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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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.