Forum - View topicForum moderation and white supremacists/neo nazi/etc
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16961 |
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Nope, there is not. Not built within the forum system itself. When we see a report all we see is who is reported, by whom, whatever text the person making the report included, and the thread title in a hyperlink to that particular post. I would agree such a feature would be quite handy especially when you have multiple mods responding to situation or particular user and they are not familiar with either personally. What we do have is a homemade system of sorts. Honestly the Staff section was hardly used before willag, Galap, errinundra, and myself became mods a few years ago. We now have separate threads in the staff section that we've created for users who have been warned and users who are on moderation. When we warn a user or put one on moderation we edit the first post of these threads to include a master list to keep track of things. We discuss the users in the threads. We also have a thread for users to keep an eye on who have not quite violated the rules, a thread for particular topics/threads to watch, and a general discussion thread. Are they full proof? Of course not. As I mentioned above we have different mods who may not be "up to date" on a particular user when they get reported. The same goes for particular threads. We do our best as mods to discuss matters and keep as accurate a list as possible of these things. Seeing as how many of us are in different time zones, and one a different continent, and we all work full time jobs discussion can take time. Which is why some users can get in a few infractions before we handle them. Sometimes it's been long enough since the particular post was made we might feel the window for further admonishment might have passed. That last sentence brings me to my own thoughts on this actual topic. We mods are all volunteers. We are not paid. We do not get any perks beyond use of the faster subscriber/staff server. We all work full time jobs and have personal lives. In the past 16 months I personally have lost an aunt, a good friend, a job, started a new job, lost my father, and my brother (not biological brother but my family half raised him) is going through a messy divorce and is living with my gf and I. The other mods have all had their own personal life drama to deal with as well. In between all of that we make time to moderate this place. As a moderator we cannot ban users actually, only admin can. We can place users on moderation which is similar but we cannot ban. I am in full support for adopting this new system of handling users. As mods we are not here to create rules or policy, we are simply here to enforce them. Yes Tempest and Zac ask us for our opinions but at the end of the day they are our bosses too so we moderate this place with the guidelines and rules they set forth. With that being said I think there are too many users who skirt the rules especially the first one of being civil. Which that rule needs to be upgraded in itself. The blatant rule breakers are easy to deal with. They're loud and obvious. The real problem are the ones who post just enough to cause a toxic atmosphere without directly crossing that line violating the rules. The passive aggressive attitude, thinly veiled insults, and comments made in bad faith that really are just there to belittle others and push their own agendas. There's a few of them right here in this thread as we speak. The moment the mods step in and moderate someone like that under the spirit of the rules there is tons of blowback and people complaining that they didn't really violate the rules. There are users complaining we're just fascist dictators. There is too much wiggle room with the rules and too much of a grey area those sort of users can fall into. If you post clear hate speech or opinions that somehow subjugate, belittle, or demean others you should be gone. You're not posting any sort of actual discussion at that point. You're just creating a toxic atmosphere. If you post in support of such groups then the same thing applies. If ANN is going to take a stance that such venom is not allowed then commit to it fully. Are users going to complain? Sure. They already do that so is it more important to accommodate as many as possible or make it clear what sort of people are welcomed and stick to that? If you want to be part of some hate group, say feminists suck, or march in support of one then do it on your own time. If you're creating or helping to foster a toxic atmosphere then you should be gone. Losing such posters is not a bad thing and will not take away from positive discussion because those users are not part of positive discussion to begin with. All they do is deter others from wanting to post and discuss topics. Now I will admit I do understand many people's opinions that politics and agendas do seem to be more prevalent lately in reviews and articles. I personally find often they can be a bit far fetched or seem to be reaching with what is being said. I think often those reviews are seeing shadows where there are none and those shows simply are not deep enough to warrant those opinions. Simply saying that and questioning a reviewer as to why they feel the way they do and to explain their opinions and how they came to them is one thing. Disagreeing with them and simply stating that is one thing. Insulting the reviewer personally or using your supposed "disagreement" to simply soapbox your own political opinions and agenda is something else. The former is simply expressing a legitimate opinion and fostering discussion, while the latter is just grandstanding and soapboxing. If you don't like a reviewer's opinion on a show here is a magical idea....simply ignore it. Its not as if that reviewer's opinion is some sort of cast in stone commandment as to how people should feel about a show.
