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.
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!”.