cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/25042034
This post is “FYI only” 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 “adult human female” 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 “civil disagreement” 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 “sort it out through discussion and voting”. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little “sorting out” 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.
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She shuts down hatred with such sincere grace that it’s impressive. Personally, I admire her restraint most of all.
She frequently deals with idiots and jerks. Hints at condescension or sly insults would be easy, but she effortlessly avoids stooping to such a level. She stays laser-focused on the topic. Behavior like that makes her comments even more powerful.
You deserve to see this @https://fedia.io/u/@[email protected] Thanks for all your hard work!
Edit: that tag is sloppy as hell. I still don’t know what I’m doing lol please don’t hold it against me
that tag is sloppy as hell. I still don’t know what I’m doing
I think you can delete the
@https://fedia.io/u/portion.
@[email protected] and @[email protected] , would it be possible to address the transphobic posts/comments?
Address the comments or address the defederation?
I was the Admin who was contacted by Ada and that is a mischaracterisation of what I said. Our rules still stand that we won’t allow transphobia.
Unfortunately, as the ruling on the interpretation of the law has recently changed, we are going to have to figure out how we approach this and that is going to require a consensus amongst the Admins, and an agreement on our wording going forward.
This is going to take a bit for us to work out (although not too long, we’re getting there, I have been active on Lemmy but I don’t call the shots, and we need input from all Admins) and if, in the meantime, LBZ feel we aren’t moving fast enough and they need to defederate from us then that is obviously their right.
Our rules still stand that we won’t allow transphobia.
Unfortunately, as the ruling on the interpretation of the law has recently changed, we are going to have to figure out how we approach this and that is going to require a consensus amongst the Admins, and an agreement on our wording going forward.
I don’t get it. Why the self-contradiction?
No matter how many times I read this I still don’t understand what’s happening on your end.I think they are trying to work out how to do so within legal confines. A legal battle can be costly for someone without millions and billions. Ultimately, these governments will not succeed with backward-facing tactics. Hold trust in the ultimate goodness of the larger population. This is just extinction burst of dying ideations.
What law is that? Did the UK just enshrine some sort of right to be transphobic or something?
Kinda, yeah.
It’s about the recent ruling that defines who is and isn’t a woman legally.
While it doesn’t seem like something that should impact a lemmy instance choosing to protect trans people via moderation of hate speech in disguise (That’s what a dogwhistle is in this context), I think that the admins are saying they’re taking an overabundance of caution until they’ve had a chance to figure out how the change does effect the instance.
On the surface, what it means is that trans women aren’t covered by equality laws for women, they would need their own, separate laws to cover them. So it does enshrine a lack of protection under the law, up to a point.
Now, I’m not sure what kind of legal liability the admins are worried about, because uk laws are not exactly something I’m generally aware of. There may be laws there that allow legal action against a forum for censorship for all I know, and if trans women are no longer “protected”, then removing such comments might open them up for lawsuits. But that’s just a hypothetical, because afaik, that isn’t something that’s actionable there, and nobody from feddit.uk has said that’s what they’re worried about, it’s just an off-the-cuff hypothetical
Which is emperor or the other since pass admins run across this, it might help cool down the drama if you do specify what kind of legal issues are the concern
Here’s our answer, from the article linked in this post: https://lemm.ee/post/62470957
This came after the UK supreme court sitting in London ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex. The action to determine this had been brought by For Women Scotland, a campaign group which brought a case against the Scottish government in which they argued that sex-based protections should only apply to those born female.
To be clear, there were no posts, this is about two comments by one of our users, both of which I personally pushed back on. We’re still discussing what to do, but consensus takes time.
FYI, I won’t be able to see any responses to this comment chain from feddit.uk users or admins unless I manually watch it off instance. I’ll try and do so, but I won’t see pings etc.
In any case, to address Emperor’s comment, to avoid defederation and give the feddit.uk time to work it out, all it would have taken was a single response to my messages stating that it’s being discussed by the admin team. Instead, despite twice highlighting that this is an issue important enough to defederate over, I got radio silence, whilst Emperor continued to post elsewhere. Even if it were not the intent, it came across as a deliberate choice to ignore my messages.
Federation will be re-enabled if they ultimately address the issue.
You are fabulous Ada, you are why I switched to this instance
Defederating because single user on fedia.uk was controversial, and global admins weren’t intervening… I recommend keeping away from any social media and living in a concrete bunker with no internet access.
It looks like it’s not because of the user, but because of how the admins tolerate such behavior. That seems reasonable to me. Just another sign of the horrible transphobia that the UK has become known for.
Conteoversy aside, what blahaj admin expects is simply infeasible at a large scale. Micromanaging growing social media platform isn’t possible beyond certain size of the userbase
It sounds like you agree that they are right to manage the size of the userbase via defederation so that they can maintain their expectations then?
ignoring hate, is promoting hate; eff those Admins.
