Hey all,
Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I’d learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it’s run.
This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.
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“Safe space” as a term comes from particular considerations about marginalized, especially LGBTQ+, people inhabiting academic space. The use of “safe” isn’t necessarily about the participants’ sensitivities so much as it’s in reference to a facilitator’s (such as a teacher) trustworthiness. As a queer person, can I come out to the person facilitating this space (and, possibly, to the others in this space) without fear of identity-based psychological/emotional or physical harm/violence? And can I trust that this facilitator will respect my identity and not harm me in any way?
“Sanitized space” — well, that isn’t really a term which comes from anywhere. We created it as a convenience for drawing comparison between other types of space.
Of course, the “paradox of tolerance” is something many of us are well acquainted with, and I think it’s always relevant when talking about bigotry. A space can’t be safe, sanitized, brave, accountable, tolerant, etc. unless we, as a rule, do not tolerate bigotry.
The problem with a “tolerant space” is that simple tolerance (with respect to identity) can imply some level of disagreeableness. Many people, especially queer people and people of color, don’t want to just be tolerated, as this can convey that our identities are something to be ‘put up with’ or ‘endured’ by others, when it should be bigotry that is the actual burden. In this case, what I personally want is acceptance and affirmation — to have my identity accepted, to have difference be welcomed, and to be affirmed in my experiences (especially with discrimination and bigotry).
Of course, you could say that leaving certain harmful content up makes a platform less tolerant, but as was raised in our philosophy article, what is the bar for harmful? Many of those who wrote this post, including myself, are frequent targets for bigotry, but our personal standards for ‘harmful’ aren’t universally applicable. Plus, it’s a lot harder to gauge the harm of long-form posts/comments than to moderate, say, messages in a chatroom.
The other aspect of this is: I hate having to wait on moderators and admins to take action, and I don’t want to put all the onus/responsibility for shaping the space on them. It’s glaring to me if other users don’t say or do anything about it and just leave it alone. A moderator can remove the content and ban the offending person, but it doesn’t get rid of the sour taste in my mouth that the others alongside me saw no need to do anything, which raises questions for me of their trustworthiness in handling other, more unclear instances of bigotry or more subtle prejudice.
I’ve been in spaces before which were highly vigilant in removing bigots and their speech, but even without them, what about the attitudes of others in the space? If they don’t take the right tone or approach to bigotry before the mod acts, it’s harder to trust them to listen when one of them does something less obviously harmful.
You may personally have not seen anything harmful on here, but I have seen stuff I would consider outright or subtly harmful, some of it directed at people like me. Honestly, I feel more assured when I can see that others have shown strong resistance to that kind of speech, which is what I’m really looking for to determine if a space is safe for me. Whether the content itself gets removed after that fact becomes of less consequence to me.
I’m personally more a fan of building an “accountable space”:
I really like that term, “Accountable Space”. Thanks for introducing me!
You’re more than welcome to share your opinion. The issue I’ve found is that what’s considered harmful by different people varies quite a bit. Safe spaces online seem to run into a frequent problem of brooding persecution complexes which leads to having to self censor around specific individuals. This can lead to a very specific kind of bullying and in rare cases a hijacking of these spaces. More importantly for our purposes, it’s the assumption of bad faith that’s not compatible with what we’re trying to accomplish here- these spaces often become echo chambers for the most marginalized identities because no one is perfectly educated and omnipotent and any discomfort is viewed as problematic discussion and removed even in cases when it is tolerant (simply due to the perceived discomfort from having ones views challenged). They’re also fundamentally incompatible with intersectionality in a variety of ways, but perhaps most notably a person of privilege may be chastised for not recognizing their privilege or being educated and the person of privilege can use the idea of a safe space to censor a more marginalized individual on the grounds that it made them upset.
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I disagree. I’ve seen the exact pattern of behavior Gaywallet is talking about, over and over again, in communities that vary from from YA writing advice to antique appraisal. Too often, we start subjecting each other and our allies to ideological purity tests that only get more stringent every time the current crop of “bad actors” or “disruptive influences” has been eliminated. And in a really disturbing number of the cases I’ve personally seen, the community member responsible (either officially or de facto) for creating these purity tests (and judging the results) isn’t a member of any of the marginalized groups they’re policing. In the rest of the cases when they were a member of a marginalized group, these folks have had a bad habit of seeing oppression as a ranked competitive event in which whatever group they belong to is the “most” oppressed, and therefore more important than the others.
