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So, there was a post in this talkback thead by Christopher Macdonald that outlined more specifically what ANN forum policy is in regards to things I'd wondered, and I feel this policy is a huge mistake. I'd like to give some feedback about that, but I am doing so here so as to not clog up the thread.

Tempest wrote:

I don't care what side of the political spectrum you're on, if you call another poster "a piece of ****," or something similar, your post will be deleted and you may be banned.... even if they are a piece of ****.

Likewise, if you express any racist, misogynist, or otherwise hateful POV on this forum, you can kiss your post and your posting privileges goodbye.

If you admit to harboring hateful opinions or supporting those that do, and go no further, I won't ban you. But if you so much as express one of those opinions, or express support for those that do harbor them, or make any statements that somehow diminish the hatefulness of those opinions, you're getting kicked out.

This was in response to a thread where someone openly admitted to being a white nationalist and talked about their plans to go to a literal white supremacist rally where last year they chanted Nazi slogans like "Jews will not replace us" and "blood and soil."

Effectively, what this policy means is that if someone actually says anything that is believed by white supremacists, such as "non white people are inferior to white people", they get banned instantly. But if they instead just say "I'm a white supremacist and I support Richard Spencer" they are fine, and not violating forum policy. (Though the third paragraph is actually contradictory regarding "supporting those who do", but at the very least "admitting to having these opinions" is allowed)

This is in my mind, to put it bluntly, an absurd distinction to uphold. White supremacy is an extremely hateful and violent ideology. One does not need to say "I hate black people" if they announce they are a white supremacist, because hatred of black people is already stated simply by the label. By labeling oneself a white nationalist, one might as well be labeling oneself a "hater of minorities" because that is the core ideal of white nationalism/supremacy.

I think part of the problem with the forum moderation for a while is that there has been a focus on two things: "politeness", and ensuring that the forum moderation is apolitical.

The problem with the first of these focuses is that "politeness" can be abused. The pinned thread in the talkback thread is "A request for politeness and respect," but in fact the "respect" part is often forgotten I think as long as the "polite" part is maintained. It is possible to be a "polite" white supremacist, but it is not possible to be a respectful white supremacist, because hatred and disrespect towards minorities is literally the central core of the ideology.

The problem with the second focus is that as is often mentioned by frustrated talkback thread posters, EVERYTHING is political. Not just art, but forum moderation is also political. Indeed, what a forum chooses to allow and disallow, and through that what type of people they want to encourage to participate in the community, is intensely political. By trying to be apolitical, by trying to say "it doesn't matter what your views are, as long as you stay polite you can post here" ANN is making a political statement: white supremacists are welcome here.

This is a mistake in my view. I think ANN should adopt a zero tolerance policy for neo nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, and the alt right (which is literally just a rebranding of the other terms as openly admitted by the guy who created the term "alt right"). Anyone espouses a view held by those groups, they get banned, but ALSO, anyone admits to being a member, they get banned.

I understand that some people will ask "well where do you draw the line?" and the answer is "at white supremacists and their various synonyms." It's a pretty clear cut line.

And some users will be upset about this, and whine about forum "censorship", but you get plenty of posts like that already. The bottom line is, no matter what decision you make, you will upset one of two groups.

The first group is "people who aren't white nationalists and who would rather not share a forum with them because they're people dedicated to a hateful ideology and their presence here makes the forums feel unwelcome and unsafe."

The second group is "people who are white nationalists, or who at least would like them to be able to participate in the forum."

Right now, your decision has upset people in the first group. I don't think that's the group you want to be upsetting here though. And like i mentioned earlier, by making that decision you are also making a political statement, probably unintended, that I don't think you want to make either.

Thank you for your consideration.

So thinking about this more, I was so taken aback by "admitting to being a white nationalist doesn't violate the rules" that I focused mostly on that, but there needs to be more. The forums have become a very unwelcoming place for a lot of people and I know many people who just don't participate much anymore because of it. So I'm gonna slightly contradict my earlier post and say that actually, I think the line should be a tad bit more than just banning the outright admitted neo nazis. Just a tad.

Basically, I think there should be a rules update that should go something like this.

"The goal of the ANN forums is to provide a welcoming and respectful place for people to discuss anime and related topics. Being respectful is about more than just civility, and certain viewpoints are so noxious that they cannot be a part of a respectful environment, no matter how civilly stated.

As a result, posters who hate, or support or advocate for hate, of other people based on race, gender or gender identity, sexuality, class, age, or disability will be banned. Posters who attempt to skirt this rule through dogwhistles or other methods may also be banned or warned at the discretion of the moderators."

There might be some other things I'm accidentally leaving off the list, but in general I think a rule like this would be a good idea. It'll probably require some further training/effort for the mod staff here, but ultimately I feel it could be an important step in making these forums a better place where marginalized folks feel comfortable disusing things. Because right now a lot of us are not, and with the now clarification that open white nationalists and other people just as hateful are indeed allowed here, the forums are gonna become even more unwelcoming. And like I said, like it or not, ANN *does* make a political statement with it's current policy, and that statement is "white nationalists are welcome here."

