alias_sqbr | On Pile-ons as a way of enforcing community norms

Disclaimer: I am sick today. This may be utter crap. But my muse was awoken by this discussion and it Will Not Be Silenced! Anyway, I may suck at replying to comments, since I plan to spend the next day and a half napping.

Also: as per the terms of service, I would like it if you read the whole post and all the comments before making your own. I have no way to enforce this community norm except asking nicely :)

So.

There's been a of of discussion on

metafandom recently about the use of "dog-piling" (or, less pejoratively, "piling-on"), when someone posts something other people don't like (either for shallow reasons like personal taste or due to serious issues like racism etc) and they get inundated with negative replies, and you get a huge swathe of people posting about it on their personal ljs, etc. See for example Why Is There Not More Shunning? and nice is different than good.

Now overall there are pros and cons to this behaviour, like a lot of people I think it's sometimes justifiable (or even necessary) but other times is over-the-top and a bit mob-mentality-ish. It depends on the context, and the manner in which people "pile on".

Personal posts inspired by a big blow up like this can have several purposes, two common ones being simple venting or using this single incident to illustrate a more general problem. But something which has been brought up a bunch of times is "policing of community norms", and I was struck today by how the way "piling on" often works isn't always conducive to this, as the original transgression becomes so magnified in the purple-monkey-dishwasher of people writing posts based on other peoples outraged posts (not reading the original source) that the "community norm" that gets enforced ends up being something really bland and obvious rather than the more complex issue that started it all. Yet it feels like the only people who complain about this are trying to defend the pile-on-ees feelings/honour etc, rather than caring about the social value of truth per se.

I'm going to use the "Open Source Boob Project" as an example since I got kind of involved and it illustrates my point well. A lot of the posts about the OSBP didn't bother to go into the details of what happened, but were mostly just venting the frustration caused by years of crap from the icky badness of fandom (or society in general). Which is absolutely understandable and a valid thing to do. When other people complained that they were misrepresenting what happened the response was mostly "Sure, you may have had nice rules on paper, but this is what it really meant underneath/what you did at the beginning/what would have happened eventually", and I can certainly see that argument. The fact that

theferrett's original post gave entirely the wrong impression didn't help matters.

But... then a second group of people read those posts and made other posts along the lines of "If they had not have made it part of the con signup process/let women wearing green badges say no/had it be run by women/groped men's asses too/etc then it would have been fine, but as it is it's disgusting". One can imagine such people theoretically starting a similar idea at a con where it wasn't part of the con signup process, women wearing green badges could say no etc and considering themselves much more enlightened ..except that's exactly what the OSBP did. So what did that second group of people learn, exactly? That it's not ok for men to explicitly expect random women to let them touch their boobs? I'm pretty sure most people knew that already, including

theferrett etc. The community norm being policed is more subtle and complex than that.

EDIT: If you don't have a problem with the OSBP then the argument above won't mean much to you, so imagine I'm talking about some other situation where someone did something you think is really bad, and then they got misrepresented as being even worse than that.

I've seen similar issues with the way history is taught: for example, I always got the impression that 19th Century british colonialists were 100% after money and power etc, and had absolutely no concern for the africans. "Well", I can think to myself "Hasn't society progressed". But learning more about history I discover that the english public was actually quite concerned about african welfare (in a paternalistic, racist sort of way) and that even the most violent, cruel colonialist regime sold themselves to shareholders etc as philanthropic gestures of education and improvement. Kind of like they do now. Which is a lot scarier, and actually makes me think.

So how to combat this? Well, I say: if you are genuinely interested in policing community norms, don't demonise the people you're criticising. Not just because it's kind of mean (although imo that should play some part in it too) but because if you tell people "Don't act like this totally evil, moustache twirling villain" they won't feel any need to critically self-examine their behavior, because they know they're *not* totally evil, moustache twirling villains.

And if you're venting, or going off on a tangent etc, then maybe consider adding a disclaimer, like "This is just a rough description, *insert link here* has a more in depth description of what actually happened" etc. Though I agree that one can't be held entirely responsible for people mistaking a rant for a reliable source of unbiased information.

And, most importantly, as much as possible don't base you opinions on second hand reports, especially if you're passing judgement on someone. I also think people should read all the comments on an offending post (or at least the whole post itself!) before ranting at the OP, in case they've recanted or clarified somewhere, but I realise this does involve a LOT of effort once the pile-on gets going(*). And don't be too quick to pigeonhole people who get dog-piled as stock, totally evil, moustache twirling villains, instead look at what really happened, and why they did what they did, and why it's bad, and really ask yourself whether or not it's something you might have done in similar circumstances, and if you'd have known it was bad without having everyone point it out to you. Sorry if this sounds a bit condescending, I get very tactless when I'm sick! And it's easy for me to judge, since my main flaw is not being critical enough.

None of this is to argue against pile-ons per se, or that they can't help people understand what is and isn't acceptable behaviour (individually or as a community) I'm just pointing out an unfortunate flaw that I hadn't seen addressed.

I'd probably have something to say about how this relates to fandom_wank if I read it :)

EDIT: Two things that struck me later.
1)Beyond defining what is and is not acceptable, it is sometimes good to create a general environment of not fear exactly, but one in which people are aware that they can't get away with doing stupid crap, and to this end the exact limits of what counts as "stupid crap" is less important. For example, most people in fanfic fandom would agree, in principle, that racism is bad, but I think it took a whole bunch of people piling-on against individual racist actions to (start to) create a general sense that racism is bad and you shouldn't expect to get away with it, and that criticising things for being racist is a normal and acceptable thing to do.
2)I've ignored the possibility that, eg, the people who misunderstood the OSBP had, in fact, read the original post, and maybe even some of the more detailed and accurate discussion, and managed to still misunderstand the situation all on their own :)

(*)I realise this is veering more into "Don't demonise people because it's mean" rather than my main point of "Don't demonise people because it muddies the message", but I still think it deserves saying.

