An interesting case of moderation in the fediverse
An interesting case of moderation in the fediverse
Here's my firsthand experience of the Fediverse, a network of social media platforms based on a common protocol ( ActivityPub ). I left Twit...
A small group of people were offended by a joke that unintentionally came across transphobic, and as a result this persons account was blacklisted. Even after getting the account reinstated, there were lasting complications with the state of the account (these probably technical issues) and the account was basically lost for good.
The 9th paragraph is where the incident is discussed.
What do yall think of this?
I've definitely been misunderstood myself, and it kinda sucks to think that my account could be lost for good due to a few reports, hasty banning, and some bug in the software.
I'm not surprised. While I've created quite a corner of an online life for myself here, in the back of my mind there's always the thought that I'm half a step from being misunderstood and reported, banned, or at least least dumped on.
I've encountered a bit too many people here who are paranoid and apparently only looking for the worst in everyone else. And since I'm probably older than average, and from the eastern half of Europe, I'm just more used to using abrasive language sometimes without needing to constantly announcing my tolerance for some particular selection of specific things that happens to be in the news this month. That's obviously not the preferred vibe here.
I’d be interested on peoples views on a concern that I’ve had growing for a while; maybe the concern is genuine, or maybe I’m being paranoid. But I feel that some of the more extreme ‘pro-trans’ conversation online feels less ‘pro-trans’ and more ‘anti-terf’ or even ‘anti-everything’ to the extent that it has become impossible to have a discussion about concerns, confusions, genuine ignorance etc, in other words impossible to educate or come up with solutions to genuine problems.
A lot of these extreme trans, conversation destroying comments are so full of hate, so often, that I admit I have become suspicious. If you were deliberately trying to divide a community from potential allies you couldn’t do it better, and I’ve seen one too many ‘as a black woman’ comments accidentally posted from the wrong account by some white as a lily racist extremist man to trust everyone who says ‘as a trans person’ online.
I would like a space where people with genuine curiosity but also genuine concerns (as in, that they have the concern is genuine, it doesn’t mean necessarily that there is a genuine problem that needs resolving) could have an adult discussion to educate and understand each other, in order to find solutions, without having to worry about being cancelled and shut down.
If you’re on the fence and it feels like the only people who listen to you with respect and sympathy are the anti-trans people, well, you’re going to end up hearing a lot more of what they have to say than learning something actually useful.
I understand that the trans community must get frustrated with having to explain themselves all the time, and impatient for the day they don’t, and it sucks that that’s the world we live in right now. But I’m also very concerned that we should be cautious about accepting every hateful or insane sounding ‘as a trans person’ comment we read at face value. Hatred leads to the dark side after all, and that’s where some people want you to be.
That said I’m not trans, or even pretending to be trans, so I can’t speak for the community. I just believe strongly in the adage that the most effective way to win support is to meet hate with love, and I know a growing number of people who should have been trans allies being turned away by the feeling that they are not being listened to or taken seriously. Even if their concerns feel stupid to be people in the community.
Oh also, whilst I think people should be taking genuine concerns seriously, be careful of ‘whataboutism’ so hey, fun tight rope.
That’s my paranoid ramblings for anyone who cares from someone who wants to see tolerance and understanding but is scared we’re going the wrong way.
The problem is that the well has been poisoned. Simple fact is that whenever someone says "I just have concerns", nine-out-of-ten times, they're just trolling you.
And I've been involved in this conversation for years, on a couple of different forums, trying to explain things that trans folks go through. And to this day I still do my best to always give people the benefit of the doubt if they seem sincere.
But I'm not at all exaggerating when I say 9/10 times it's just someone JAQing off, and within a few posts they're accusing trans people of being a danger to women or children.
This is combined with the fact that a lot of the "reasonable" compromises cisgender people come up with, just aren't at all reasonable from the perspective of the transgender people they would affect. The compromises usually involve denying life-saving medical care, or involve basically accepting being ostracised from public life.
Finally, cisgender people just massively outnumber transgender people. So while for any one cisgender person, this might be the first time they've ever asked anything about the topic, the trans person has likely been asked dozens if not hundreds of times. Many of which were in bad faith.
So a lot of trans people have checked out. For their own mental health.
If you’re on the fence and it feels like the only people who listen to you with respect and sympathy are the anti-trans people
This is what people just don't seem to understand. The "you're 150% with us and declaring it on every turn, or you're against us" rule just makes completely normal people end against them.