Exactly. |
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鏡
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I mean, last I checked, ANN's forums never advertised themselves as a democracy. I don't see why mods should be beholden to how users interpret the letter of the rules.
IMO, either of these kinds of posts in the talkback thread of a review should be considered OT, especially because they're the primary mechanism by which soapboxing is able to skirt explicit rule violation. There's a difference between disagreeing with a specific argument in a review for specific reasons, or saying "it's not that deep" and accusing reviewers, without supporting your own view, of reading too deeply into something (this accusation will often be followed by an implicit or explicit accusation of a political agenda to explain why the reviewer is "reading too deeply"). |
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Crisha
Moderator
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To follow up on what Psycho is saying, we can also review the post history of users by going into their profile, and we can see their deleted posts. We can also dig back to review previous reported post if we like, but that can be a very tedious process, because it takes about 30 seconds for the Report Posts page to load, and everything is organized by date. You'd have to scroll through hundreds of reports. That information is not maintained with the user and easily recalled.
A centralized "moderation history" that Mad_Scientist has brought up would be really nice, though I don't know how feasible it is with these forums. And I imagine that IT is already busy enough with other stuff. We have a system in place that provides us similar information to the function that Mad_Scientist mentions, but it's spread out across several threads and requires moderators to remember to update the threads with the information. When just dealing with one report, I could have multiple tabs open - one looking at the users post history, another for the Warned Users thread, another for Users to Keep an Eye On thread, another to actually review the reported post. My memory for certain users, unless if I'm dealing with them on a constant basis, can be subpar, so I'm often relying upon whatever history I can find of the user to help guide my decision. As for the "draconian" user that Mad_Scientist is mentioning, I eventually PMed that user after their 4th (or so) offense. I hadn't realized it was the 4th time they made such a post until I looked through the user's history and saw their deleted posts. Other mods dealt with their previous offenses that were reported. |
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Chrono1000
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all-tsun-and-no-dere
ANN Reviewer
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Hi there! I'm a staff member at Anime Feminist. None of my colleagues have posted in this thread, and thus are not the ones pushing for this, but it's great to see that we've become a sort of boogeyman for toxic fans. For what it's worth, we have no interest in banning or censoring any kind of anime, nor do we have any affiliation with anyone at ANN with decision-making power. But that's not the point of this post. Anyway, needless to say, I am strongly in favor of the rules being revised. I understand the difficulty of promoting reasonable discourse in a time when the political climate is increasingly polarized and focused on identity politics, and it can be difficult to have even a civil discussion with people you disagree with. However, I've read posts that call trans and nonbinary people deluded, One frustrating thing I've seen come up over and over is the spreading of blatant misinformation. I've seen certain posters make provably false claims such as -There is no social justice movement in Japan -No one in Japan is interested in LGBT rights -Sexual assault is almost nonexistent in Japan -The #MeToo movement doesn't exist in Japan -Only Western feminists think the choice of whether or not to have children is political, and marriage and family planning are apolitical These are not matters of opinion, but factually incorrect, bad-faith arguments designed to silence progressive fans and advance the lie that Japan's peaceful appearance comes from it being a racially pure paradise, rather than a complex web of cultural and social norms. And I see people parrot them unchallenged because those who know better are afraid of getting in trouble for soapboxing, or simply don't feel like it's worth wading into the cesspit because they'll inevitably get shouted down with similar lies. My hope is that the culture of the forum can eventually become such that people just don't blindly repeat these things, but until that is the case, I was wondering if there could be any change in the rules that make it a) easier to refute these claims and b) penalize people who repeatedly make them anyway, especially since they're dog-whistle arguments for ethnonationalism more often than not. |
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Kicksville
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Hi there, another long time user (errr technically long than it says - I wanted to change my name and couldn't, please forgive me ._.)
