the rachel drama/hack, the pronoun struggle sessions, and now this (most likely) false accusation against beatnik show that there's a lot of asshats with no morality willing to use anything against the site, and we need to get a lot smarter and stop falling for it
From what I have seen from the mod team, everything is working as it should.
Serious accusation is being handled in a serious manner. That's all that can be expected.
Yeah, they've been handling it really well. Like, if the "drama" has been interrupting your regularly scheduled memeing, tough shit. That's what transparency looks like and I support the way our mods have been handling it 100%. We're a community.
I think we should treat these types of allegations with the seriousness they deserve. The admin or mod can recuse themselves temporarily and let the process occur. The site shouldn't fall apart from one person being temporarily or permanently removed from their position. Therefore we should not hesitate to do the right thing, treat them seriously, investigate, and reach a verdict.
That said, I think all admins and mods should learn more about op-sec (myself included) to prevent this from happening. Additionally, I've always made the point to separate my community persona from my dating persona. Even at work, I never hit on the women there, to the point they thought I was gay. I rather come off as completely uninterested than a sex pest.
The thing that sucks about this is that no matter what happens ChaCha is worse off. Either it's legit, which would be just fucking horrible, or it's a fraud, which will further the destructive and fake narrative that many accusers are liars. This whole situation has to be absolutely shitty for people who have been abused in the past. Whether or not it turns out that the story is true, I hope that when the dust settles, we find a way to show our support to people who have suffered sexual violence but are afraid of coming forward because they think they won't be believed.
yea it's really fucking upsetting to see how these people are willing to weaponize rape accussations, zero fucking shame
I disagree. I think that if the claims are fake and it is shown after it is handled well, this can be a good thing for the community.
Premature to declare the beatnik thing a fraud imo, but eh
Truth is its a website and its stupid to care about websites, its a podcast fandom reddit clone for looking at jokes; mod drama, user drama, or the things I post shouldn't be upsetting or concerning to anyone
Calling this a 'community' is weird and thinking of the people here as real people rather than bleep bloops is recipe for unhappiness and very much teenage behavior
It may be a result of a capitalist reality, but it is reality nonetheless. Under communism I believe the internet would be different, but as it is, my way is the healthy and happy way to be.
This site is a content generation machine. The old sub was that, a small content cog part of a larger content machine that was reddit (ptew ptew). Content can be educational, emotionally effecting, humorous; you can be a content creator, doing bits and having arguments. You can try to effect the way the content is generated for the better. But its a reddit clone, and thats just what it is. As a community, it is fatally flawed even moreso than the old forums were back when the internet worked more like that, and even those were probably too flawed to be communities. As a content stream it is ok-to-middling
Yep. Treating it as anything else is just setting yourself up for trouble.
But then again, I do have schizoid personally disorder so ymmv.
"That's just the way that it is" is exactly the rhetoric that impedes progress. We have an opportunity to create a community here that is different from Reddit and Twitter. I like the people here, and I don't find that seeing it as a community makes me unhappy. Perhaps viewing it in the way that you are, due to the other spaces from where you've learned this behavior, is what's making you unhappy? I don't want to extrapolate too much and assume what you feel or believe, so please take it with a grain of salt. We want an inclusive and mutually respectable space that treats people as people, so don't be afraid to do the same (:
I'm unhappy because daddy used to beat me, it has nothing to do with this website
Creating an atmosphere of respect and ensuring everyone is comfortable posting here is one thing, and a laudible goal (although it would also be nice to be able to tell people to fuck off). But you want to feel comfortable at the theatre, the audience wants to be able to applaud or withhold applause, and the players want to be able to express their art. It would still be considered wrong if someone thought the characters on stage were real, if they couldn't tell that behind those characters the players may or may not really believe what they are saying.
Calling this a ‘community’ is weird and thinking of the people here as real people rather than bleep bloops is recipe for unhappiness and very much teenage behavior
I meant feeling unhappiness with regards to reading the posts here as messages from people rather than from fictional characters. Man, I'm sorry that your dad used to beat you. That fucking sucks.
My point is that it's unfair to assume people are actors on a stage playing characters if/when they are real people expressing real thoughts and emotions. It's an unsubstantiated accusation. It's invalidating and alienating.
Edit: fuck I can't figure out quotations
Actors are also real people, and their emotional expression can be taken seriously, but their characters aren't 'real'. Or take a standup comedian, they may be speaking as 'themself' but it is still a comic persona that you see on stage, the character of which is distorted by the medium, and you have to treat it as such. The medium of posting here - partially through the style differences between posting and actually talking, but mostly imo due to anonymity and the screen barrier - creates such a distortion, and the alienation is a result of that distorition, of failing to understand that it is a distorition.
