June 16th, 2020

Update (June 18th, 2020): The head administrator has stepped in to undo all of the changes I made, including the banning of the user that directly sent me death threats. I have requested that all my data be deleted from the forum. Under the GDPR, he has 1 month to comply.

Yesterday, I removed an administrator from the What the Daily WTF forum and issued 1 permanent and 4 temporary bans.

To an outside observer, this may have seemed like a sudden, drastic response. But this is a day I had been planning for quite some time. And it went more or less exactly as I had planned for.

Here’s what went down.

Stage 1: The Engage

I knew that I had to act quickly, as any of these actions would alert users that the others might be coming. I issued two 6-hour temporary bans to the users I had seen being racist, homophobic, and transphobic the second- and third-most (we’ll come back to this later), removed an administrator who had been complicit. While I was at it, I also issued a 7-day ban to a newer user that I had never seen post something non-bigoted, and then I posted a short announcement:

Just a quick reminder that bigotry is not tolerated on this site, and using the same tactics that neo-nazis try to use when I say this on other sites will work about as poorly here as it does there.

Forum announcement, 13:25

That’s it. The message was simply that you’re not allowed to be a bigot, and that if you tried to go from the fascist playbook, it wouldn’t work. The wording here is intentionally inflammatory, but also very clearly not directed at anyone who doesn’t act like a nazi. It also specifically avoids accusing anyone of having taken any action or supporting any ideology.

Stage 2: The Push-back

Predictably, despite my warning, the first responses came directly from the alt-right playbook.

Next, the user I had been waiting for chimed in:

And then something I hadn’t planned for. In response to someone’s post where they stated they were confused about what was going on, the user wrote two words:

Autism speaks

For those who aren’t “in the know”, Autism Speaks is a lobbying group that seeks to eradicate autism. It treats autistic people the way one would treat a disease like polio or cancer. Only someone who knew this, and also that I am autistic, would have posted those words.

My response was short and simple:

I’m not a huge fan of eugenics-based autism charities.

And their immediate response showed that they were not prepared for what was happening today:

I didn’t think I was either……but they’re growing on me.

To be clear, this is a user saying directly to an administrator that they would be in favor of a genocide that affected the administrator. On a public forum. In a discussion about people being banned for bigotry.

Needless to say, this is when the user was permanently banned.

Stage 3: Community Reacts

At this point, more users started chiming in. It was clear that some of them were replying as they read, not having the experience needed to spot the manipulative responses. Others were more familiar with what was going on and posted in support of the tiny steps I had made towards making the forum safer.

Of note is a response from a former moderator:

For the record, @ben_lubar, I’m right there with you on this. A number of people in here, intentionally or otherwise, work straight out of the fascist playbook and, as far as I can tell, turned it into an environment indistinguishable from a radicalization front. It’s why I fucked right on off out of here, because I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

Ban hard, ban fast, don’t let them talk you out of it, and, frankly, talk to Alex about shutting it down forever.

Deplatform hate. Punch nazis.

The former admin replied to this:

The main fascist today has been Ben, as far as I can tell. The bans are bullshit.

At the time of this article’s publication, the former admin has still not removed “CHIEF FORUM FASCIST” from the forum signature he set for himself.

Stage 4: Outside Response

A few past users contacted me, either privately or in the discussion thread, and expressed basically the same sentiment as the former moderator:

They had left the forum because they didn’t feel safe. Some of them had tried to return, possibly several times. The actions of yesterday had shown them that the forum still wasn’t safe for them.

And to them, I just have one thing to say:

Yesterday didn’t cause a drastic change in the forum community’s culture. But it sent a message. A message that had needed to be sent for a very long time.