lines-and-edges:

adobsonartworks:

As someone who’s reported alt-right harassment and rhetoric on various
social media sites and been told “there’s nothing here that violates our
TOS,” seeing what RPGnet is doing is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Please, more social media sites need to do this.

I overheard a loose paraphrase of this earlier and thought “hmm, I’m not sure this is tactically the right way to go about it”, then saw the actual announcement and it IS in fact the right way to go about it! I wish the whole thing was here instead of truncated, because it’s very informative and goes into their reasoning at length.

Here’s the announcement itself – and the content is reproduced below:

————–

Policy outline:

1. We are banning support of the administration of President Trump. You can still post on RPG.net even if you do in fact support the administration — you just can’t talk about it here.

2. We are absolutely not endorsing the Democrats nor are we banning all Republicans.

3. We are certainly not banning conservative politics, or anything on the spectrum of reasonable political viewpoints. We assert that hate groups and intolerance are categorically different from other types of political positions, and that confusing the two legitimizes bigotry and hatred.

4. We are not going to have a purge — we will not be banning people for past support. Though if your profile picture is yourself in a MAGA hat, this might be a good time to change it.

5. We will not permit witch-hunts, progressive loyalty-testing, or attempting to bait another into admitting support for President Trump in order to get them banned. The mod staff will deal harshly with attempts to weaponize this policy.

6. It is not open season on conservatives, and revenge fantasies against Trump and Trump supporters are still against the rules.

Policy Citations:

1. Racism and rhetorical alliance with white supremacist groups. This is a fairly thorough collection of citations in itself, not just a single tweet.

https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/statu…764966912?s=19

2. Hostility to transgender persons. [ https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-…untry-n923266]

3. Attempting to ban transgender servicemembers from the military [ https://www.sfchronicle.com/lgbt/art…-13086811.php]

4. He is personally hostile to both individual reporters and the very idea of a free press. [ https://www.motherjones.com/politics…media-threats/ ]

5. He mocks the disabled. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9reO3QnUA ]

6. He mocked a sexual assault victim, to applause from his supporters. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m00qAeFHaQ ]

7. For the record, “Globalists” is almost always code for “Jews,” particularly if it’s in concert with anything about Soros. [ https://thehill.com/homenews/adminis…ling-for-unity ]

8. When confronted with the fact that his rhetoric may be encouraging domestic terrorism, he has indicated he should maybe encourage it more, and has implied the press has it coming. [ https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trum…hreats-1190263 ]

9. He is attempting to stoke fear and violence in other arenas, as well. [ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w…-a8512406.html ]

10. It is clear from context that his embrace of “nationalism” is a dog-whistled love note to white nationalists.

11. There are components of his immigration policy that cannot be supported by persons of good conscience. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_…aration_policy]

12. Further reading on this and all of the above topics are freely available from any reputable news site. [ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/…ration-n895006 ]

—end quote—

In short, all of this makes it clear that what they’re banning is hate speech phrased as statements of support for Trump. And well they should be.

The clarifications draw a firm and necessary line between misguided party loyalty and open bigotry, and also set boundaries against misuse of the policy. This should be an example to us all.