Moderation Team Accountability Issues

Yes, this is a computer software message board. And other places are a supermarket, or a bar. Or a forum about motorcycles. None of those are nominally about our identities. Yet all of those are also communities, where we have to deal with constant harassment and, at times, threats - because the people doing the harassing are not constrained by the nominal topic of these communities either. And that means that community safety is always a concern, regardless of what is nominally the topic of the space.

To try and illustrate it with an analogy: if I’m in a cafe, and someone knocks me out because they think I “look too gay”, then saying “but this is a cafe, this is not about being gay!” is in no way going to undo or prevent that violence, or its consequences. That it’s a cafe and what that cafe is “about”, are not relevant to the community safety aspect - we have to deal with the abuse either way.

If “harassment is everywhere regardless of the type of venue and needs to be dealt with accordingly” is not a thing you are aware of, then I would suggest that you have some work to do in understanding how systemic discrimination and privilege affect different people’s lives differently.

And again, where is the evidence, is there something on the homepage?

To put it bluntly: we are under no obligation to provide an extensive crash course in “this is how we get harassed on a daily basis and how it relates to this one specific post or person” to any random person who asks. This is demanding from us to do extra work on top of already having to deal with the abuse and systemic discrimination issues.

If you are genuinely interested in understanding the problem, then you will have to do work yourself to understand the situation. If you do not wish to do that, then let specialists (eg. community moderators) do that job, and trust the outcome. Don’t make it the problem of already-overburdened marginalized folks.

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