This really goes for every kind of issue that may come up, not even just for the typical "left-right" feud bullshit.
The thing is, it's not even required to be nice and keep explaining shit or whatever - there's always the option on an individual level to just ignore stuff.
Like with the joke in this story - no, you don't need to be the police to immediately report and flag everything that's 10% over the line. You don't need to see red all the time. Just ignore it and move the fuck on, you're not getting any extra social credits for beings overly sensitive and protective.
The obvious counterargument is "well if you ignore everything, they win", but that's still just the same paranoia, the same dividing between us and everyone else, the same overprotectiveness. You don't have to let everything pass, that doesn't mean you have to police everything everything either.
Besides there will always be a ton of people willing to do online vigilantism, so you're really totally fine to just ignore most things and not run to the mod about everything.
It's like those zero-tolerance policies in some schools (American schools of course, where else) where forgetting a pink plastic water gun or a nail clipper in their backpack can get a 10yo kid arrested and expelled. It's not helping anything, it's not addressing the actual problem, it singles out random people as examples, and it just makes everyone hate you.
be careful of ‘whataboutism’ so hey, fun tight rope
If I see someone using the term whataboutism, I know there's no discussion to be had with them. Another originally sensible word that has been destroyed by overuse. I've been accused of whataboutism by just adding some extra information about a game console history. Holy shit. You can tell that person's entire mission in life is to just scope the internet of any sign of disagreement about anything they find holy, no matter how trivial.
The fediverse is notorious for overmoderation and mobbing. A lot of ppl have come here looking for a safer space and as a result they are incredibly (over?)zealous about protecting it.
Sidenote: I incredibly disagree with the author's conclusion that calckey should be avoided because of their experience. On mastodon, they likely would not have had their account reactivated because the majority of those overzealous ppl are on mastodon
Agree that it’s not much of a reason to avoid a piece of software. If anything an instance.
No one knows who you are on the internet, and in case you’ve been living under a rock, the bigots are out in force to troll, to belittle, and to shame anyone who is different.
I think the moderation in this case was a bit to heavy handed, yeah. But, I also don’t blame them for being on a hair-trigger. Read a mod log sometime, you might jump at shadows too if you saw what the actual assholes have been up to.
In general, I consider myself fairly open-minded, I have no issues with the LGBTQ+ community and find it infuriating that the Trans community especially is being targeted by Republicans. It’s obvious they’re being made into scapegoats to get Republican voters to the polls. They’re exploiting people’s misunderstandings and fear for political gain.
HOWEVER, I think the Trans community is its own worst enemy at times, due to their excessively heavy-handed tactics online and this constant drumbeat of accusing anything under the sun as being transphobic, no matter the actual intent. There’s no attempt to educate or help people understand, it’s just bringing the ban hammer, reporting transphobia, accusing people of bigotry, for relatively mild and innocuous comments or actions.
This situation could’ve been resolved by somebody just saying, “Hey that term ‘tranny’ is offensive, you shouldn’t say that,” to which the poster would’ve responded with their background and everyone would realize it was just a joke from someone who was obviously not a bigot. The country is still coming to terms with the Trans community “entering the mainstream”, it’s all new and not everyone knows what’s acceptable (poster probably should’ve known, but probably thought people would know him better). I get that they’re under attack, but the Trans community could afford to chill out online and not go on the attack at the slightest perceived provocation, else they’re gonna start turning people against them.
This is a tale as old as time. Oppressed groups are naturally conditioned to be hyper-defensive per the oppression they face, which results in lashing out against neutral parties, which comes back to haunt the oppressed group as oppressors can now point as their "inherent evil" and sometimes even the neutral parties will say "hmm maybe they ARE all crazy" and become oppressors themselves. In this case it's not even a neutral party, but someone who is part of the oppressed group theirself, being ostracized by their own community.
I'm reminded of the time that Contrapoints (Natalie Wynn, a veritable transgender icon) got cannibalized by the very community she seeks to advocate for because she confessed that the pronoun dance that happens in inclusive spaces can feel like a step backward for a newly passing trans person who wants nothing more than to be supportive of others, but simultaneously wants nothing more than to naturally and intuitively be referred to by their preferred pronoun without needing the dance. If even the champions of the community are going to be eviscerated for not treading lightly enough, what hope is there of recruiting allies from normie-space?
