Oh, one other thought -- I think it's also worth keeping in mind that justifying a point by replying to it can create a conversation about that point, and is a process by which it is legitimized in public.

That's a process I see happening a lot, and the justification step is happening even by the hand of people who mean well.

Yeah, go ahead, by all means!

for sure, it's t i n y for the size of the place.

Yeah, that's extremely fair

There's an underlying trust issue at play, to be sure. Go on?

(so to speak.)

@JourneymanGeek Sorry-- to clarify, when you as a meta mod want staff to cool down, or when you need help from a staff member to cool a situation down?

Gotcha! Go on.

Truthfully, that strikes me as advice that's ill-suited for the current situation in general.

...even that post is pretty short-sighted on the kinds of unrest that can emerge, to tell you the truth. I appreciate it and it's probably a useful tool but as a policy? Mmm.

Yeah

Really? That's neat, I'm glad it exists. It scans well-suited for what it does.

Is this... the situation I'm likely thinking of?

Gotcha. Go on!

I wonder if SE has any formal risk tracking / risk matrix process, for keeping tabs on key threats like, well. Something going horribly wrong.

How'd you handle that specific situation?

Or... well. I know the details probably aren't something to divulge, but in as much detail as you're comfortable.

Transphobia: An Analysis | Philosophy Tube

Unrelated, here's a helpful video.

Yeah, he's really good. This video's a little subtle but it also hits close to home.

> Since the position of the transphobe is that trans people don't really exist as trans people, and the position of trans people is obviously that they do exist, immediately we can see that no compromise is possible. Things either exist or they don't: there's no middle ground.

> So in any debate on the issue it's gonna be winner takes all. The trans person, then, is in the impossible situation of having to prove their own existence to someone whose every response is gonna be, "How do you know? How do you know? How do you know?"

Don't let me derail, though, @JourneymanGeek -- I am listening, sincerely. I'm, getting a picture of how Meta works that I wasn't before, and that's really valuable.

The community team could probably do well with a PagerDuty license ;)

That's super fair, though. So I guess the question becomes: why do these tools break, in this specific situation? And... I have a theory, just based on what I've seen in the past couple weeks.

They're all designed for holding patterns. When there's no shift that needs to occur: they only work when things are fine as is, and should be maintained at a peaceful neutral.

@JourneymanGeek I think this is true, but I also have a slightly different lens on it. The Stack community is... okay at handling questions of Content, but is terrible at questions of Personhood.

@JourneymanGeek The speed and nature... well, it's hard for me to see, because I've predicted most of this essentially to a T from the moment Monica was terminated. And that's true just because I'm a lot more familiar with the forms of violence transphobia takes on. It's hard for me to see what I'd think if I... weren't.

I can sympathize with being caught flat-footed, at a minimum. I'd probably have been, too, if not for... y'know. Life.

@JourneymanGeek Definitely agree here. It's just... Stack's now gotta grapple with the fact that content alone doesn't cut it, y'know?

...do our best to set the stage for recovery, I guess.

CMs can't predict every issue. We as community have... some obligation to help build that back up, at least if we care for the community to succeed.

> If the transphobe acknowledges that trans people exist as trans people, then that amounts to a total forfeit of their position. So the strongest a trans person could get to in that debate would still probably be one in which they are either lying or deluded about their own existence. The deck is very much stacked in the transphobe's favour, so in that situation it's perhaps unsurprising that many[...] would [choose] not to play.

@doppelgreener yeah, for real. I think Shog acknowledged that here openly, too, so at minimum they have awareness of the problem, I think.

I mean, there's a reason I live more on meta than on main, and it has very little to do with "meta is murder"-y things. It's because... that's the place you go when you want to make something better of the situation.

@JourneymanGeek Mods are easy to confuse, too. You just have to state a position, get a little support, and mods will go "we must accommodate this to keep the peace. but it's bad, and now I'm not sure,"

Ah, that's the thing!

A mod who encounters a harmful statement without any support will just remove it. A mod who encounters a harmful statement with support... will speak against it rather than remove it.

That's how moderated civility can be used to shift the conversation.

State a bad position, get some support, and mods will come rushing to say the opposite. Now you have a debate... a debate in which mods are on one side and users are on the other side, and now it looks bad, too.

Now you've got a case of Mod Abuse, now your mods are Authoritarian if they decide it's time to clean up, now...

And that's kind of how we ended up here.

This is kind of why I say keeping the peace is a very useful tool, but it's only a tool. It's easy to be abused, it's easy for someone to say "I'm just stating this [rAcE rEaLIsM, etc.] in good faith," if they have two upvotes behind their back.

That fabricates a social issue where there wasn't one before, and it happens because a moderator... wanted to keep peace in a values-neutral way, above all else.

That's not to say moderated civility should be discarded. It's a useful tool, broadly applicable, and a powerful first-resort. But... context. And we're running face-first into a context where moderated civility breaks, here.

You can't go back, once a position is permitted to take hold. Or, once a moderator argues against it rather than removing it. The only route to correct a situation that's diverging in this way is to escalate to someone with more authority to clean up, and even that often fails. Sometimes it can be restored by a mod who hasn't been involved yet, which is why moderation is pilot/copilot.

I hear that.

@Magisch Yes and no. I think the analogy is good, but it's a little different. The Overton Window relies on a general population being swayed by a limited set of information, which is kind of where it starts to break down. But a lot of the framework still applies.