Hypatia

yeah

i definitely see how it can be hinky -- we face decisions where no option seems good at all and it's just a matter of what is less . . . worse. but i, at least, want to know if a rapist is around and what happened. sometimes, people here talk obliquely, and i wish they'd just be more candid and less whispery. i can't choose for myself if i don't know who or what the issue is, you know?

I would always rather know than not know, but if "naming and shaming" puts risk/cost on you/the person disclosing it then that outweighs my desire to know. If that makes sense.

For this specific situation, it would be good if Cohost had direct messages of some kind, e.g. if I am boosting someone who's a rapist I would want someone to tell me so I can stop but they shouldn't have to put themselves at risk to do so.

Socially, it's a mess. Cohost has users who get upset if you even speak too loudly about a site feature you don't like because it's negative. They don't even want you giving UI/UX feedback because it might stress the devs out. So I absolutely think it's already a problem here. There's constant handwringing about not being like twitter, but "twitter" behavior is defined by...basically a lot of extremely human behaviors that have existed online since way before twitter existed. If you don't trust the moderation, that's twitter behavior. If you argue with someone, that's twitter behavior. Anything other than extremely benign happy posting is looked down upon. And frankly, that's exactly what I saw from Pillowfort when massive security problems were being reported there. "The devs are working really hard! You're just trying to cause problems! You're just being trolls! This is a good website for good people!" The problem is, whether you think it's a downer or not, you could impersonate people in DMs trivially on the site and that's a big problem. You can't have a site where everyone is just positive all the time, because it leads to willful ignorance of problems. Now my examples are more site focused than social group focused like yours, because...site UI/UX and site security are interests of mine so they come up a lot. But it's the same problem: if you have an issue, and you bring that issue up, you're bringing the vibe of the site down.

But I also have to worry about the rules of the site itself. Their rules basically say no to callout posts unless it's important. What determines that? Who determines that? If callouts become commonplace here, is it up to the staff to decide which ones have merit? What if they don't find an accusation to be worthwhile? I think they've tried to pick a middle ground between "we don't want this to become tumblr with nonstop callouts about petty bullshit" and "we can't ban people from warning people about dangers", but that middle ground won't hold up in practice.

I don't know, and frankly I don't think we'll have any idea how it'll play out until it plays out. But I've been in communities before where you were expected to always be positive and they were extremely easy for abusive people to manipulate, because if you say "hey your behavior doesn't seem right to me" you're the one being mean because everyone else in the room was talking about Nice things. I don't know you or your situation, but this seems like the thing you're worried about, and it's a very real worry.

One of the few accounts we have blocked on here is a known rapist who has lied about a close friend of ours being part of an elaborate conspiracy against them. How do we warn people about this?

I think, technically speaking, this kind of warning is not what is meant by a “callout post”. When I think of a “callout post” I think of a long tumblr rant that shotguns a bunch of accusations ranging along the lines of “likes Harry/Draco slash fiction” to “said problematic things about Black Lives Matter” to “is a tankie” even up to “is a ‘known abuser’” with no details given. It’s throw-a-bunch-of-mud-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks; the kind of thing where no effective response can be made because the whole thing is vague and amorphous; and the majority of it is garbled hearsay anyway.

I happen to know someone who is frequently the target of this kind of callout post, because they were the target of a Kiwifarms op a decade ago and now a bunch of people are convinced that they are a “known pedophile abuser”. I’d probably report someone to the moderation team who tried to “warn” me about that person based on Kiwifarms-sourced evidence. That’s not toxic positivity on my part, that’s “keep this Nazi shit off the site”.

I’ve also been dragged into this kind of callout in real life, and it has uniformly involved people with poor interpersonal communications skills getting entangled in ambiguous situations and trying to depict them as unambiguously black and white. And I’ve seen other situations where people had real concerns about problematic behavior or questionable use of language, and because they raised those concerns clearly but in good faith the situation got resolved with everyone feeling cared for and listened to. That also isn’t toxic positivity, that’s actual positivity.

So I don’t have a complete answer to this question, but I would say that if you thought I should be warned about Z (because I’d interacted with them) you should not do it by saying “Hey, joXn, just so you know, Z is a known rapist who has lied about a close friend of ours being part of an elaborate conspiracy against them.” “Known” is being asked to do too much work here. Known to whom, on what grounds? You need to have some receipts and you need to be willing to provide them.