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Izzy Jayasinghe

@Gargron @mikebabcock “White men doing their best”: fills you with so much confidence. Especially when they reply out of turn.

19 comments
Michael T Babcock

@i_jayas
How was I out of turn to make a philosophical statement about the nature of humankind and your expectations thereof?
Educate me.

David Cooper

@mikebabcock now might be a good time to educate yourself instead of asking someone else to do the work for you.

@i_jayas

Michael T Babcock

@cooplogic
That's literally what asking is.
How is one to educate themselves about a purported problem that hasn't been explained in any way?
If you want people to do better you have to actually explain your critiques. You can't expect the ignorant to know what they don't know or even how to find the information.
Never put the onus on the ignorant to be wiser, it's just intellectually lazy.

David Cooper

@mikebabcock, first, making a philosophical statement about someone’s actual strife is marginalazing their concerns.
Second, it’s unclear whether you considered who the person posting was, before responding. It’s easy to say “doing your best is all anyone can do” in order to shirk the responsibility of accountability. … (continues)

David Cooper

@mikebabcock The mastodon site claims that the network is “safe for all”. If the safety measures are used as a way to attack minoritized groups, then not only is the system not safe, but it’s mechanism for “safety” is being used to harm.

Andreas K

@i_jayas
Sigh, then run your own instance with a black moderation team.

The difference from centralized systems is that nobody forces you to use this specific website.

Run literally your own instance. Then the only thing that can happen to you is that people block you. Shrug.
@Gargron @mikebabcock

Rich Burroughs :kubernetes:

@yacc143 @i_jayas @Gargron @mikebabcock That’s too late. Black folks are going to the big instances because that’s where a lot of people go, and they are getting alienated. We can’t expect new users to know what instances are the “good” ones.

Michael T Babcock

@richburroughs I have a basic life philosophy of fixing things I can fix, instead of the ones I can't:
* We can do a better job of educating users on sign-up immediately.
* We can try to fix other peoples' moderation skills slowly.
* We can unfortunately never make the system faultless. Even with infinite effort.
* So we must deal instead with mitigation and best efforts.
I could be wrong however. Feel free to explain how.

Rich Burroughs :kubernetes:

@mikebabcock I was replying to the person who said that Black folks should just make their own server. I hope I don’t have to explain to people what a problematic message that is. I don’t know specifically what needs to be done to improve the moderation. I don’t know enough about what’s happening to say.

Rich Burroughs :kubernetes:

@mikebabcock What I can tell you is that Black folks are seeing these misfires and some don’t want to come near the platform. I have a lot of Black friends I follow on Twitter and very few of them have come to Mastadon. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

David Cooper

@yacc143 most of us can’t run our own instance. I’m not sure that suggesting that it’s the job of the oppressed to fix the problems is the best stance here.

@i_jayas @Gargron @mikebabcock

Kat Kime 🚢

@yacc143 @i_jayas @Gargron @mikebabcock

Okay, but I'm pretty confident Eugen's goal isn't to build a de-facto whites-only instance.

The complaints were delivered to Eugen because the complaints are about *this* instance

"Deal with racism or go someplace else" might work for you, but not for Eugen's team

That's why the staff is doing something about it, and that's why his users will continue to deliver feedback

DELETED

@i_jayas Firstly, why do you presume that the moderation team is white? Germany is more diverse than you might think. Secondly, trying to silence @mikebabcock is the exact thing you are criticising @Gargron of doing. This is an open platform and everyone may participate, so long as they do not post hate speech. Prejudice and racism is not a one-way street.

Izzy Jayasinghe

@mikebabcock@floss.social @GlowingLantern @Gargron Go and read about the post that was removed from mastodon[dot]social. If you have, and still don’t understand, you are part of the problem.

huardsmith

@i_jayas @Gargron @GlowingLantern where can we read these “posts” (toots?)? It’s not obvious from this thread (no initial toot with the one in question). Maybe I’m being dense in my searching.

DELETED

@i_jayas I responded to you and your comment alone. What other people have said or done is quite frankly irrelevant.

Sibrosan

@i_jayas @Gargron @mikebabcock

What makes you think this is about “White men doing their best”?

Even if all the moderators are actually biologically male and have a light tone of skin, that doesn't mean they are, for this purpose, "white men".

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