For a real example, they might excuse themselves for referring handicapped people with a slur, but are very strict about moderating other peoples’ uses of everyday words/phrases that track back to a Native American concepts, even unintentionally. In (another, real) example of this, someone in a gardening forum I used to frequent got suspended for talking about wanting to set up a circular divided plot and calling it a “wheel garden”, because it’s shaped like a wheel, without knowing that the concept of a “medicine wheel” exists. For another real example in a different forum, and I swear to fucking God that I’m not making this up, a non-indiginous moderator who constantly talked about her “spirit guides” ended up removing/muting the posts from someone in a theater subforum who asked “What do you see as the spine of this play?” because the question was allegedly ableist against paralyzed people.
The practical result of all of this is everyone either walks on eggshells around that person and their direct reports, or gets run out. We’d constantly have to be trying to anticipate what new, unwritten rule of communication was coming next, because the warnings for violating it would only come in a very narrow window before the ban hammer started being applied. We end up with a place where we can’t even criticize the worst bits of our own marginalized communities (like, in my case, complaining about bi and ace erasure in the wider LGBTQ+ space, or the dubiously minimal gains we’ve made in intersectionality) without being censured, muted, suspended, or banned for being bigoted. That’s the definition of an echo chamber, and the constant sniffing around for more and more granularly defined “bad actors” generally meets the layperson’s definition of a persecution complex (note: I am not licensed to practice psychiatry or make medical diagnoses in your state/territory).
Just talking about the fact that this problem exists, and how it begins, is not bigotry. It’s a problem. And it needs to be addressed, preferably before people start talking about (real examples) how much a POS a white musical artist is for culturally appropriating dreadlocks or how racist it is for anyone other than Romani to read tarot cards. The kinds of spaces Gaywallet is talking about don’t just pop up fully formed overnight, they start out where Beehaw is now and slowly evolve that way over time. Talking frankly about how that’s not what we want to be and about how we plan to prevent that is not problematic, it’s necessary.
“There is no cause so right that you cannot find a fool who follows it.” --Larry Niven.
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Oh, you’re definitely right in that I’ve seen communities go the other way, and you’re also right in being concerned that the transition to alt-right-friendly is frequently more common than left-ideological-purity. Which way a community slides, or, whether it slides at all, is almost exclusively down to the community’s moderation policies and enforcement.
What you’ll also see a lot of the time is a community where the cryptofacists infiltrate the discussion with carefully-phrased bigotry, walking up to the ban-line and putting just the tip of their big toe on it. Then, when other community members (rightly and validly) tell them to fuck off, the community members risk getting moderated if their request for off-fucking is phrased too harshly. The alt-right basically use that kind of bright-line moderation as a shield, and won’t hesitate to report every negative comment they receive as a reply to “But what positive benefits to society do trans people provide? I’m just asking questions.”
So moderating a safe community is hard work, no doubt. There’s a fine line between over and under moderating, and we can’t easily rely on a rules-as-written method to do it effectively. There always has to be some degree of subjective discretion, but that degree of subjective discretion can’t be so far as to become a purity test.
So, yes, I agree with you that the terms “persecution complex” and “echo chamber” can be effectively weaponized, but it’s not the words themselves that are the problem. In their appropriate context, they’d perfectly accurate and useful for the creation of models and predictions. But the alt-right is famous for taking everyday words and phrases and trying to use them against us, because, to them, words have no real meaning. They’re used like magical incatations that are expected to ward us off and confuse us, rather than as tools of communication. See: “You’re being racist against white people!”, “I identify as an attack helicopter!”, or “You’re supposed to be tolerant!”.
Absolutely agreed, we would be removing those. What you’re talking about is a space that’s intolerant of intolerant individuals. That is absolutely this space. But a safe space, a brave space, and a ‘sanitized’ space are all different concepts. Google can be of assistance for the first two if you need more context; the latter is defined in the piece we (admins and moderators, a diverse group consisting of several poc identities, men, women, nonbinary, lgbtq+, multiple theisms, and in general a high level of intersectionality) wrote.
Apologies if any of what I said was unclear. Echo chamber is not specific to marginalized identities and nor is persecution complex. These are specific kind of environments, and behaviors respectively. The nuances of this in relation to safe spaces are spelled out in the philosophy post, and I just attempted to distill a little of what isn’t fully touched upon or elucidated into a shorter form.
I’d like to address any concerns that you have, but I’m not sure what they are. Assuming my language is loaded without asking me questions about how I’m using my language has me hesitant and afraid to share more. I don’t want to upset you, but I’m struggling to understand your concerns, and when I tried to foresee them I both missed the mark and was chastised for it. If you have anything you’d like me to talk more about, could you help me understand the underlying concern you have here? What in the original post wasn’t explained well enough, or could use additional clarity?
