Politics and moderation

[JWeinCom]

Chrkeller said:

JWeinCom said:

Lol. Bad faith. You made a topic about this alleged problem. You said content should be less restricted. Then you won't say which content you're actually talking about. As has been established already, I don't read minds. So, no, I don't know what content you would like to not be restricted. You on the other hand, should know exactly what you mean. Yet I'm acting in bad faith? 

But, since you won't tell me, this is what I think. That when you say "right wing" or "political" you don't really mean that. After all, there are all kinds of political issues, such as the ones I mentioned, that you are free to proudly champion. Even some of the more controversial ones like championing unrestricted gun access or saying the 2020 election was stolen probably wouldn't get you banned (at least it didn't when I was last active in politics). To my knowledge, you can even be an antivaxxer, and the mods aren't going to ban you. Pretty sure you could say Trump is the greatest president ever and nobody is going to ban you. So it's not all right wing views. Not even controversial ones. Only a few.

Which ones? Well, I'm pretty sure I understand the quiet part you don't want to say out loud, but I was giving you a chance to actually define what you meant instead of putting words in your mouth. But, since you don't want to clarify...

The views that get bans, that you apparently think should not, are the ones that demonize a particular group of people. Especially gay people, women, and trans people. But nobody wants to say "I should be allowed to shit on trans people" or "gay people shouldn't be represented in games" so they go to "oh well it's because it's a right wing view". But that's not the issue. The issue is that they are hateful. If those hateful views are also right wing views... well, I'll leave that to the right wingers to grapple with. 

And, inevitably, when you ask the people who complain about cancel culture, wokeness, political correctness, or whatever new buzz word they want to coin about what it actually is they wish they could say, you get the evasive tapdancing you did. They won't say it out loud because what they want is for it to be ok to shit on certain groups of people.

But, by all means, add me to the ignore list. Because, apparently, if you subscribe to the site, you shouldn't have to be subject to such horrible things as *check notes* being asked which content you think should not be restricted after saying content should not be restricted in a thread you made about how content should not be restricted.

And that's the thing that we keep seeing in this thread. The very people pretending to champion free speech get awfully upset when people do the mildest mildest things to them. When people don't inherently believe everything they say. When people say that they are derailing a thread in a gaming forum. My oh my do they clutch those pearls. As always, the fuck your feelings crowd gets in their feels the fastest. 

So, hey, you have the ignore button, so use it. I just ask two things.

First of all, don't reply to me first. Because it would be really weasely to say anything to someone who can't talk back. I think it's only fair.

Second. If being pushed to defend your position is enough to make you reach for your own personal ban button, imagine how you might feel if you're a trans person who comes to talk about a game and has to hear about how people like you are delusional and people like you being shown in a game is part of an evil woke agenda. Imagine being a woman who has to come into a topic and hear about how gaming is for men and therefore developers should only include women in games if they are apporpriately fuckable. Imagine being a gay person who has to hear about people like you being game developers is ruining the industry. If you deserve to be free from content you feel is in bad faith or antagonistic, perhaps they deserve that too ^_^.

I can give you my views, hopefully I have credits given my claims were proven. 

I never thought I couldn't express my politics.  I felt expressing my politics made me a target of the mods.  

As an example I was threatened with a ban for something like "the adults are talking" in a thread about PC vs Nintendo.  I flatly got banned for pointing out captain lives with his mom.  

Meanwhile Captain told me years ago he wanted to blow me up.  He said something about stabbing Leynos.  He is calling for executive assassination and talks openly about desires to blow up data centers..  and that is all fine.

Leynos got a laughable slap on the wrist for saying kill Republicans, in a thread where i identified as a republican.

My only rationale explanation is I identified as right so now there is a target on my back.  Unless you got s better explanation  because it makes no sense to me that straight up calls for violence is great, but don't dare tease anyone.

Point being, I really dont care what the rules are, in a sense.  But apply rules equally and fairly.

*calls for violence should be banned, period. 

I'm not sure that is responsive to what I said. What I asked for was examples of right wing speech that should be allowed but isn't.

I would need to see the context for those to really address them all and give an actual explanation. Which I'm not interested in doing, frankly because I feel like I've kind of wasted enough time in my thread. But I'll just assume all of these are accurate and there's no missing context. Already discussed the post about republicans, so going to skip that one.

Honestly, I would personally agree with you on most of those points. But, that's not generally the policy of the mod team, at least from my experience, which I haven't been a part of for years now so I do not speak for them.

The team had always been more lenient with any kind of speech about people who are not actually on the forums (i.e. celebrities or hypothetical executives) then comments that were made directly towards members of the forum. I'm pretty sure I argued pretty much the point you're making, that anything violent should always receive the harshest penalties even if the target is not an actual poster. Which is not to criticize the mod team, they just saw it differently. 

As for the comments about stabbing and exploding, I'm pretty sure if Captain Explosion said he was going to blow me up (and if I recall correctly he did once) I'd probably get a chuckle out of it. I would take it as hyperbolic and silly and think he was kind of crazy, but I would not really care that much. On the other hand, in my early 30's, I did have to move back in with my parents for a while. I genuinely felt super ashamed of it to the point where even now I'm upset thinking about it. If someone had said that to me on a forum, I would likely be super upset and not want to post here anymore. Bringing up personal information about a user in a negative way meant to embarass them was actually something that would always receive very harsh penalties.

The point is, mods are not necessarily objectively evaluating which speech is "worse". A big part of it is what the mods feel is more likely to be disruptive to the forums. For example, back to trans stuff. The mods are genuinely pro-trans (as they should be), but that's really not the whole reason we policed that so heavily. A big part of it was that we knew that once someone started talking about trans people that's what the thread was about. Anyone who wanted to talk about the actual topic would inevitably leave and it would boil down to two people arguing about trans issues. And trying to nip any conversation in the bud before it derailed a topic was simply more workable than trying to wait till it got out of hand to reign it back in. 

So I would probably agree objectively that saying you want to blow someone up is objectively more unacceptable than saying someone lives at home (which isn't really something to be ashamed of we're all doing our best our best here), I think the latter comment is much more likely to derail a thread and make users less likely to come back. Whether you believe me or not, that being treated more harshly is 100% what I would expect without knowing anything about either user's political views.

Comments which are likely to evoke strong negative emotional reactions from users are typically treated far more severely. If I were to say I want to beat Jaleel White to death with a sock full of pennies, that is a horrible thing to say, but honestly, I think it would slide because despite being violent, no particular user is likely to feel any sort of way about it. Meanwhile, if I said "user X is a pathetic loser" that would much more likely get a ban. Not saying I agree, but that's what my experience has been. 

So no, I do not think you have been personally targetted. I think teasing is in many cases generally treated more severely than violent speech whether that should or should not be the case. I personally do not believe it had anything to do with you being particularly targeted. Take that as you will.

Last edited by JWeinCom - 1 day ago