It's like with most people really. The majority just wants to live their lives in peace, but there's that small group of militant assholes that make life difficult for everybody.
In this case, they also happen to belong to a disadvantaged group, so in addition to being assholes, they can also accuse other random people of just about anything, and you can't really say anything against them.
The only possible end result of this is that it will blow up, nobody will be happy and the wave of sympathy can even turn around. Like Amber Heard killed the whole MeToo movement, but it was on its last legs already due to similar shitty people.
imo, I can totally understand parts of the trans community not wanting to have to teach people to respect them (people not respecting you as a person by default fucking sucks, and it's understandable that you'd find it not worth your energy and fucking ridiculous that you have to teach people that you're a person)
so, I can see why OP got immediately banned, especially since they legit said a slur in a shit joke that, with said slur, could have come off as weirdly fetishizing; many people in marginalized communities don't really like having to go through someone's post that comes off bigoted to "figure out if they meant to say something bigoted on purpose or in a bad way" for obvious reasons
hopefully OP realized why they blacklisted them so quickly
could have come off as weirdly fetishizing
Another trap one can easily fall to even for just being friendly
don't really like having to go through someone's post
If you're gonna accuse someone of something, then yes you better make some effort to be reasonably sure. This is the other side of vigilantism people don't like hearing about - accusing everyone of being evil and making everyone just walk on tiptoes around you isn't really the outcome you want, it will eventually come around and bite you in the ass.
Reporting everything and leaving the police/mods sort it out only works if those police/mods aren't overly trigger-happy to shoot you on sight.
Wait what? Tranny is offensive? But Kim Petras tweeted about being a tranny with a Grammy. This non binary person is confused.
Referring to oneself as a slur is usually not viewed the same way as referring to someone else with a slur. Doubly so if one doesn't belong to the group the slur targets.
Don’t you find it funny that when whiny people complain about moderation on some instance, it’s always because they were transphobic? Yeah, what a surprise.
I couldn’t care less that your « joke » was « unintentionally » transphobic, and I couldn’t care even lesser that you don’t understand that every instance manages their own moderation as they see fit.
In good old Reddit words, maybe you should have posted this in « AmITheAsshole », because boy do I have some news for you
Permanently Deleted
The issue was the use of a specific word, that is now uncouth, but with which OP identifies. They claim to not know the word had fallen out of favor. Other than the word itself, I don’t think there was anything wrong with the comment they left.
If they have been on social media during the last 10 years it would be pretty much impossible for them to not know that tranny is now considered a slur when referring to a trans person. Maybe an old fart who just watches cable TV could be unaware, but the odds of being on social media and not being aware is pretty much zero.
I also thought maybe it was a misunderstanding, but really it has been long enough for people who are online regularly and have a blog.
I mean, it was never "in favor"; as far as I know, it had always been a slur
I can't see how OP was "failed by moderation"; I assume the instance they were on had a zero tolerance policy for such language, and honestly someone with a blog on the internet that had a twitter account probably should have known that that word was a slur and still is
maybe they'll realize why they got banned and figure out that "jokes" like that aren't tolerable, but with how they reacted here I don't know
This is a little scary. You can find yourself banned pretty easily. All it takes is to annoy someone with nothing better to do than dig through your post history, and find something old that you wrote hastily which might break a rule. I know because it happened to me.
Back in my Reddit days I got banned twice - once from a subreddit and once a site-wide shadowban (which got rescinded when I appealed, amazingly) and both were random bolts from the blue where I didn't actually break the rule I was banned for. In the shadowban case I happened to belong to a subreddit that was apparently in the midst of brigading another subreddit I was reading, and when I upvoted a few comments I guess I triggered some kind of anti-brigade filter. In the case of the subreddit ban, there was a guy being downvoted who was complaining about it and I explained to him why I thought it was likely that he was getting downvotes. That subreddit had a "no downvotes allowed" rule and the mods must have figured that since I was explaining why the guy was getting downvotes I must also be downvoting him. On Reddit there's no way to actually tell who's downvoting who.
Here on the Fediverse it's both a bit more scary since every instance can have whatever standards of care it wants, but it's also less scary because every instance can have whatever standards of care it wants. I can just create a new account at a different instance if the one I'm on turns out to be run by yo-yos. Hopefully the account migration features get implemented soon to make that even easier.
Find a mostly European instance. Problem solved.
Americans are desperately trying to globalize their concerns everywhere.