The thing is, although alienation is a downside, this distortion also has upsides, like for example it allows people to be funnier, more raw, etc.
Yeah, that shit is exactly what's wrong with the hellscapes that are Twitter and Facebook. One could draw similarities to how people are way ruder to cars driving on the road until they're confronted with the actual person driving. I don't want ChapoChat to become like that too, so this sort of alienation is harmful.
Its the best way to be, if I were a real person I wouldn't be making ever post with the aim of maximizing how annoying I can be, that is solely robot shit
To suggest purposely convincing yourself that posts here -- from real life people, with real emotions and lives -- are not real people as a coping mechanism is honestly pretty fucked. I certainly don't want to be viewed as a disconnected string of words. I'm a person. Care about websites or not, this website is full of people and made by people. As communists, we are for the people.
Please reconsider how this viewpoint alienates your fellow comrades.I don't know if you are a communist, I assume like I assume with most (excluding the anarchists) here you are someone who labels themself thus because they like the sound of it and maybe surrounds themself with paraphenalia. Being unable to verify the rest because of the anonymous character inherent to this site, I have to be extremely charitable (which I often am) to grant you the rest of your 'communism', which is to say, dues-paying membership to a democratic socialist or anarchist mutual-aid organization. Assuming all that is true, I still find it very fucking condescending and dopey that you make an appeal to our presumed shared 'communism' and being 'for the people' to defend the poor posters on this, I say again with emphasis, banned-comedy-podcast-fandom-subreddit spinoff reddit clone.
If people are feeling alienated by this website or by the internet, there is a very effective solution that ends with off and begins with log. The alienating thing is not the style of the other website posters, it is the fact of seeking out a sense of community on this website in the first place.
If they cannot go outside and find friends in real life, which I get, then there are ways you can build a digital connection with individuals you meet on a public forum, I'm sure friendships have grown out of this site, but those have hopefully grown privately, where it is safer to intimately expose yourself (joke not intended). Becoming invested in a digital relationship with a person is fine. Investment in a digital relationship with 30k anonymous people is not fine
I'm struggling to see how advocating for a sense of community rather than alienation is condescending.
I dunno, I'm starting to question whether this is in good faith or not anymore. I'm not going to engage in a discussion about how valid a communist I personally am.
I don't know how else to convince you that a forum for people with a shared ideology, which engages - or has known to engage - in earnest discourse is a good thing, and that considering it a community is not harmful. To address your claim that it is "not fine."And I guess my other point is that if you're doing things that are alienating and make people "log off," you should reconsider whether it's right to alienate people such that it pushes them out
What I am saying is, I (and the rest of the people posting on the website) am not doing anything to anybody, they are doing it to themselves by having an expectation that does not match reality.
I dunno, I’m starting to question whether this is in good faith or not anymore.
Good! You are learning. You have no assurance either way, so you have to accept either as a possibility at least. Thats part of posting on a forum.
But you are also not learning. You've take personally as some sort of attack something that, if you had emotional detachment and uncare for posts on website, you would have understood as a generic statement about a generic poster on this website (which is how it was intended). I don't know you! As far as I know, you fit that description, and I can't know any more than that. That's why the appeal to our shared communism is dopey; you don't know me or what I believe, and I don't know you, and this website is by all evidence mostly people who like that who just like to be called communists. Maybe not even mostly, since there are anarchists and people who don't buy stickers and pins at all here, too. So it is dopey to me when people pretend they are doing revolution when they post here, it reads as play-acting. The condescending part is more a matter of tone: "Surely you must agree with me, we are both marxist-leninist-maoists and love the workers, so you are wrong and I am right!"
E: as for earnest discussion, that doesn't require and can actually be hindered by community. We are doing it now and I don't consider myself in any community with you.
Not that I want to dismiss very serious allegations as an op, but breaking up leftist communities is kinda their specialty, and I'm sure fedbois engage in this kind of activity quite often in the internet age.
My question is why would an accuser come to chapo chat to voice these allegations on someone we don't have any real-world contact with? What is the incentive structure to taking their claims to chapo? As far as I'm aware, the accuser is not a long-term chapo user.
