@Skygunner
Okay, there’s a lot to unpack there so bare with me. Going to try and convey my position in this post in relation to yours. I’d agree that it doesn’t boil down to censorship, but it boils down to a series of logical conclusions we as a community have to whittle down to.
As the article pointed out there are so many images on this site, and yet when I last looked a few days ago the offensive tag only had 3000 images under it. That’s 0.14% out of 100%. I know artists with more images under their own tags then that, a single user could overtake it with dedication within a week. I think it’s disingenuous to make it out like this is a pandemic when it’s a blimp on the radar.
But more to the point you say that it’s a black and white issue, that any depiction that isn’t clearly anti-nazi is pro-nazi. The first thought that came to my mind was “What about video games?” What about a video game like Battlefield that gives you a random chance of being a Nazi when you go on multiplayer. When playing you aren’t given any motif other then ‘win the battle for your team and earn points’. Would it be reasonable to argue that EA actively tolerates Nazis? That EA has a bad image when it comes down to Nazis and that according to EA, they don’t think there’s any difference between being a Nazi officer and being a British officer? To me you have to divorce yourself from reality quite a bit before we get a point where context has been removed enough to justify this way of thinking, that there is no contextual difference between a protayal and a good portayal if the portayal isn’t negative. This was a discussion that already took place and was unanimously agreed to be absurd by the gaming community when
Extra Credits presented it. Maybe an actual Nazi will get put on the Nazi side and enjoy it. Okay. I’m not going to reconstruct my reality just because someone might enjoy something they shouldn’t. It’s not about a slippery slope it’s about moving the goal posts. It’s about creating very oddly specific conclusions that end up contradicting themselves as soon as you try to put it into practice.
Equally I don’t see how we’d be better off having actual Nazis keep to their own kind rather then post among anti-Nazis? If anything posted by a user formulated a pattern that became
legitimately concerning beyond a reasonble doubt,
there’s a report system but more importantly
I’d rather we actually know about it. You say not removing it is having it go unchecked but when you remove it then it encourages people who actively believe this stuff to go unchecked within their own group chats and secret places where no counter arguments could ever enter. At least if they did it on this site, and I or many others like me actually saw it, I know I could at least open a dialogue about it rather then them just conveying it to people who they know already agree because sometimes
opening the dialogue is all it takes.
Hitler’s biggest fear was that the Nazi’s would end up as a joke, something that doesn’t strike fear into the hearts of anyone who hears the word. It really frustrates me when people treat the word with such fear as fear grants power to it when prior to the 2016 we were able to treat Nazis as the joke they are. Now we’ve reverted to hiding behind the couch on the fear they’re going to come knocking like we’ve gone back 75 years all within 4. Over time villains in history become more removed from the current day. It’s not something that can be prevented, as time passes history become more historic and will feel further removed from the next generation. Pirates were awful terrible people but now Disney makes movies about them, kids dress as them. Cowboys were rapists and gangsters and now there are cartoons about them and games in the playground. It doesn’t mean all historic context should or will be lost it just means time moves on and the seriousness of the threat regresses and social constructs change.
“How is anyone supposed to know who is actually supporting nazism/racism, and who is just doing it to be edgy.” – I don’t understand why this is the concern of the poster, art isn’t defined like that. Some Catholics believe Harry Potter is no different from Satanic ideology, but it’s not J.K’s Rowling’s concern to clarify her intent verses their interpretation and if it were she’d be too busy posting TERF content on Twitter to do anything about it anyway. Just because someone personally cannot differentiate something doesn’t mean the issue lies with the work or author. That’s not how art functions and never has been. As an artist, if you believe you have that much say or control over my work then you’re sadly mistaken. My work is my work, what goes into it vs what you see can be very different things. If you want to open that dialogue, it’s always there but it’s not your place to go into someone else’s space and enforce your interpterion onto them, regardless of the subject matter.
What I really hate about this idea of dealing with issues this way is that it’s simply the most illegitimate way of doing anything productive about any real issues that exist. It’s superficial and doesn’t really do anything outside of maybe winning a few brownie points for public reputation (which is always going to be a losing battle when the people writing about you have already come to their conclusions 10 years ago).
Usually blanket rules actually come at the expense of actual progress like fundraising, creating networks/specific support groups. Larger voices in the community promoting smaller stories on the issues and first-hand accounts to raise awareness of it actually existing. I think if you want to tackle an issue you have to look at the avenues where the issue breaks down and why people who act badly to others get away with it.