I agree with everything that @Mad_Scientist is saying. The policy of allowing white supremacists to exist on this site, so long as they don't directly state their beliefs(which, y'know, they already do by stating that they're white supremacists) is a pretty awful one. Policies like this one aren't neutral, they make white supremacists feel welcomed and everyone else feel unsafe. This is why ANN is so widely known for having toxic forums, and I've seen people say that they're too afraid to post because of stuff like this. None of this is even mentioning the misinformation that's allowed to stay in threads like the one mentioned in the OP, where you have one person claiming that counter-protestors attack random white people in the streets, and another claims that "the left" drags women and old people from their homes to beat them with flagpoles and puts innocent bystanders into comas.

A few weeks ago, before this current shitstorm, the staff approached me about cleaning up the forums and diminishing our tolerance for hateful or hurtful speech. We've never tolerated directly hateful speech, but a lot of stuff that is, at it's base, hateful has managed to evade our previous rules. We've tolerated the shitheads that constantly go right up to and stretch the rules without ever crossing them. This will no longer be the case. We're making a concerted effort to address the toxicity we have on this forum.

I've written up a rough draft of a new guiding policy, and the staff are getting back to me about it at AX.

That said, as much as the "Unite the Right" marches disgust me, as do all people who participate in them, the idea of banning someone simply because they admit to being a part of that is contrary to my ethics. Right now, I won't ban someone for their beliefs, but I will ban them for expressing those beliefs on ANN (ie: I won't ban someone who does disgusting things outside of ANN, I will only ban them for what they do at ANN). The staff has the opportunity to convince me otherwise in a week and a half. In the meantime, I've already set up discussions with outsiders whom I respect to get their opinions on this.

I won't be publicly addressing this issue again until after AX.

Thanks, Chris. I am looking forward to whatever new guidance policy the staff brings forward. I try to be unbiased when moderating and stick to the rules as written, but there have been several times I've thought that by being unbiased or "apolitical," as mentioned above, I'm allowing certain harmful speech a platform to be allowed on the site simply because it is still polite.

Hi folks,

Some of y'all might remember me. I used to visit the ANN forums daily and post a lot back in the day. I've long since stopped doing so however. I won't pretend there aren't multiple reasons for that, but without a doubt one of the big ones was the growing awfulness of the forums. I can only imagine what it's like now if things have gotten even worse since I left. Anyway, I happened to hear about this through twitter and though I'd pop in and add my two cents:

Tempest wrote:

We're making a concerted effort to address the toxicity we have on this forum.

Tempest wrote:

That said, as much as the "Unite the Right" marches disgust me, as do all people who participate in them, the idea of banning someone simply because they admit to being a part of that is contrary to my ethics.

These two statements are fundamentally irreconcilable. White supremacists are inherently toxic. So long as they are allowed to remain on your platform, they will continue to find ways to spread that toxicity no matter what rules you adopt. The only way to remove their toxicity is to remove them entirely. That being the case, the choice is simple: You can have a forum without this toxicity or you can have a forum with white supremacists. I seriously question any ethical code that leads you to prioritize the later, but I guess that's your call. At the very least though, you are going to have to grapple with this choice at some point. To stand here and talk like you can have it both ways it's simply naive.

Quite frankly, what is being presented in this thread disgusts me.

I hate the whole "alt right" crap, but as long as they keep their political opinions to themselves, why shouldn't they be allowed on an anime forum? Unless you're saying that because you like anime, and disagree with their completely unrelated opinions that they shouldn't be allowed to like the same things as you?

I agree with and support Tempest. The staff and moderators should only moderate what gets posted here, what someone does outside of this site is none of their business.

Last edited by musouka on Fri Jun 22, 2018 4:03 pm; edited 1 time in total

Dessa wrote:

I agree with and support Tempest. The staff and moderators should only moderate what gets posted here, what someone does outside of this site is none of their business.

Except they are posting it here. Every single day in every single thread that goes beyond ten or so responses.

But, hey, I guess this means that I can start posting through the lens of my newfound Femitheist beliefs! I’m sure there will be no issues with posters when I start cheerfully wishing them a polite Happy Castration Day as I also talk about how anime with all female casts are just a reflection of the utopia that awaits us all once the world has been purged of 90% of the male population, right?

EDIT: Sarcasm aside, I do want to say that I think it’s obscene that the current forum policy offers absolutely no protection for the hateful vitriol routinely directed towards your writers in their discussion threads, aside from half-hearted clean up when enough people slam the “report button” to get a mod’s attention. It’s horrible that it’s gotten to the point where you know how a thread is going to go by simple inclusion of a single word or phrase in the linked article.

Last edited by 鏡 on Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:42 pm; edited 4 times in total

Cosign. All of the politically correct nazis should have their accounts deleted. Any fears of loss in traffic or engagement are misplaced given that their domination of talkback threads is an obvious disincentive for anyone else to post.

I think there's a broader problem with the state of the forums than the specific political beliefs of the poorly-concealed white supremacists though.