What is more likely:
A. One of our admins is a pedophile who had a real-life relationship with a very underage girl, told her about his internet persona, who then decided to post about his predatory behavior on the niche communist forum he helps run
OR
B. Some asshole targeted an admin with elaborately constructed allegations to take advantage of our community inherently taking accounts of abuse from women seriously.
I'll reserve judgement for when more information has surfaced, but I can't imagine how a non-chapo-user would arrive at the decision to air out allegations here of all places.
The accounts from that user are detailed and bizarre, and I have no way of validating those claims, so I can only make judgements on the circumstances surrounding the controversy.
Has there been any more communication with the user making the allegations or was it just the initial thread?
I'm very proud of how our mod team has handled this. We absolutely should not dismiss allegations of abuse outright, but we also should understand that our predisposition to believing accusations from women can be weaponized against the greater community. Feds and fash will almost certainly try to use any methods they can to disrupt left wing spaces, digital or otherwise.
I think the most important thing to come from this is opsec, and how we all should be taking it more seriously. I have a series of suggestions on how we can take steps to protect the security of users of chapo chat, and I will be making an effortpost detailing some of these steps.
The good news is that we've proven we can handle these attacks. I see no reason to change how seriously we take them if the way we responded to it has worked as well as can be expected.
i respect the way they are handling this
but it's so obviously false that they could have just deleted the comment and banned the account and that would be ok too
it might be obvious to people who know beatnik, but he's an internet stranger to me, and if the response was simply to memory hole it, that would feel like they were desisting in their duties as moderators. it's possible to presume innocence while taking accusations seriously, and that's what has been done.
I’m glad they are erring on the side of caution but even without knowing him, the post seemed really off. She’s a 15 year old girl and they bonded over a shared interest in craft beers? And that he enjoys IPAs like everything else about him that the poster claimed to know from personal interaction was available in his reddit post history. For example, but again I’m glad that they’re doing due diligence.
I know nothing about the dude -well, I guess I now know he has a family crest featuring a fox- and the initial post still screamed troll to me
One part of the solution to me is don't pin that shit (as in stuff involving specific individual users) to the top of the front page. It makes it much more of a big drama and talking point. Just let it exist as part of the site as normal and people can care about it if they want.
No shit that is the biggest problem on this site. Like just make it an unpinned thread in user union instead of blowing up the site with it. Literally no website on earth spotlights it's stupid user drama like we do. This goes for all drama
I think we should wait until the investigation plays out before we go deciding what is and is not "likely false".
As someone with no power whatsoever for this situation, I'm a little more than 50% certain it's an op
but a significant part of the ‘online left’ (🤢) staked out a position against this for years, if for no other reason than to signal its opposition to libertarians around the time of Kavanaugh.
I don't think that's true. Believing all women doesn't mean believing anything a woman says without any critical thought. It's pretty self-evident how that's a flawed idea. This isn't a contradiction. Our position differs in that we didn't dismiss anything. Some random commenters cracking jokes may be insensitive but the admin are taking it seriously. And that's who needs to take it seriously. We can't do this thing where a few users shitpost and we treat that as the moral failing of the entire left. This isn't a referendum on where the left, even the online left, stands on MeToo. There is no identity crisis. Let's not lose our heads here.
This was always going to turn out one of two ways. Either we get rid of Beatnik and that proves that chapo is infested with pedos just like they already say. Or nothing happens, the accusations are dismissed, and that proves we're hypocrites for not believing all women. There is no win here. We've been here before when they said we were all white college bros. They're going to think what they think no matter what we do. There's no level of cooperation or humility good enough. So we don't worry about it. We don't agonize over what some chuds and libs might say. This isn't a PR thing. The soul of the left doesn't rest on what goes on in this site. Anyone who thinks it does isn't worth taking seriously.
Exactly. "Believe all women" doesn't mean that women never lie, it means that accusations need to be taken seriously and not just swept under the rug because it's convenient, you know the accused and he would never, she was just asking her it, etc, etc, etc. It means to listen and investigate, and if necessary, take serious action, which is what the mods are doing. I don't see any reason for a struggle session here.
Well, the point is that often women aren't believed. Reports go unfiled and uninvestigated, rape kits go untested, the default response is "it didn't happen, and if it did she was probably asking for it." So believe all women, even if she engages in "risky behavior," even if they'd been dating, even if she's a sex worker, even if he's an important man, even if they'd both been drinking, even if a conviction would spoil the life of a "promising young man." Believe that no matter the woman's circumstances or identity, her claims are worthy of being listened to and investigated. The current system is shit, especially if you're, for example, a WOC, or trans, or any of a number of things that make you worth less in the power structure that exists today.
