They were but I didn’t always talk to some of the writers about them because the discussion had moved on by then and deleted them would be weird in the thread. Also I get sometimes 10 flags a post for multiple posts in a thread. It’s too many to deal with individually.
I agree that fat people posting fatphobic content shouldn’t be the arbiter of what is fatphobic. However, people left because they felt this wasn’t a kind community anymore and they were afraid to talk about their own experiences, not because they were upset they can’t post fatphobic content.
People learn and change- a few months ago, I had content Flagged that was written by someone who now is calling out fatphobia regularly- that person described food on someone else’s journal as “sinful”. So there is change that can happen if we facilitate it. That was handled in private.
There aren’t clear lines for everything. We had this discussion with the word queer as well. Some GLBTQ+ folks felt it was a slur and others saw it as a reclaimed slur. Ask three trans people what is transphobic and you will get different answers.
So how do we foster a sense of community across diverse opinions?
If people are leaving over process (unkind callouts or feeling responsible to police other people), then the solution should be process. Not in discovering a perfect definition on the content side - which will never exist.
I think I’ve identified a problem with how I’m reading this. I’m feeling defensive because I’m reading this as saying that calling someone out by saying “hey that’s fatphobic” isn’t ‘kind’. But maybe that’s not what you mean?
I have very few answers for the newer questions, but I was mulling this issue over while I washed dishes and one thing that is a clear rule that I think might be useful: no debating/reopening an interaction that is already dealt with. The meme thread had a post, a post saying “please don’t,” the original post was deleted and then multiple people asked questions/started debating a civil exchange where everything had been dealt with. I don’t think it’s either triggering or silencing to flag and delete posts like that.
I think we should all be trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, even though were hurt. I strongly believe that everyone in this community has good intentions and wants to be growing and getting better. When your friend gets it wrong but wants to do better, what do you do?
That being said it’s really hard when you’re feeling attacked and unwanted because of something someone has posted.
Suggestion: a policy wherein people who have been called out for something take down the post, don’t respond until they have had time to cool down and maybe ask people privately how to do better.
-telling people off for posting things about their own experience that were behind double spoilers
telling someone they can’t talk about food or weight loss on their own journal
things that are debates tending towards getting VERY personal with other people’s life details
extremely aggressive tone saying that it was against forum rules (when it wasn’t)
saying any negative discussion towards ones own body and wanting to change it is fatphobic
saying wanting to change one’s body is transphobic
saying being mad at your own body was ableism
A common theme here is saying that saying things about your own life experiences and getting called out on that doesn’t feel good, and it doesn’t look good to the others that flag the call out
We have had no situations where people haven’t wanted to do better. The situations have escalated when people wanted to define what was wrong OR they wanted to have a discussion about something where there was a group of people who firmly held their side of the argument, without yielding. This has been the situation we have gotten into many times
I think this is a good rule because dog piling makes everyone feel like shit no matter what their intent is or whether they are the person making the original statement or the person calling out. (Both have been dog piled on)
None of the callouts that have been flagged are just “hey that is fatphobic” mentions. They are the personal attacks or strong passive aggressive words downthread. I haven’t seen a single simple “this is fatphobic” be flagged.
This is legitimately helpful to me, in knowing what will and won’t be a problem.
Wow, I hadn’t seen that - I did see (and write!) a lot of posts suggesting to people that their own journals are a better place to talk about weight loss than a fatphobia thread.
The flipside of this is that the person doing the call out is left out on their own - when we talked about this in my journal there was a lot of support for third parties to say “hey, thanks for noticing this and calling it out, and thanks X for deleting it” or similar to not further isolate the person doing the work.
I mean… It can be? Internalised fatphobia is real, self-directed fatphobia is real. But if the decision is made to exclude that from the forum rules, I will follow the forum rules, obviously.
I don’t know that there’s any easy-to-receive way for a person to alert someone else to the fact that they are acting out of unconscious bias, and it’s not fair to ask that the callers-out be sensitive to the feelings of the callees without that going the other direction as well.
The problem is often that the callee either doesn’t get why what they’ve said is harmful, and wants to discuss/debate it … or they act out of fragility and refuse to look at how their words could be hurtful because that wasnt their intent. Neither is a helpful or developmentally-minded response.
Maybe we could talk about community guidelines on what to do if something you posted is “called out.” Namely, listen, take the feedback on board, and yes the dreaded take responsibility for educating yourself on what happened and why some folks might be hurt by it.
Of course community guidelines cannot solve the problem of privileged fragility … after all, it is much larger and deeper than one community’s forum and tons of people don’t understand and are not interested in understanding that mechanism …
To be honest, I didn’t see this so much as supporting the idea of “let’s support the person who is doing the calling out with public replies”, it was that you asked for this specific type of support so people were trying to be supportive of you, because we care about you.
Someone else mentioned elsewhere that people could show support by liking the call-out post instead. I personally feel that this method (or a personal message) is preferable because it avoids a feeling of dog-piling. I’ve been in situations where I said something thoughtless and then felt like shit about it and would certainly feel more shit if a ton of people were like “yes, what you said was inadvertently hurtful” (even if it’s phrased as supporting the caller-out, drawing more attention to it). Of course things should be called out if they are harmful, but if no harm was meant I don’t think it’s a good thing to make that person feel worse and unwelcome here than necessary.
disclaimer; I am a new-ish forum poster; I saw the conversation in the fatphobia thread and was pretty rattled by it.
Another community I’m in has a rule about “if someone calls you out, you apologize promptly and both sides have to move on.” No dogpiling, no debates.
I think that having “…and you are not allowed to debate if this is really a [racist, sexist, etc] comment” rule is important. It doesn’t mean that the called-out person has to be convinced that the thing was [racist / sexist / etc] but they have to acknowledge that nevertheless, it impacted someone that way.
ETA: this is mostly tactical, with an aim towards avoiding derails & extra emotional labor on the impacted party, and it’s supposed to make it easier for people to call out “borderline” icky stuff that they see.
I think it would make sense to apply this differently in “communal” spaces versus “personal” spaces - e.g. a journal author probably has some more leeway than a participant in a communal thread, but not total cart blanche.
I’d love to focus on the process for resolving disagreement.
It is OK to have different and diverse opinions – some of what is getting called out is where someone genuinely disagrees rather than being uneducated. I don’t have any problem when people are doing the calling out - it is more when the thread writer’s own triggers are ignored.
I would suggest things like:
Suggestions or model language about clarifying triggers at the top. Examples of what triggers might be.
Rules for one’s own journal vs other thread types?
A general rule of no dog piling - in other Facebook communities I am a part of, the mod closes threads that have dog piling or puts a warning picture.
Warnings for certain things that cross a line - Not that I want to encourage tone policing, but have clear guidelines or examples for warnings would be helpful.
Removing account access after a certain number of warnings.
I am angry at my body all the time, and I often post about it, and it can be internalized ableism. I don’t want to be disallowed to talk about anger at my own body even if I agree my anger has a root in disabling society.
What makes this community interesting is sharing diverse experiences and if everyone has to tip toe around their own lives experiences we will lose that.
I agree with @madgeylou thought about establish what to do when called out, and that is where community standards can help.
I heard it suggested we have a closed/locked thread of education resources on different topics which will be easy to point people to, rather than throw them in the hole of research on the entirety of the internet. We had previously done this with ELI5 threads but we have gotten too big for this