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I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of what’s happening or what is explained in the philosophy post. In fact, we explicitly state that sanitized spaces are both desirable and needed in the world, but that’s not what we’re trying to accomplish here. The relevant quote is about 1/3rd of the way down, and copied here for posterity
We don’t spend a lot of time talking about the why, but that’s also explained in a footnote. Unfortunately we are busy running this website and moderating the content, which is a LOT of work - there’s often hundreds or thousands of messages a day in the moderator channels discussing what content should be left up and what should be taken down. There isn’t a ton of time to spend on posts like this one, which I made sure we prioritized, so that people could have better transparency into everything happening behind the scenes.
To be clear, nearly all harmful material is removed. This post was about the stuff that falls into a gray area, which we tried to do our best to explain. If you have specific examples of speech that you take issue with and are looking for more detail into why it remained up, feel free to reach out with tangible examples and we can do our best to explain how we arrived at a consensus on whether to leave it up or take it down. Most of the cases where content isn’t removed involve individuals who are learning and some of these examples actually result in the original poster editing their post and explaining that they learned something tangible that day and apologize for causing issues.
This is also addressed in the post - what is offensive to one user isn’t necessarily offensive to another user, and this is explaining how we do our best to accommodate that. Earlier this week there was an individual who had been traumatized by men who was offended by the very presence of cis men on this instance. If we were to accommodate this individual, we’d have to remove all cis men from the instance. That action would be offensive in and of itself to every cis man on the instance. There’s no way to accommodate both sides of this issue and that’s what the spirit of this post is about.
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I understand being guarded against this. I have several queer identities, one of which is being trans, meaning that I’m often the target of hate speech. I have no desire to see this on this platform, and the easiest way to explain our space is to say that we are a safe space (this is itemized in another philosophy post), but we are not a sanitized space. I’m not sure how best to collect “best of community” type posts, or show examples of what gets left up, but I think you’re not the only person that this would benefit, so I’d love for them to get collected and shown off at some point.
This post was mainly to quickly address issues like the one I highlighted above, which are tricky to navigate. This post was to help users understand when they do come across content like this (which is awesomely quite rare) why it may have been left up. We of course always encourage you to report content if you are unsure, but we don’t always have time to explain everything and this is our attempt at a compromise where we explain the ideals as an attempt to gain a little bit of trust.
A situation that might be relevant to this. For most people in the western world communism (Marxism, Leninism, Maoism and all the variants) are largely theoretical constructs.
Unfortunately there are people for whom oppression under these kind of political order has not been that far in their memories. Beehaw for good or bad seems to have inherited a connection with lemmy.ml due to historical reasons and there seems to be many users there who bring bad faith support in this context.
Does this not count as important as transphobic or islamophobic content because it’s outside the general experience of people in the western world who likely makes up a majority of users on this platform?
From the perspective of a person in say America, it’s a theoretical discussion about something that acts as counterweight to the flaws of the capitalistic system, a topic of debate. Saying oppression under communist (popular definition, not technical) regimes are made up by western media is something that might not qualify as hate speech.
I’ve lived in places where you were brutalized and sometimes executed by maoists if you dared to leave your house after 5pm.
spoiler
I’ve seen a tree which was used to kill babies of supposed anti-communists by bashing their heads against it. You could see little bits of skull on the ground in the soil after all these years.
Edit: Added spoiler tag to some disturbing content.
Thank you for making me read this in the morning. You could have asked me a question without that imagery.
We do not allow bigoted content on our platform. This is explicitly called out in many parts of our philosophy documentation.
I apologize. It wasn’t my intention to hurt people in any way. An attempt at communicating how different realities might be based on where you’re from. I’ve tried to add spoiler tags to it, though I don’t know how successful it was.
In a way I’m sorry I asked this question as well.
Thank you for apologizing, I promise I’ll be fine 💜
I prefer the term “tolerant space”.
The “paradox of intolerance” approach fits alongside the “safe space” terminology in that it assumes some natural order to things that needs to be understood and navigated.
Recontextualizing “tolerance” (the general idea) as “Tolerance” (the specific social contract) clarifies the situation: We are under no obligations to tolerate the intolerant because they have broken the reciprocal social contract of Tolerance.
A tolerant space is one where Tolerance is upheld and expected.
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Well said, I do like the phrase tolerance here for the reasons you’ve outlined. I also agree that by looking at “safe spaces” it’s really putting the onus on the people who are offended as opposed to the offenders.
If you roll up to a space known for its tolerance and you can’t get a long? You are probably the problem