your help, because we can't do it on our own! As our subreddit grows, as we bring more and more people together under our roof, please help us with our mission to make and keep this a truly special place, where everyone is welcome to debate and discuss politics in a welcoming environment, because not only do you, the users deserve no less, but our discourse as a whole deserves and needs it as well.

Q&A:

Q. "I see rule-breaking comments all the time, why aren't they removed?"

Simple, comments that break the rules often go unreported. We receive thousands and thousands of comments a day and we rely on automation and our users to report comments that break our rules. If a rule-breaking comment is not reported, a moderator will almost certainly never see it.

Additionally, we are dealing with a large volume of reports each day so it takes us time to review everything. To put things into perspective, we receive about 7,000 reports each and every day.

The best thing to do to a comment that is clearly rule-breaking is to downvote, report, and move on; especially in cases of trolling.

Q. "Why aren't you mods doing more to combat the bots that troll this subreddit?"

Bots are something the team is constantly dealing with and we are always trying to automate ways to identify them more quickly, but truthfully our tools are quite limited and most of the work is done manually. We are a small team doing the best we can with our limited set of tools. If you think a user is a bot or troll, please report and move on.

Q. "There are websites on the domain whitelist that I don't think should be there. Why can't we remove them?"

In August of 2017 we moved from a domain blacklist - which targetted rule breaking domains - to a domain whitelist - that approved generally rule compliant domains. At that time, we were very sensitive to the impact of making this change, and were determined to make certain that the whitelist was not a round-about way of trying to curate our front page, or push submissions in a different ideological direction than what users were interested in submitting. To guide us, we created a 'domain notability' requirement, which would ensure that any domain that was sufficiently influential or remarkable would be permitted.

Two years later, we're extremely happy with the impact of the whitelist system. It has dramatically reduced the amount of spam and obvious rule breaking content that we have submitted to us. Things that were once incredibly commonplace - advertising spam, Macedonian fake news / click-bait websites, blogs, Youtube promoters etc - are now made instantly irrelevant. This has made r/politics/new much easier to browse, and has let the moderator team focus our efforts elsewhere - on enforcing comment guidelines, removing trolls, removing off topic content etc etc. There are many domains that we receive regular complaints about - their content may be inflammatory, controversial, or spurious. The fact is that we were very actively trying not to target those domains when moving to this system. We want to make user voting - the core mechanic that all of reddit is based around - the primary method of curation on our page. We still feel confident that our approach is sound - but of course we will discuss further below.

Please (for the love of all that is holy) try to remember - inclusion on the whitelist is not an endorsement by the mod team or r/politics, or a reflection of reputability. Is is solely reflective of whether the domain is notable.

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