Erin Kissane
If the mastodon ~community wants to be more welcoming to more people, someone is going to have to do bystander training for dealing with people like this dude. (And the other guys who told her to just block.) He responded to a Black woman’s post about it feeling super white here and went on for like seven posts telling her how to speak and how he was helping her be better.
By not making this guy’s replies visible to most people bc of federation weirdness, the software plays a role, too.
Paul Cantrell
@kissane @paulkruczynski
Yeah. I really would like a better solution than just boosting bad posts, but absent a better alternative….
I’m totally on board with this general idea. I keep used the phrase “raising the bat signal.” And Erin’s phrase “bystander training” seems like a key thing here.
Erin Kissane
@paulkruczynski I don’t do the “boost bad posts to make an example of them” thing but I more people probably should 😬
Pauxlll Kruczynski
@kissane there needs to be a way to light a flare so the rest of can see these interactions and offer offenders some, oh let's call it "course correction" 😀
Erin Kissane
A few weeks back some dude came into my replies for like 11 posts about how I was behaving like a child but he cared about me as a person and would teach me how to speak effectively. No one else saw the replies because he was on a tiny instance. It’s relentless and mostly invisible.
ANYWAY. The alternative is it stays a mostly white mostly male space with N European geek norms, which, okay, but you don’t get to also complain about people using other platforms.
Paul Cantrell
@kissane
Yes, that’s a really good point. That advice seems directly contrary to boosting the bad post! And surely “hey, this sucks what you’re experiencing, we value you” is a place where a bat signal response needs to start.
I do also want people fueling the toxic replies to experience pushback (either education, request to go away, outright shaming, or blocklisting). Not sure how to balance that. But actively stemming toxic reply habits seems like an important outcome.
Erin Kissane
@inthehands @paulkruczynski Like the first thing they teach you in bystander training is to center the person being targeted, but in a quiet peer way, not a performative confrontational way. It's a signal in the moment that someone has people.
Then there's the maybe separate problem of detoxing the people who caused the trouble to begin with.
Paul Cantrell
@kissane @inherentlee @paulkruczynski
Does Mastodon support any form of shared blocklists? One thing that might help here is to develop, for example, a list of people who keep posting emotionally exhausting replies to Black people that never quite rise to the moderation threshold for account suspension, and then make subscribing to that blocklist a part of an ally-supported onboarding process for newcomers.
Erin Kissane
@inherentlee @inthehands @paulkruczynski I do this in some cases, but not in others, bc when I'm widely boosted, it always results in more of the exact same tedious chiding and I don't want to bring that into anyone else's life—so idk, idk.
lee :Fire_Trans:
@inthehands @kissane @paulkruczynski what about boosting the OP's response to a bad reply? To some degree that is still a bat signal - curious readers will want to know what it's in response to - and it shows more support for OP instead of furthering the spread of the shit reply directly
Paul Cantrell
@trochee
It seems like one could get a great head start on this by having a few dozen high-traffic accounts privately share exports of which individuals they’ve blocked, and then publish a list of accounts that appear on x% of those lists.
I strongly suspect it’s a power law distribution thing where a small number of users are a huge fraction of the problem.
Jeremy Kahn
shared blocklists are being built at #TheBadSpace -- I wonder if "poster is in bad faith towards marginalized people" is something that's worth federating there too
Jesse
@jdp23 @trochee @kissane @damon I'm not sure I agree we have a sufficient set of tools. I think there's a lot we can do in between what we have, and what existed on Twitter, which had no guardrails and therefore had a real tendency toward public shaming spectacle that I understand why the anti-quote people would be afraid of recreating. We shouldn't limit ourselves to the best tools we had before.
Jeremy Kahn
I agree there COULD BE intermediate options
but also we have to build them into the affordances of the software _to the users_ and the community practices (e.g. onboarding!) so that our communities actually use these intermediate options when appropriate.
Jesse
@trochee @jdp23 @kissane @damon I think it would be great to have more built in ways to call in or ... call sideways? Before jumping right to call out. Call outs are just inherently a really powerful tool that can be abused.
Jesse
@trochee @jdp23 @kissane @damon Of course there is no way to systematically prevent abuse or going overboard. But it helps to give people intermediate options, so that the whole culture isn't normalized around going to 11, because the dial actually has a 1 through 10.
Jon
@misc There are already plenty of intermediate options! Agreed that calling in is often a better initial approach, but when racist behavior repeats and persists (as it has on Mastodon for the last 6+ years), powerful tools are needed as well.
Jeremy Kahn
I coined the phrase "underdogpile" over here to describe using QTs to rally allies and call out bad behavior
https://dair-community.social/@trochee/110498394535933139
(and I think I agree with all of you about how tricky it is to make QTs work best)
Jon
@kissane Yep. Black Twitter refined using QTs as a means of calling out racism (and sexism, hypocrisy, etc). And racist misogynist troll kings. have plenty of other tools they can use (includng 11-thread reply chains).
Of course the details of how QTS matter a lot -- and there certainly needs to be more anti-harassment functionality and better moderation in general. So we'll see how it goes.
And @damon, 💯 !
Erin Kissane
@damon I've felt a little neutral about QTs because the same dynamics that make them work for this use also make them worth for racist, misogynist troll kings—but if you axed those people right away with good moderation, that wouldn't be an issue. Feels like a system with interconnected parts that all have to work together.
Damon Outlaw
@kissane@mstdn.social Thank you for bringing this to light. This is one of the reasons having QT’s (actual qt‘s and not a work-a-round) is and has been helpful for BIPOC on the bird app forever. It highlights bad actors, allows the community to come to the defense and should make it more noticeable to mods. It’s stuff like this why I speak out daily about the gatekeeping and HOA attitude. You’re so right how they talk down on big social but then want to control peoples experiences here in the #Fediverse being told to block is not enough. #Mastodon needs to do better as do we all
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