If the mastodon ~community wants to be more welcoming to more people, someone is going to have to do bystander training for dealing with people like this dude. (And the other guys who told her to just block.) He responded to a Black woman’s post about it feeling super white here and went on for like seven posts telling her how to speak and how he was helping her be better.
By not making this guy’s replies visible to most people bc of federation weirdness, the software plays a role, too.
@kissane@mstdn.social Thank you for bringing this to light. This is one of the reasons having QT’s (actual qt‘s and not a work-a-round) is and has been helpful for BIPOC on the bird app forever. It highlights bad actors, allows the community to come to the defense and should make it more noticeable to mods. It’s stuff like this why I speak out daily about the gatekeeping and HOA attitude. You’re so right how they talk down on big social but then want to control peoples experiences here in the #Fediverse being told to block is not enough. #Mastodon needs to do better as do we all
@damon I've felt a little neutral about QTs because the same dynamics that make them work for this use also make them worth for racist, misogynist troll kings—but if you axed those people right away with good moderation, that wouldn't be an issue. Feels like a system with interconnected parts that all have to work together.
@kissane Yep. Black Twitter refined using QTs as a means of calling out racism (and sexism, hypocrisy, etc). And racist misogynist troll kings. have plenty of other tools they can use (includng 11-thread reply chains).
Of course the details of how QTS matter a lot -- and there certainly needs to be more anti-harassment functionality and better moderation in general. So we'll see how it goes.
And @damon,
I coined the phrase "underdogpile" over here to describe using QTs to rally allies and call out bad behavior
https://dair-community.social/@trochee/110498394535933139
(and I think I agree with all of you about how tricky it is to make QTs work best)
@trochee I like it! QT's recenter power in a way than reply-and-boost doesn't. Of course this cuts both ways but it's certainly useful for the underdogs.
BTW I did a deep dive on "Black Twitter, quoting, and white views of toxicity on Mastodon" earlier this year in https://privacy.thenexus.today/black-twitter-quoting-and-white-toxicity-on-mastodon/.
@jdp23 @trochee @kissane @damon I'm not sure I agree we have a sufficient set of tools. I think there's a lot we can do in between what we have, and what existed on Twitter, which had no guardrails and therefore had a real tendency toward public shaming spectacle that I understand why the anti-quote people would be afraid of recreating. We shouldn't limit ourselves to the best tools we had before.
Agreed, there's lots of room for innovation here -- both in terms of norms and affordances.
But back to @damon's point: as @kissane's OP illustrates, sometimes spotlighting bad behavior's useful. A tactic that #BlackTwitter uses effectively in this situation (QTs) has been blocked from Mastodon for years, which has the effect of reinforcing the anti-Blackness here.
@jdp23 @damon @kissane @trochee I agree with all of this and QTs should have been enabled a long time ago, but I think developing those norms and affordances should be a priority, because the concerns about abuse are legitimate. I’m not arguing for zero tools for spotlighting abuse, I’m arguing for many tools. And I was just trying to sketch out an idea for something that would work like a limited-reach QT.
@trochee @jdp23 @damon @kissane Not fully, of course, just like you can’t prevent people from doing screenshot quotes or unauthorized search crawls, or anything else that people don’t want. But, like, as one example, what if quote boosts were followers-only by default, and it took an active choice to flip it to public? Even a simple soft guard rail like that could be helpful.
@misc think about the implications though. From that article I shared: "Women and other marginalized groups say they are disproportionately targeted" by harassment from private QTs.
[Of course, with good moderation that might not be as much of a problem. But that's not the reality today in most of Mastodon.]
@trochee Yep. "Private QTs" where a huge harassment vector on Twitter -- https://www.dailydot.com/debug/twitter-private-quote-tweets-abuse/ discusses in more detail.
@trochee This simple diagram highlight some of the changes that could help!
Well okay it's not all that simple, https://privacy.thenexus.today/social-threat-modeling-and-quote-boosts/ discusses in more detail.
But of course there's no guarantee that the actual design of QB's will take this into account. Several of the things I point to are long-standing requests that have been ignored to date. Sigh.