I still post here because I like leaving out my bad Gundam opinions or whatever, but admittedly there have been times I've realized I'm nervous to say certain things, and then don't, because I know some bad faith "gay people don't exist in Japan" people are going to jump out. It IS more prevalent than it used to be, I think, and it is indeed frustrating that the same people stick around forever because they stop juuuust shy of breaking the rules, or always take one single step back from saying what they obviously really mean. It's the same thing that plays out on other forums: People do want to have honest, open conversations, earnestly, then some group comes along and uses that to move in with all their bigoted beliefs, and soon enough all the people they don't like get tired of it and leave, and they are all that's left. The fact that this is combined with a comment section on a big news site seems like the only reason it hasn't fully happened here. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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Okay, here's my problem: to use your example of "criticism of feminist ideology", there are forumgoers whose posts I've started to automatically skip over because something like nine out of their last ten posts somehow managed to work a statement about the gradual vilification of masculinity into the thread's discussion. Talking about your socio-cultural beliefs is fine, but at this point people are making off-topic criticisms of feminism more frequently than I make off-topic references to Katana Maidens. Meanwhile, we have a thread in the community forum called "Post "*sigh*" here whenever you resist posting in some other thread because drama sucks". It started in November, and is already at eight pages. Eight pages of "sighs", many of them signifying that someone had to stop themselves from posting in a thread, because they knew that it would eventually turn into the kind of thread that a mod was going to have to go in and nuke later. Eight pages of us watching each other be prohibitively obnoxious, and censoring ourselves because we don't want to be seen as the sorts of people who censor others. This isn't a healthy forum environment anymore... and since experience has shown me that the ANN forums are pretty much the only place in my life where I can talk about anime as much as I want without someone telling me to stop talking about anime so much, I have a vested interest in this place not becoming a garbage dump. |
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Errinundra
Moderator
 Posts: 6561 Location: Melbourne, Oz |
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A few? Who? Please back up your assertion. |
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Chrono1000
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Last edited by Chrono1000 on Fri Jun 29, 2018 6:38 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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CrowLia
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If your definition of "criticism of feminist ideology" boils down to soapboxing about "the vilification of masculinity, heterosexuality and traditional family values" and other such boogeyman falsehoods and persecution complex, then that "criticism of feminist ideology" is exactly part of the problem being argued here and that has contributed to the current toxic environment of these forums. |
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Ashley Hakker
Posts: 115 |
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Because anime is a long standing stronghold of masculinity and appropriate gender roles. All this 'feminism' and 'lgbt' stuff is just a recent trend invented by the 'Es Jay Double-Us' who are trying to ruin anime. 
Oh wait, nope, had that wrong, anime has def been super queer and feminist for a long time. But I mean, what do you expect from self-professed 'white nationalists' who spend their time off consuming media produced by non-white people in a foreign country? Seriously, being a white supremacist homophobe who watches anime makes about as much sense to me as someone who goes into a vegan restaurant and is shocked and dismayed that they can't order bacon. I mean it's clearly a THING but I don't get what their thought process is. |
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鏡
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The fact that conversations about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of certain political ideologies are taking place in forums dedicated to discussing anime is something that should be rectified regardless of the feelings or stances of the participants or of the particular ideologies in question. You and your interlocutor should have both been banned for posting OT. You know, the more I think about it, the more absurd the laxity with which OT posting has been punished seems to me. That people are allowed to carry on a conversation about their personal political beliefs or the hypothesized beliefs of the author in response to an anime review makes it incredibly unsurprising when these threads devolve into circular arguments. Last edited by 鏡 on Sat Jun 23, 2018 9:06 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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all-tsun-and-no-dere
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 627 |
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It's not possible to completely avoid politics, because art is political. However, it is essential to shut out politics that are rooted in dehumanizing others and factually incorrect statements. |
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Mad_Scientist
 SubscriberModerator  Posts: 3011 |
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@willag and Psycho 101
Ah, that makes sense. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it would take to implement a system like Gamespot had here. If I remember correctly Gamespot's forum was largely or completely custom built. But I definitely think it would be a good thing for the tech staff to start working towards. Like Psycho said, you're volunteers with full time jobs, so the easier it is for you to access the information you need to moderate, the better. And having to share a lot of the info manually like you do, and having to go through a poster's entire post history to see their deleted posts, which for prolific posters would be too time consuming to be feasible, definitely makes it easier for stuff to fall through the cracks. And makes it makes it harder to see the complete picture of just how bad (or not) a known problem poster is, which just exacerbates all the current issues on these forums.
