Community moderation doesn’t stand a chance in these situations, because of multiple recs of anything from “Melanoma” to slut shaming, to reminders of teh nekkid photos, to the assumption that all that awful stuff must have meant she was a prostitute… all the tropes we hate so much when Republicans use them against women, are okay for us to use if the woman is a Republican? I watched more than one valiant argument against those tropes die for lack of any backup, and a number of wonderful excuses for the bigotry in the comments, which came down to IOKToBBITAR (It’s Okay To Be Bigoted If They’re A Republican).
And I can’t even call out anyone in particular for this, only that whenever it occurs, there’s a group that ends up assembled to push the meme that in this case, sexism and misogyny are a fine way to go.
If you don’t believe it, the easiest way is to do a lookup in Comments for “melanoma” over any six month period in the last couple of years. A few will actually be discussing cancer; the rest? They show just how far we have to go before all the people who manage to fake acceptance of equal status for women actually manage to have that acceptance across the board.
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Too many other prohibitions seems to carry that exemption, too, including the ones we work hardest to flag. Prison rape “jokes” are probably the most ubiquitous bigotry we correct for, week after week; thinking about it, I’m not sure we ever see them outside of a situation where political affiliation is a key factor.
I think I need to add, also, that most of the comments that endorse or advocate violence get made in that same general context. And, of course, this is a political site, so those contexts occur on a regular basis.
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So, perhaps we do need to add “political affiliation” to that list of things where slurs and stereotypes are prohibited, even if the main response is laughter. The rest of the work might get a lot easier if people could be satisfied just saying “Republican,” or coming up with more substantive ways to say “neo-liberal.”
I have no idea whether that would help. The only real tool that moderation has, though, and then only when admin backs it up, is promoting changes in how language is used in the comments. At the moment, we’re pretty much in a place where additional polarization is almost a given. Just being able to dial it back would be useful, I think. More penalties don’t seem as though they’d be helpful, so what kind of carrot might make a difference?
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I’ve shut down membership in Community Moderation group (we had a wonderful month!); the Archive remains, and I’d appreciate it if people would message me with links to new diaries that you think might belong there. I’ve got a pretty fair list of interesting items that came up, waiting to be written about, and I’m open to more suggestions, so I expect to be doing these at least once a week for some time to come. Tuesdays look like a good time. ;)
Comments are open.
Thank you all.
Caveat:
I am not on the Daily Kos Staff; I have no official position. I do not speak for the Help Desk, and just about everything in these except for direct quotes from the Rules of the Road is my personal opinion. Some of it I can back up with numbers, some is pure guesswork, and some of it is pulled straight out of thin air (or something), because it seemed to make a reasonable argument at the time.
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