I did commissions for 3 years, dealt with legitimate sexism in the fandom from midly annoying dumb stuff like turning down me down as an artist because ‘girls can’t do NSFW as good as guys’ to trying to ruin me financially through fraud over me being a woman and all women being the same. In my experience a rule like this would make things worse if it were about hateful ideology surrounding gender. Because fantasies are just that, forced nudity and other NSFW concepts like it would be horrible in real-life, of course they would, in real life all sexual gratification between adults should be consensual without any form of ‘force’. I think that goes without saying but in the form of art it simply is not real. It’s fake people in a fake scenario. Equating this to actual abuse or as a stepping stone to it in my opinion does nothing but undermine actual abuse just like equating video games responsible for violence undermines victims of violence. You may argue in return that you’re not equating it, you’re just trying to stop actual bad people post under said tag or context but by doing that you are equating it, intentionally or not that’s what it does. Equating a specific thing as the direct route of something only works in removing the blame from
“this was a mentally twisted person who didn’t get the help they needed before causing pain to others” to
“this could happen to anyone who overindulges in X”. Having gone through a very similar thing in the gaming community I know it just makes legitimate sexists harder to spot.
In my experience dealing with sexists in the fandom, it’s not usually the people who post edgy images, it’s usually the ones you’d not expect, the ones who know how to hide it and would never go near stuff that makes them stand out. I can only assume racists are the same.
Equally broad rules that include banning even dumb jokes make people like me look bad when talking about legitimate hateful ideology that can harbour within the context of the fandom. When you over enforce surface level things to counter a problem that’s deeper routed like bigotry it undermines the problems other people face around that topic. Over-enforcing only makes people have less faith in not just the mod and admin team but the issue that’s being tackled as well. It leads to situations where my issues or experiences get equated to the micromanaging as it slowly loses its impact when people keep hearing the same words pop up over and over and being thrown around nonchalantly. As I said I’ve already experienced this exact thing in the gaming industry where ‘journalists’ threw the word sexist around to the point where it lost all meaning and then when I actually did experience legitimate sexism it was hard to get taken seriously. Now if I say
“I’ve experienced sexism in the gaming community” instead of people thinking of doxing, rape threats, and demeaning sexual comments, people will instead think of feminist frequency and that’s made the issue 10x worse for the people legitimately affected. You speak of
bronie branding but what about the ‘branding’ of the people affected by the very issues we’re making rules about? That has an impact too, one I know first is a much bigger problem then 0.14% out of 100%.
You mention The Atlantic & The New York Post articles but using those as evidence to me seems flawed considering both papers have a very famous history and notable reputations of being gossip papers, You speak of the importance of reputation for Bronies but
surely reputation should go both ways? Surely we should look at the reputation of papers like
The New York Post and Atlantic?
I started watching the show in late 2010, I remember back when the articles were about how scary it is that adult men are into a show for little girls heavily implying malicious intent from the grown men who watch it. If we are to use the argument that because it’s in article form it’s therefore true then that would apply to those outdated articles from 10 years ago but we know it’s not true, heck I knew it wasn’t true 10 years ago and I was literally one of the
‘little girls’ the articles were trying to
‘protect’. We know that fundamentally it’s not about reporting on fandoms, they don’t care when there’s charity streams or children hospital visits, they only care when they can convert fear and outrage into profit. It speaks to a bigger problem but fundamentally fear sells and quality vs time to produce quality will always be factors in the digital age of journalism leading to blurred lines where it’s not about if something is or isn’t news it’s about if an article can or cannot get away with sensationalism in its most ugly forms. And it worked, we all clicked their Pony article at the end of the day, so they get the last laugh in the end.
To me the biggest issue is how the admin teams on the main sites dealt with the media attention. It’s evident a lack of experience was at play here. It’s quite fitting That The New York Post was founded by Alaxander Hamilton, who famously had papers spreading rumours about his affair that no one believed, and then he wrote a massive article confirming everything to be worse than the rumours were insinuating, to me that’s what leaders in the MLP community did. Everyone knows these papers are gossip papers, a boiler plate statement that reads as generic as a horrorscope would have done the trick. But instead they write these lengthy admission of guilt statements, and play right into the hands of the journalists. It affectively tells everyone from the outside looking in that this house of cards will fold at a drop of the hat. That’s where the true problem for me lies. It encourages mediocre journalists to keep digging and it sends a signal that any form of pressure will lead to cracks. I can’t fully blame those involved since without knowing how companies usually deal with this kind of pressure and why and how to control the narrative it can easily boil over into panic and fear and blurting things out that in retrospect were a bad idea. But this entire thing has raised many concerns for me like it has for many in relation to the people who are supposed to be the flagpoles of the community.
I’m all for new implentations of structures and ideas to build upon equality among users, creating a system in place to support groups when dealing with hateful ideology, but because I am so ‘for’ this I’m also very anti-wasting time on things that in my opinion help no one. Suface level concepts like banning nazi posts do nothing beyond ensure that more Nazi posts will pop up because if you tell the internet not to post something then of course they will.
(Sorry in advance if I repeated any points anyone else has said, this took awhile to write :P)