Current Mood: blah

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

quillori.livejournal.com

if they know and like you then they're probably more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt compared to some stranger

I agree with you. It's unfortunate in a way, because one of the especially good things about public discussions is that you can can interact with strangers, who may have points of view and reasons you would never have thought of or understood yourself, whereas it's in the nature of things that your friends probable think in roughly the same sort of way as you do much of the time - most probably you choose to associate with them because you have something in common. So anything that tends to reduce the chance of a profitable discussion with strangers is rather a shame. But I don't think there's anything to be done about it - it's hardly unreasonable to be more sure of someones good faith when you know them than when you don't. And the very fact that strangers may think about things differently from you means you can't be certain that one of the things they think is that civil and reasoned debate is good and trolling bad.

Hmm, that's not something I've noticed but I shall keep an eye out for it.

It's something I only noticed quite recently, although I don't know if I've just missed seeing it in the past. The first time I noticed I was actually mentally going along with it, and then it suddenly struck me that the only reason I thought the comment off topic was that I'd somehow come to accept there was only one proper way to approach the subject. And yet, given that the subject had only just been raised, in the middle of a wide-ranging discussion, who had decided that there was One True Approach? ... Oh dear, reading back over that, it's far to vague to be helpful, and yet I'm reluctant to give an example, because I've only ever seen it done on topics that are absolute lightning rods for wank. I think what happens is that various well known ljers post on a subject, wanting to look at it from a particular perspective and not unreasonably rejecting comments not from that perspective; sometimes other people who admire said posters conclude either that there is just something inherently wrong with comments of that sort, regardless of context, or that there is only the one perspective from which the subject can be examined. To assay an example (one I absolutely haven't seen): there are plenty of discussions in which 'but men can be raped too' is irrelevant (and indeed, would attract much suspicion of trollishness) because what is being discussed is women, and rape is being looked at with regards to their experience; on the other hand, it would be very wrong to think that any time rape is mentioned, it must automatically be talked about in the context of women's experience or that it is automatically wrong and off topic to make any mention of male victims in any discussion of rape. Well, perhaps that example is too good: I wasn't thinking of something as serious as ignoring the existence of one group of victims of a serious crime, just the damage to the general intellectual climate that comes from any practice that encourages the treatment of objections not as things to be rebutted but as things to be dismissed.

From:

quillori.livejournal.com

continued from previous comment

What made me elevate it from a dodgy argument to a strategy, even if probably an unintentional one, was the thought of someone of my acquaintance, quite eminent in her field, and generally intelligent and reasonable: she is a keen feminist and very concerned about the abuse of women and the conviction rate for rape¹, which she feels should be improved by reversing the normal presumption of innocence. She also has a habit of framing every discussion as being about the experience of women and how they are oppressed. This allows her to dismiss most objections to her proposal: those at risk of false conviction are men, not women, and abstract principles of justice or the rights of the state against the individual are just that, abstract, and not relevant to lived experience of most women. Thus she neatly sidesteps ever having to defend her position. (Not that there aren't arguments that could be made for her position: it's just that she never makes them.)

Now I think about it, there may be a somewhat different thing going on here? Perhaps in her case, the issue is that while you can choose what sorts of conversations you want to have, if you are advocating something you have a duty to consider (maybe not in any given conversation, but at least at some point) objections relevant to what you are advocating, even if they aren't relevant to the specific conversations in which it normally comes up. Which isn't quite the same as the first thing, which was more people assuming that there's only one sort of discussion to have on a given subject.

¹ Not to keep harping on the topic - it was writing about her that gave me the idea for the (not entirely satisfactory) example I added to Part 1.

From:

alias_sqbr

Ah....when you put it like that, yes I have seen that attitude. I think it blurs into "Everyone I've seen say that (in and of itself unobjectional) opinion is an idiot/troll etc, so I shall assume you are and idiot/troll based soley on the fact you have that opinion", and is often another symptom of a polarised debate.

I did actually once see pretty much the example you give: the OP was talking about "ways for men not to be sexist idiots" (or something like that) and had "Don't ever say 'Men can be raped too'!". A male rape victim piped up saying "So, what, I'm not allowed to ever mention it?" and the OP immedietely apologised and changed the post to be less ambigious, but some of the other commenters started with knee-jerk "Don't you understand how derailing it can be" without really acknowledging that this guy had legitimate reasons for wanting to bring it up and not feeling deeply sympathetic to female non-rape-victims who ignored his opinion.

I've also seen lots of examples of white, middle class feminists assuming that anyone who disagrees with their analysis is sexist without acknowledging that there are more perspectives than just the "male" and the "female", ie POC feminists arguing that a "tough on crime" attitude to rape etc is less helpful to women from groups who have a problematic relationship with the police (poor urban african americans, for example)

..but then generally 90% of people who argue against a given feminist statement are sexists who are going to oppose anything which challenges their privilige, so it's an understandable mistake to make.

Tangent:
I actually have a post burbling away in my brain on the way that when group A fights against injustice from the more privliged group B (women against men, POC against whites etc) there is a huge danger of the main deliterious effect being on those who are also less priviliged: either becuase they're on the boundary between A and B, or in some other group, or are technically in B but lack the relevant priviliges. Thus the sometimes unfortunate relationship between feminists and GLBT people (who don't fit into the relevant, sometimes very narrow definition, of "woman")

Which isn't to say Group A should throw their hands in the air and give up on fighting against the very real injustice they suffer, but it's definitely something very important to keep in mind.