Oh duh, I can't believe I left religion out of the list, I mean anti-Muslim hatred is on a massive rise right now. So of course that needs to be added to the list. [SUPER LATE EDIT HERE: I realize, upon rereading this, that this part could come of as sarcastic. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm genuinely surprised that I somehow didn't think to include religion in my initial list. It's a pretty big oversight. So I just want to make it clear that my "oh duh" was self depreciation about how I could somehow make such a big oversight.] I do find something a little curious, though. This thread is inspired by a white supremacist/neo nazi rally, and the Nazis are famous for their genocide of millions of Jews. And right now there is an obvious, massive rise in hatred of Muslims around the world, I mean heck our current US president literally wanted to ban them from entering the country. But when you bring up the the subject of hatred based on religion, the only religion you mention is not Judaism, the religion specifically targeted by the white supremacists at the rally, nor is it Islam, another religion that white supremacists tend to hate. No, it is Christianity you mention, the religion that currently dominates US culture and politics, is professed by the majority of people in the US, and is also the one religion that a decent amount of white supremacists don't hate. Indeed, a fair chunk of white supremacists consider themselves to be faithful Christians (though I consider them to be a disgrace to Christ's teachings.) Anyways, this is a good way to segue into "dogwhistle" discussion.
I don't think anyone specifically said this, or if they did I somehow missed it, but Psycho 101 did say something to the effect of "if you want to say feminists suck, do it on your own time." Here's the thing. Obviously not every feminist is a good person, and in fact there is a certain small but infamous subset of feminists that virulently and violently hate trans people and who are particularly loud in the UK right now, but "feminism", as a general over-arching term, is the support of equal rights for women. So when you object to a vague "feminist ideology", and when "feminist ideology" is broadly defined as "women should have equal rights"... then you are essentially objecting to equal rights for women. You currently (oops not anymore this thread advanced quickly while I was writing this!) have three posts in this thread, and in every one of them, you have negatively referenced feminism. In the first post, you brought up the Anime Feminist site, and implied some nefarious purpose behind them. In the second post you didn't indict feminism specifically, but did briefly bring up the "male gaze" concept, which is a concept often discussed by feminism, and you made it clear you were unhappy with common feminist beliefs regarding it. And now in your last post you're expressing fears people won't be able to criticize "feminist ideology", and making it very clear that you object to it yourself. And unless my memory is failing me or I dreamed this up last night, there was at least one other post you made that ALSO complained about feminism, though both that post and the reply to it that I remember seeing appear to have vanished from this thread. I'll stop dancing around it: you are using a dogwhistle. When you object to feminism like you do, what people hear is "I don't want women to have equal rights." Because again, that is the literal definition of feminism. And currently, because you are being quite polite, you are not violating a single forum rule. Eventually, if you keep on bringing it up, you'll start to violate the "no soapboxing" rule. But until then, you can say, in a way that comes across loud and clear to pretty much any woman reading this forum, that you object to us having equal rights. And you aren't violating the rules. I brought up the Nazi "echoes" dogwhistle because it was a blatant dogwhistle so extreme and offensive that I figured no one would willingly object to it being banned. But I guess I should thank you actually for helping to illustrate a much more common, and less obvious dogwhistle here, but one that can make the forums very unwelcoming to women. One final thing I'll say, while I proposed zero tolerance for certain extreme views and outright expression of hate, I did say that skirting the proposed rule through dogwhistles and other methods could result in warnings/deleted posts rather than immediate instant bans. Last edited by Mad_Scientist on Sun Jun 24, 2018 6:56 am; edited 1 time in total |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
Subscriber Posts: 3018 |
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...and putting aside the issue of whether or not you, Chrono1000, are deliberately trying to communicate this message, people who are deliberately trying to drive women's voices away from the forums could do so in exactly the way that Mad_Scientist just described, and the perception of a lot of forum users right now seems to be that the rules are currently set up in such a way that such people wouldn't get punished for doing this in every thread, they'd only get punished for doing this too much in a single thread. |
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