Link to the altfurry chat logs and some samples of contents (Asking Nazi leaders outside the furry fandom for their involvement, trolling against conventions, discussing hiring a hitman, antisemitism, racial slurs and discussions of supremacy and genocide.)
"This Alt-Right hasn't even become big enough to make fandom noise to the level where I've heard it."
That's because they don't even act with enough good faith to present a real front. Everything they do is a false front borrowing the trappings of cute animal avatars and networks pre-made by fans of creative stuff. They're like those wasps that infest a furry caterpillar, make it be a zombie for a while and eat it from inside out.
It is worth noting that the platforms most flamboyantly dedicated to a borrowed idea of free speech and assembly are the same ones that have struggled most intensely with groups of users who seek to organize and disrupt their platforms. A community of trolls on an internet platform is, in political terms, not totally unlike a fascist movement in a weak liberal democracy: It engages with and uses the rules and protections of the system it inhabits with the intent of subverting it and eventually remaking it in their image or, if that fails, merely destroying it.
But what gave these trolls power on platforms wasn’t just their willingness to act in bad faith and to break the rules and norms of their environment. It was their understanding that the rules and norms of platforms were self-serving and cynical in the first place. After all, these platforms draw arbitrary boundaries constantly and with much less controversy — against spammers, concerning profanity or in response to government demands. These fringe groups saw an opportunity in the gap between the platforms’ strained public dedication to discourse stewardship and their actual existence as profit-driven entities, free to do as they please. Despite their participatory rhetoric, social platforms are closer to authoritarian spaces than democratic ones. It makes some sense that people with authoritarian tendencies would have an intuitive understanding of how they work and how to take advantage of them.
Lame "free speech absolutism" doesn't map to the grid of these social networks. Not when you don't have any ownership of them. One thing that works is, inside or out of them, holding people to good faith in some shared community ideal. In other words, there is an actual community and it can't coexist with nazis. And no, it's not hard to tell when people are in that group if you look. All those bad faith excuses about "they're just trolling" are intentional distraction. There you get the bottom line of Lamar's piece - the head of policy for the MUCK just didn't care enough to look, or maybe preferred the way things shriveled up.
It's a lot like stuff in a long report about FurAffinity moderation I have on deck to post.
Link to the altfurry chat logs and some samples of contents (Asking Nazi leaders outside the furry fandom for their involvement, trolling against conventions, discussing hiring a hitman, antisemitism, racial slurs and discussions of supremacy and genocide.)
"This Alt-Right hasn't even become big enough to make fandom noise to the level where I've heard it."
That's because they don't even act with enough good faith to present a real front. Everything they do is a false front borrowing the trappings of cute animal avatars and networks pre-made by fans of creative stuff. They're like those wasps that infest a furry caterpillar, make it be a zombie for a while and eat it from inside out.
Relevant NY Times article:
Lame "free speech absolutism" doesn't map to the grid of these social networks. Not when you don't have any ownership of them. One thing that works is, inside or out of them, holding people to good faith in some shared community ideal. In other words, there is an actual community and it can't coexist with nazis. And no, it's not hard to tell when people are in that group if you look. All those bad faith excuses about "they're just trolling" are intentional distraction. There you get the bottom line of Lamar's piece - the head of policy for the MUCK just didn't care enough to look, or maybe preferred the way things shriveled up.
It's a lot like stuff in a long report about FurAffinity moderation I have on deck to post.