RPG.net forum bans Trump support
2018-10-30 20:45:34.639298+00 by
Dan Lyke
3 comments
It's interesting to see how forums are dealing with neo-Nazi trolls and reworking their standards and
codes of conduct to navigate the challenges of allowing a community to communicate vs keeping those
spaces safe and respectful: forum.rpg.net: New Ban: Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration:
We are banning support of Donald Trump or his administration on the RPGnet forums. This
is because his public comments, policies, and the makeup of his administration are so wholly
incompatible with our values that formal political neutrality is not tenable. We can be welcoming to (for
example) persons of every ethnicity who want to talk about games, or we can allow support for open
white supremacy. Not both. Below will be an outline of the policy and a very incomplete set of citations.
[ related topics:
Politics Games Invention and Design Bay Area moron Community Race
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: RPG.net forum bans Trump support made: 2018-10-31 00:10:26.287332+00 by:
TheSHAD0W
Banning political discussion entirely, I can see. Banning one party? It's just making the polarization worse. Yay.
#Comment Re: RPG.net forum bans Trump support made: 2018-10-31 18:01:11.5484+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Maybe. I suspect that that contingent will just lose interest in participating in the forum and move on. May make polarization worse on a global scale (although without the mechanism for that group to find each other they may drop below critical aggregation), but that's a speculative externality.
#Comment Re: RPG.net forum bans Trump support made: 2018-11-02 17:25:41.066286+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Motherboard reached out to the RPG.net admins for additional comment:
The admins aren’t banning all political discussion, that’s still fair game. So are posts criticizing the Trump administration. It’s exclusively pro-Trump posts they’re concerned with. “We aren’t going to take notice as staff if someone wants to argue for the elimination of the estate tax, or if someone makes a reasoned case for why the new tariffs are a good idea,” they said. “The Trump administration promotes those policies, but they aren’t Trumpism. You can be a conservative, or a Republican, and not run afoul of our rules. We think all those things are distinguishable. An idea shouldn’t be excluded from our board only because Trump happens to espouse it for however long it can hold his attention.”
and:
“It's long been clear that support for Trump was support for sexism, racism, nativism, nationalism and a host of other pernicious isms, all of which are on their face violations of our long-established board rules and culture,” RPGnet admins told me in an email. “This just acknowledges and formalizes that.”
Interesting that they're threading the needle that delicately.
Brought to my attention Via MeFi.