I want to help them with their research, so chapos of the "post hog" and pigpoopballs poster variety, what are your thoughts on counter trolling the fash and the terf? What techniques do you use to identify the foe when they try insidious entry into a community (e.g. how norse mythos got stolen by nazis but witch aesthetic is repelling them)? What level of engagement do you use? Do you know of any other academic writing on the topic?
I've thought about this good and hard but the struggle session was winding down and I didn't want to stir it back up.
I think srs is a good model for what you're talking about. It was easily the most despised subreddit, constantly under attack, but an aggresively sjw safe space.
There's a reason they did things the way they did. And they actually used academic research in informing their strategy if I remember.
The proximity of bigots is triggering. They don't even have to say anything. So a user posting their rant calling out the unspecified transphobes who might be on the site is a problem.
The ONLY engagement a bigot should get is the mod notice of their ban.
Another way counter trolling hurts the safe space is by making the user's fight against bigots on the site louder than the mod's. Picture a vulnerable person leaving reddit because everything about their person has to be a controversy and then they come here mid-struggle session and see 'oh I'm going to have to fight for everything here too'. Do they have reddit-tier mods? Why do the posters have to do all this? I'm trying to get away from fighting for myself.
Meanwhile a mod action says the opposite "you will never have to defend yourself to this person". We should not drown that part out. We actually have mods who ban people for shitty ideals and that needs to be audible
But we've got like a different mission than srs. Trolling is part of what makes us us. Is the safe space the most important thing to us?
idk like i dont feel the need to defend myself here, if transphobic shit happens yall lambast it and fuck with the person who did it. thats entertainment to me, not a violation of a safe space or something. though it is an issue if theres no downvotes on it at minimum. comments just make it better
yeah chapo boards have really been about entertainment value than anything else. that's why we have memes like "post hog". But I'm just telling you all how it is. Say you're post traumatic and you wander on the site when a bigot pops up to argue. You're not in a frame of mind to appreciate the irony of asking the bigot for pictures of his penis. That's one way clear way the site isn't an entirely safe space.
I'm not saying it's wrong to like the site how it is because it is also cathartic to rage at them, but if we were interested in maximum inclusivity, there would be zero engagement with bigots. Not even on hypothetical to-the-bigots-who-might-be-reading-this level.
oh ive got a ton of trauma but i mean i guess people process it differently
ideally you could just filter certain phrases out