The most vocal members of ANN's forums spend their time trawling the front page and forums for articles and threads that are disseminating "leftist propaganda" so that they can complain about it in winding, OT dialogues. These threads inevitably devolve into repetitive, barely on topic discussions because anyone who engages with these people is engaging in a discussion about the validity of a political ideology that never declares itself as such so as to stay nominally within the scope of the thread. The subject of the article is never the point, only the extent to which the article affirms or strays from the political ideology of the reader, and so no amount of discussion about the article's content will ever conclude the discussion.

One of the most prominent forms this process takes is a complaint about what an article is "focusing on", or that a review is needlessly "subjective" - critiques of the conceit of an article rather than its content. IMO, if you want to prevent a lot of these kinds of "discussions", you should include a rule banning discussion of the "subjectivity" or "objectivity" of a review and discussions of the value of the opinions expressed in a review rather than their content. If you want to post in a talkback thread you should have something to say other than "this review confirmed or disconfirmed my beliefs about what a review should be concerned with to x extent in y ways".

There should also be much more stringent, punishing enforcement for discussions that go off topic, as well as more clearly defined criteria for what constitutes being off topic. One of the biggest problems this clarification needs to address is "meta-discussions" about ANN and the forums occurring in specific talkback threads. Discussions of staff twitter accounts, the "views of ANN", the "state of the discourse generally", the state of the ANN forums, the views of other websites, and the relationship between reviewers and readers should all be verboten in talkback threads, along with anything else that is not a direct comment on the content of an article.

Locking threads or having mods post "please get back on topic" is clearly insufficient, because the same users will just repeat the ritual for the next article or post that expresses something they disagree with. IMO the mods should just be more punishing generally - less PM'd warnings, locked threads, and deleted posts, more bans.

I said I wouldn't post further, but I think I'm going to retract that. I will ask the community for input. I will read everything, but I won't reply for now, unless it's to ask for clarification. I may post future questions, or this may be my last.

I'm open to feedback on this by the way. Much more open to feedback from people who are already part of the community, and not individuals with registration dates of 2018-06-22 or later.

One of the more interesting (and important) questions we're looking at, and directly related to the thread that brought this to the forefront today is, "Is openly stating that you are a member of a hateful group" (eg: Unite the Right, Westborough Baptist, etc.) equal to openly expressing their platform?"

Does saying "I'm going to participate in the Unite the Right March" equate to saying "I'm racist" equate to saying "I hate black people." If someone makes the last statement, we're obviously going to ban them. Should we ban them for the first one ?

What about "I'm part of the Westborough Baptist Congregation?"

Tempest wrote:

One of the more interesting (and important) questions we're looking at, and directly related to the thread that brought this to the forefront today is, "Is openly stating that you are a member of a hateful group" (eg: Unite the Right, Westborough Baptist, etc.) equal to openly expressing their platform?"

Does saying "I'm going to participate in the Unite the Right March" equate to saying "I'm racist" equate to saying "I hate black people." If someone makes the last statement, we're obviously going to ban them. Should we ban them for the first one ?
"

Unless they're some kind of double agent, it's a pretty obvious "yes" on all counts.

Tempest wrote:

One of the more interesting (and important) questions we're looking at, and directly related to the thread that brought this to the forefront today is, "Is openly stating that you are a member of a hateful group" (eg: Unite the Right, Westborough Baptist, etc.) equal to openly expressing their platform?"

Does saying "I'm going to participate in the Unite the Right March" equate to saying "I'm racist" equate to saying "I hate black people." If someone makes the last statement, we're obviously going to ban them. Should we ban them for the first one ?

I think this is adjacent to the actual point. Yes, talking about your plans to take part in a racist/sexist march should be a bannable offense.

Why? Well, look at what started this firestorm in the first place. Why would someone create an alt account to post in (purposefully) bland support of the march instead of using their main account if they truly thought there was nothing wrong with wanting to show “white pride”? Does that alone not make it clear that this is not a good-faith attempt to start a dialogue? It’s about skirting the letter of the rules to make it clear that as long as you say things “the right way”, you are welcome on these forums. This means you get more and more people, posting the same exact way, derailing every single thread, until they get what they want.

In what situation would stating you're a member of a hate group not equate to a statement in support of said group's platform?

These people are making a conscious choice to join the hate group. Their membership in that group directly implies hate speech.

This isn't some republican/democrat "can't we all just get along" scenario. These are people who actively despise, and they should be banned. Get on the ball yo.

Tempest wrote:

One of the more interesting (and important) questions we're looking at, and directly related to the thread that brought this to the forefront today is, "Is openly stating that you are a member of a hateful group" (eg: Unite the Right, Westborough Baptist, etc.) equal to openly expressing their platform?"

Does saying "I'm going to participate in the Unite the Right March" equate to saying "I'm racist" equate to saying "I hate black people." If someone makes the last statement, we're obviously going to ban them. Should we ban them for the first one?

What about "I'm part of the Westborough Baptist Congregation?"

Absolutely yes to all questions. Why would someone be part of a hate group if they did not believe in their philosophy? Why would someone participate in a racist march if they didn't believe in what they are marching for?

If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.

_Emi_ wrote:

If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.

I think you might find this article an interesting read:
Link.

All I'm gonna leave.

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