All that does not mean that no woman has ever lied. It just means that every accusation (no matter who makes it and how much status they have) deserves a rigorous investigation, and consequences if necessary. This is not how things go in most places today, but the mods are working to ensure that it's how things will work here. I hate to be all, "as a woman," but really, as a woman who uses this site, I find that reassuring. I'm sure it would be MUCH easier for them to latch on to some of the details from the accusation that make it seem ... questionable ... and just declare Beatnik innocent by default, but they're not doing that.
I want to dig into how you reconcile the contradiction, specifically: “Our position differs in that we didn’t dismiss anything”. I don’t understand how this is materially different from liberal concepts like ‘presumption of innocence’ and ‘conclusive evidence’.
Our admin reached out to the alleged victim. They locked the post and stated that any harassment of either party would be banned. Beatnik handed over all his admin privileges and basically transferred site ownership to TC69 and the other admins. Beatnik is now just a normal user who hasn't posted since making a statement. He could be easily banned and if we get any hint he's posting again, he can be called out. But this isn't a court, we can't stop him or anyone from posting. Bans aren't permanent. This is a problem with putting so much on the internet and trying to force it to be something it can't be. In person, you can get a restraining order and you can physically bar someone from a community. So there's only so much we can do as a site to punish someone. Because of that we shouldn't attempt to act like there's some scenario where proper justice, in a liberal or any other sense, can be done.
That response is as different as it could be from the chud response. The alleged victim comes forward. The post is immediately deleted, they're banned. Everyone has a laugh about it. The accused brags about it on twitter or the site. A person in power has been protected. They kept their admin status. Nothing changed. Everyone keeps posting about how women lie to get attention or money.
In your view are these situations the same and indistinguishable because of the "everyone had a laugh part?" Seems awfully reductive. Especially when everyone here did not have a laugh.
Now onto the broader philosophical argument. If chuds view themselves as justified in protecting good men from unscrupulous accusers, how is that different from us believing Beatnik might be the victim of a scam? How do we know we're good and they're bad when they believe they're good and we're bad? Outside of the above response, I don't know. I feel like this is one of those "how do you know your green isn't my red?" questions. I don't think morality is so objective. You try to do the best thing you can and live with the consequences. Chuds don't even try to do that.
I mean I look at the context of the post. We're beset by trolls just about every week. We have old chapo members who hate us and are gladly tweeting that we support pedophiles right now. We have people from a discord who hate us and raid every so often. There are two or three very active subreddits dedicated to trolling us and posting drama. There's a whole nother site for a different podcast that likes taking a shot at us from time to time. That's not including the various interpersonal and ideological struggles happening within the site at any given time. These are real things that happen. This isn't like claiming the deepstate is paying women to lie about Trump.
Not only that but we have bad actors who are active users here. I know that because as soon as the accusation was posted, it was almost instantly posted in other places. So all these people who hate us are here and at least some of them have become long-standing members with credibility. They just get a kick out of being a double agent or whatever. Or they believe in the politics but hate the idpol shit so they vent by stirring shit from the other end. When the stupidpol purge happened there were several users who posted there and here.
None of that means that we don't have weirdo sex pest users. Of course we do. So does any large group of people. Being leftist doesn't make us immune from having shitty people on our side. If anything this site defaults to thinking everyone is a secret chud or wrecker a little too much.
I think a lot of the struggle here isn't actually over philosophy or morality, it's that we're trying to force this site and the internet to do something it can't do. If we ban a sex pest they can just get a new name and keep posting. Materially there is no change. You would never know you're replying to them unless they made it obvious. Therefore we can't actually be a platform of justice in any real sense. Liberal or otherwise. We can ban people and try to curtail the bad people but we can't actually stop a really clever bad person.
That's why I occasionally push for logging off. We put too much faith in the internet and try to make it the center of our movement and that's a bad thing. Precisely because it's so easy to lob a grenade into the center of anything we build and bring it down. It's not secure by design. There's a reason leftist orgs had in-person vetting before corona. The internet should be the way to get to a place, it shouldn't be the place.
This also plays into how we deal with our own powerlessness. We put so much emphasis on online behavior being the metric by which we judge right and wrong, and who belongs and who doesn't. It comes from a good place but it's still misguided. We can't control anything happening in politics so we redefine what happens online as politics and then try to control that. We turn that control into a moral crusade because control means safety. We control who gets to be in our community and who doesn't. We get to control, to an extent, who says what. We determine which are the right opinions and which are bad.
