Thoughts: on community moderation

I feel like a big problem that communities, both physical and online, are currently struggling with is a variation on the “Nazi bar” problem.

Michael B. Tager wrote the following thread on social media back in 2020:

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues.

“you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

A lot of people’s instinct when it comes to “whether or not someone might be toxic in our community” is to be cautious. We look at the laws our societies are built upon and see that freedom of speech, of public expression, etc. are often specifically protected, even if the speech in question is highly objectionable. We imagine that, if just wearing an “iron cross” (not a Nazi symbol in and of itself, even the modern-day Bundeswehr uses a variation on it, but it is often used by neo-Nazis as a socially acceptable substitute for the swastika) were to be made illegal, it would cause a lot of problems for innocent people.

But there, in my opinion, lies the mistake: it is impractical to run a small community the same way one would run an entire country.

For one, the kind of responsibility expected for each is way different. If someone living in a country suddenly gets imprisoned for no good reason or denied access to its basic services, this is considered a massive infringement on their rights, and on a large enough scale, could even be considered a form of genocide. This attitude discourages draconian laws and encourages pluralistic view of societies, in which people are free to hold a variety of different views. The same cannot be said for a small community. Being banned from a bar or an online chat group is nowhere near as devastating to someone’s survival, and usually the person in question still has other ways of obtaining the same services (such as by going to a different bar or finding other ways to communicate with the same people individually).

Secondly, the level of threat is different. A neo-Nazi on a public street is immediately subject to being viewed and judged by everyone around them, recorded on surveillance cameras, etc., whereas one in a small bar or an online forum has much more opportunity to hide their identity and perform more stealthily. Same goes for larger groups: if a thousand neo-Nazis or other right-wingers decide to hold a rally, it can be expected (as often happens in Germany) that even larger amounts of people with more reasonable views will hold a counter-rally or find other ways to protest them. Just a dozen of such individuals entering a bar or infiltrating an online community, however, can disrupt things way more efficiently with little, if any, accountability.

Some tend to look at this and think that the issue is anonymity – online, people can create lots of random identities and then use them to harass people in a way that would not fly in real life. However, that is also inaccurate, and is shown by how similar harassment also exists on platforms with explicit real-name policies and user verification.

It seems like most countries’ laws are in agreement, as usually there are fewer regulations on behavior in private spaces compared to that in public spaces. Whenever it is illegal to kick someone out of a private space, it usually happens in specific circumstances, such as to protect specific marginalized groups against discrimination, and otherwise owners of private spaces are given enough freedom to restrict access to those considered disruptive.

Similarly, we expect countries to have working justice systems and provide due process to everyone accused of a crime because the consequences of an incorrect judgment can be extremely grave, whereas nobody demands a full-on jury trial before removing someone from an informal gathering.

Of course, as a community grows and more people become dependent on it for more and more things, the consequences for wrongful ejections grow and the priorities might shift, and reliance on a BDFL starts becoming more problematic. At that point, instituting more formal sets or rules and systems of governance becomes necessary – which will also, sadly, make it easier for toxic community members to exploit the rules.