That post explicitly says itās not a place for debate or participation from users of other instances.
Iād like to respect that but I think events like this need debate and discussion because it helps to develop and evolve the culture of lemmy and the fediverse in general.
The post says:
This post is āFYI onlyā for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the āadult human femaleā dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and ācivil disagreementā on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to āsort it out through discussion and votingā. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little āsorting outā has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
The first rule:
It would be entirely under that first rule to remove it. There is nothing to explain other than āRule 1ā.
So I will firmly disagree. This was not only a communication problem, but a complete lack of moderation by their own rules. There is no way to allow the comment without them changing the rule.
Leaving that comment up is and was implicit support for the comment by saying it was not against the rules.
I went back through the two main threads just now, and see no updates.
With that in mind, I do believe that if the comments havenāt been removed, at least temporarily, the matter has gone on too long. It has been long enough to verify the dogwhistle is in common enough use that even if the person using it didnāt know what it means, a moderator or admin should know and have taken action.
Even with the shitty state of search engines nowadays, it is possible to find out that a specific dogwhistle is known and in use within a few hours. Since it was something that I ran into months ago, itās easy to confirm with A Wikipedia search
Since the recent UK court ruling is absolutely not applicable to this situation, and theyāve given no other reasoning for a decision being delayed on this matter, I donāt feel it would be reasonable for the comments to still be up. I donāt know if they are. Nobody has linked to them and shouldnāt have because brigading sucks even for this kind of thing, so I donāt know if the comments are still there.
Which, I think that brings us into complete agreement at this time. Rule 1 should have been applied already. If it hasnāt been, then it is implicit support for the comments.
100% agreed.
Which is a valid viewpoint, obviously.
However, dogwhistles are a difficult thing to moderate. You first have to be aware that they exist (they are), then you have to be aware that a specific phrase is one (they do now), youād have to verify that the report is one (still up in the air), and then decide what to do about it (still in the air).
Moderation does not have to be instant. Even if you have dozens of moderators or admins, expecting action even within an hour isnāt something to reasonably expect. Now, I havenāt gone back through and checked to see what theyāve decided at this point, if anything, but you and I are still talking about the principle itself, so I donāt know if that matters for this part of this particular discussion. As in, was the delay at the time of the post reasonable.
I agree with you that a comment using that dogwhistle needs to be removed. I agree that if it isnāt, then thereās a problem. The only point I see that we donāt agree on so far is how quickly an admin is expected to step in on a moderation case.
By this point, I would expect at least an update on the matter, some kind of āthis is where we are in the processā. But, at the time of the post and the start of this particular conversation, I believe that they were still well within the range of an acceptable time frame for a policy decision on an unfamiliar dogwhistle.
Again, Iām still talking about events as of the time we started this chain. If you want to shift to what would be an acceptable state now we can, but Iāll need to go through both of the posts Iām aware of and update.
Agreed
They were informed, yes. Whether they knew before or not isnāt known, but also irrelevant at this point.
Negative. They are aware the phrase is a dogwhistle. The user realizing that or not is no longer relevant. Remove and notify of the reason.
Adhere to rule 1 of their instance.
When the admin is on, available, responds, then stops responding but continues to make comments/postsā¦ Question answered. They decided against moderating.
I donāt believe anyone said anything about āinstantā. What was said was they went unresponsive.
It IS a dogwhistle.
Whether a user realizes that or not is irrelevant to moderation.
Not remotely relevant at this point.
Not āWeāre figuring it outā, justā¦ Radio silence.
No, sorry, not relevant at all.
Not without saying as much. And that has nothing to do with their reasoning - they agree its a dog whistle.