I know that sounds like a parler post. But I don't disagree with some levels of control because they are indeed necessary to secure the community for marginalized members. Unlike the internet censorship people I agree with banning chuds and sex pests and others as well as not turning this place into some kind of marketplace of ideas where lolbertarians come debate us everyday.
But the control has a bad side because it means people confuse that for political control. They think by regulating the community they're doing praxis. Again, to some extent it is because marginalized groups need safe places to congregate without harassment. But it's not going to help bring about socialism or propel the leftist project forward. So we can't treat it as an important part of the movement or accomplishing politics. Therefore we should limit our agonizing over these lines in the sand we set up to police our community. We shouldn't put so much emphasis on policing consumption and worrying about how watching the wrong movie or liking the wrong podcast makes you a chud.
If you understand that then these online interactions become simpler and easier to contextualize in a broader political sense. A lot of controversies aren't actually meaningful. The power the internet has appears to only exist to those who believe it has power.
So to bring this back around. I guess the idea is that I'm pretty comfortable with my morality on this. I don't see it as a contradiction. I see a material difference between how this has been handled so far and how r/The_Donald would handle it. I think it's been handled as well as it could have been for a website. The accused are no longer in power. The site is still up. The alleged victim has every channel of support from the admin and most users open to them. They've been clear that people shouldn't harass anyone over this. Not sure what else there is to do. I don't know what a perfect response looks like. If Beat had been banned instantly and publicly then we'd just be having a permutation of the same conversation.
We’ve set up an incredibly low bar of ‘is the person a 15 year old girl, and did Beatnik ever have contact with them’.
This isn’t anywhere close to the sorts of denial with Biden or Kavanaugh.
Instead, what’s pretty blatantly a memey accusation has been taken seriously, Beatnik has given up his position of power pending investigation, and, assuming no further evidence actually does come to light, we’ll shrug it off as being a wrecker.
Typically in situations like this, there’s also often a few victims. If no one else comes forward with stories of Beatnik being weird, it’s a decent sign that he isn’t a predator using ChaCha as a stalking ground.
‘Degrades quality of investigations’ may very well end up being requiring a higher standard of proof for next time.
This time around, Beatnik acted with an over abundance of caution, knowing, in part, that many in this community are survivors of SV, and that we hold a high standard for not allowing abusers.
After this time, the entire community will be more wary, and more resilient. If the same post pops up next time, we may see the response be “ok give some evidence and we’ll take it seriously”. That creates a higher workload for fabrication.
Also, the stress of a false accusation aside, a two day hiatus isn’t gonna kill the site. The accused gets to go on gardening leave. It’s not like the place falls apart if someone with a red [A] beside their name doesn’t log in for a couple of days.
Yeah, a big fucking yikes at a lot of comments.
The only thing I feel sure about is that Beatnik's fursona is deff a fox
I always took "Believe all women" to mean don't dismiss an accusation just because a woman happens to be a sex worker or is a drug addict or any of the other typical reasons people use to dismiss these things. Not literally meaning "Believe EVERY, each and every single women out there on each accusation no matter how ridiculous they me seem." Like those outlandish Jacob Wohl trainwreck accusations from back when. Nobody gave those an ounce of their time because they were obviously false.
to be fair, I've always felt "Believe All Women", despite being a catchy and profound slogan, was a poor one to use because of times when its very obviously not true. I can't think of a better one off the top of my head, but I think it should be more of a "Justice is Blind" connotation , along the line of "Give all women the benefit of the doubt when they make accusations, no matter what their life circumstances might be", and if an initial investigation into it throws up a bunch of red flag like this one has, so be it and skepticism is warranted, but don't ever go into an accusation already assuming there's going to be red flags because a person happens to be a sex worker or homeless or an addict or whatever. It should be more about the initial conditions and attitudes going into an investigation, NOT a view that its a requirement to hold as the investigation goes on no matter how many suspect things are uncovered and pieces don't add up.
This article (I think this is the one) handles the issue in a fairly mature way IMHO: https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations/
I think its intersting to note that two of the top reasons that false accusers will make up a rape story are (1) Fear of retribution from partner if they knew activity was consensual and (2) Fear of retribution from parents if they knew activity was consensual. Particularly that second one.
Has the slogan ever been "believe ALL women?" I might just be remembering it wrong, but I remember it as "believe women."
This is the first step in developing a healthy dose of irony poisoning for the community, just like the sub
