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.
Question:
“It’s ok to punch a Nazi” or “It’s ok to execute a pedo” content acceptable? and tangentially related Publishing “Mugshots of criminals” fetishism posts, in the moderation philosophy here?
My personal ethos of moderation is to recognize in written policy that we have these biases to have “they/them” which can backdoor exceptions content moderation standards. The backdoor is that if someone is sufficiently and clearly “bad” for the majority of the community then it becomes ok to wish harm on or dehumanize someone. In my opinion shouldn’t entertain these sorts of post because of the harm/damage done if the mob is wrong, or harm to ourselves by indulging in this sort of pornography of moral certainty. Because as long as a broader culture finds certain categories of people are ok to dehumanize, then there’s no (real) objective check upon what is acceptable based on the desire of that majority, even in a community like beehaw.org.
A tangible legal example which I think provides an example of my personal philosophy is how Human dignity is enshrined in the first article of the German Basic Law – which is the German Constitution. Article 1 reads:
My two cents here is that if a social media policy is to succeed, it needs something akin to this in it’s “constitution”, because to not have it opens too much moral relativism by bad-faith actors unrestrained and unconcerned by cultural norms to test and push the limits of what they can get away with by dehumanizing their enemies off-platform. ( IE: imagine Pizzagate, and it’s ultimate effect on Beehaw if it’s premise was accepted by the broader community. )
I saw a very popular post on Beehaw yesterday that clearly fit this pattern, and it seems like content designed to test the relative limits of the moderation policy of philosophy of places like Beehaw.>
___–Ideally, we don’t want people dehumanizing others, ever. Realistically, if someone is intolerant to you, we’re not going to tone police you for responding in kind. There’s nuance in there we touched on a little with this post, but it’s hard to itemize every possible human behavior.
If you see anything on Beehaw that makes you think twice about whether it should be up, please report it.
I read this as modspeak for “ideally, those posts wouldn’t be up, but because it’s usually intolerant people we’ll file the calls for violence towards these groups as just minority frustration that shouldn’t be tone policed.” Am I correct in my interpretation?
There’s annoying insults and there’s normalizing violence and dehumanization of the Other. I’m going to be disgusted with myself if I ever dehumanize even the worst person out of frustration. Have to remember that no, they’ve not monsters, they’ve made a series of bad choices that any of us could have chosen to make, we could all be “monsters” if we choose wrong enough. They’re not some odd other species of being that we could never ever fall into being.
Kick them off the platform, figure out how to make acts of bigotry illegal, but I don’t believe in violence unless it’s protecting yourself or others. And what I see looks much less like a preemptive strike to protect yourself/others and more like “whee, acceptable target, it’s punching time baby!”
I’m not sure I completely follow what you’re saying or asking, could you reword if you still have questions for me?
You’re posting that in reply to someone’s question about whether content about mugshots of awful criminals, about Nazi punching, and pedophile execution is acceptable, and their concern about whether it’s okay to dehumanize and wish harm on these people.
I am interpreting your reply as a diplomatically-worded and unclear way to say “Ideally, this kind of content would be unacceptable, but in practice we will let it fly because it’s just minority frustration at people being awful and telling them to stop would be tone policing.” I am also autistic and would like to know if my interpretation is correct, because my disability has gotten in the way of me interpreting people correctly before.
The rest of my reply to you was not a question but me stating my own views for context. I’ll try to explain it again, sorry for any confusion.
I also heavily disagree with allowing that sort of content. Dehumanization leads down dangerous roads, such as believing you could never ever be like your enemy, because after all, they’re not human. It leads to violation of rights because hey, they hurt someone too, let’s make them feel the pain 3x worse as punishment! Allowing calls to violence just seems very bad to me too.
I hold the view that that content should not be allowed while also believing that Nazi content and “it’s just freedom of speech” justifications for Nazi content should be removed and the Nazi should be banned. I do not support them or their views at all, but I do support not allowing any calls to violence or dehumanization, even if the person you want to dehumanize is really really bad. I also perceive the recent Nazi-punching content to be less about violence for the sake of protecting others and more about having an acceptable target to dehumanize.
