Monday morning, a video showing a man being dragged off of a United Airlines flight went viral and while the story was all over social media, the popular site Reddit decided to remove it.
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Observer reported:
It seemed like all the internet was talking about this morning was the viral video of a man being dragged off a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville last night because a United employee needed to take his seat. The man tried to explain that he was a doctor who needed to see patients in Louisville, but to no avail.
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Both United Airlines and the airport security officers who treated the man with such force were widely condemned—”United” was one of the top trends on Twitter Monday morning.
But there was one social network where the United story couldn’t gain much traction, no matter how much users tried: Reddit. Moderators on the online discussion board have removed several front page posts that included the controversial video. The exact number of deleted posts is not clear because the video is constantly being uploaded, removed and re-uploaded (though ironically, one of the deleted posts was from the subreddit r/undelete).
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Mods gave several reasons for deleting the clip, including that the video was “damaging to a corporation,” that it showed footage of “police brutality or harassment” (the so-called “Rule 4”) and that it could be construed as a “witch hunt” against United Airlines or the security personnel.
Reddit’s users were not pleased, to say the least, with the deletions, and responded accordingly.
One user, CloudCityPDX, wrote in the cached r/videos thread that the site’s explanation for the deletions didn’t pass muster: “Deleting this over a supposed rule 4 violation is laughable considering how many police brutality videos you can find on this subreddit by simply searching ‘police’ and then sorting by top.”
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“This is shameful,” chornu wrote.
Other users offered a different perspective.
“When a company gets big enough it’s pretty hard to give employees leeway while keeping order so these things doesn’t happen,” Miguelinileugim noted. “And even those that do might simply not have caring enough employees as for them to do the right thing.”
The r/video moderators went on to confirm that the video was deleted because it supposedly violated Rule 4 involving police harassment and Rule 9 regarding depictions of assault, the Observer reported.
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“Even if this is not a government police force, they are hired officers abusing their power and harassing another person,” the moderators explained. “Being forcibly ripped out of your seat and dragged across the floor against your will is an assault.”
In an interesting twist, a second video which showed the man bloodied and disoriented as he unsuccessfully tried to make his way back onto the plane was reportedly allowed to stay on the site.