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize it as simply frustration. These people are at serious risk of harm and death by some of the individuals who have passed or may even have friends or important figures in their lives who were directly harmed or even worse killed by intolerant people’s actions. I personally see no issues in them celebrating the fact that a person who caused harm and violence on the world is now unable to do so and that the world is a safer place with them gone.
Like any comment there’s going to be an axis of acceptability that it falls upon. A short comment simply celebrating this with words like ‘nice’ or ‘lol’ is very different from a one page manifesto of insults. There’s also just the general vibe of a thread- too much negativity and short one-liners which don’t promote discussion aren’t particularly helpful for the website either, so moderators may step in and lock the post or remove comments if it’s inspiring people to act negative towards each other.
For what it’s worth I’m also a heavily nonviolent person. I would rather die than inflict harm on just about anyone, simply because I do not wish to live with that burden. I’m not one to call for violence on anyone, but I understand that the world doesn’t exist in black and white and minority individuals need space to vent emotions, including anger, in a healthy manner. I think that it’s fair and necessary and good to be intolerant towards intolerant individuals and what that means from person to person is going to be different. I’ll probably never punch a nazi for the reasons above, but I’m not going to take that away from anyone else.
Do you have any recommendations for a space like Beehaw that’s free of that kind of content? I suppose I’m oversensitive. I wouldn’t tolerate a Nazi on an instance but I also really really really do not like celebrating violence. It’s not celebrating “they can’t cause harm anymore,” it’s celebrating the act of punching. Taking an army against the Nazis stopped them from committing more atrocities on a large scale, this is fine. Never heard of punching individual Nazis stopping any of them from just plotting out how to hurt more people and get back at the person who punched them.
For me acceptable intolerance is deplatforming, making it illegal, taking away their megaphone and not letting them play ball, not “violence is GREAT against the intolerant group and we’ll celebrate it” instead of “violence is a necessary evil we sometimes have to take out to stop intolerant people for making it worse for us.” Not violating basic human rights. Even “nice” and “lol” when someone fucking dies is not something I can really get behind. I get why people have the feelings, I really do, but I don’t want to see it and I have to figure out how to curate my experience to easily avoid that given that a lot of online safe spaces for minorities actually don’t curate that out. What to do when you’re a minority that needs to not have “but freedom of speech” when people post slurs, but also needs to not have “lol” when someone dies…
I suppose I should have spoken more carefully because I fully understand the actual threat the rise of neo-Nazis can pose, especially given the anti-LGBTQ+ laws actually being enacted in the modern day. “Minority frustration” was probably reductive though I did not intend to be—I think I grabbed it from several posts on the topic of “are people allowed their vent spaces” and I need a better way to express that I understand the dangers while also managing to convey my point. I understand people need their vent spaces. I want to find a space safe from the vents.
Blocking a lot of the news subs should be pretty helpful, but I’m still curious if you know of any spaces that don’t tolerate bigotry but also don’t make room for these type of posts.
We’re probably one of the most highly moderated spaces on federated software. I am not aware of any spaces that are more moderated. I would encourage you to take your mental health seriously and if you need a more sanitized space to seek it out or work with a professional to see if there are coping strategies that can help you when you encounter this kind of behavior as it’s openly and extremely present in the world at large.
So in nice, diplomatic words, you’re saying “toughen up buttercup, find therapy, because everyone has a hated group and you’ll have to accept ‘lol’ at deaths of the hated group and other nasty things you and everyone were taught not to say as kids, and everyone other than you thinks it’s actively acceptable instead of even mildly distasteful and something they might want to avoid online.” Did I process that right?
I don’t come across people saying this stuff in real life. It seems to be a purely online phenomenon, at least in my tiny little corner of the world.
Considering that one of those is about executing someone with an internationally recognized mental illness that is out of their control. For a thought crime.
Probably not.
Objectively, no “sympathizing” happening here, factual discussion can’t happen when one party assumes the other is arguing in bad faith and uses that as a premeditated weapon to push the argument in their direction.
You make a good example as to why such content should be discouraged. Because most people will be ignorant of the real-world details, and instead follow the crowd on social media opinions and misinformation. Thus, leading to nonsensical statement such as that, where the thing they think they are talking about is entirely different than the actual thing they are talking about.