#discourse ban violation

[bereft-of-frogs]

My toxic trait is that I’ve long thought the most fervent Jedi haters in the Star Wars fandom would be more happy with Dune, because they’re clearly big mad at the position in the narrative the Jedi occupy and would be happier with the more malevolent Bene Gesserit (but I think their dissatisfaction is the point, they want to be contrary or else they would have decamped to another fandom ages ago)

That’s not the toxic part. The toxic part is I would still totally want to be a Bene Gesserit.

Like obviously I, like many others, grew up trying to use the Force to levitate stuff toward me, being a Jedi in this hypothetical situation is the easy answer, of course I’d want to be a Jedi. But I totally voted in that poll a couple months ago that I’d want to be Bene Gesserit and that was a secret I kept until now I’m confessing it to all of you. Look don’t @ me I’ve done the reading, I know about all the shit, I’d put up with a lot for spooky powers and dramatic cloaks.

[prying-pandora666]

I don’t know how to say this tactfully, but I’ll do my best.

If other fans online have convinced you to see the gentle, optimistic, empathetic, fun loving, whimsical, forgiving, wise beyond his years genocide survivor, as a sexist, racist, xenophobic, abusive, pro-colonization, sexual assault perpetrator who doesn’t care about anyone else and doesn’t understand trauma…

You have been LIED TO.

Please just think for a moment!

ATLA was banned in China from the beginning for a reason. Because they didn’t want anyone empathizing with a character based on Tibetan monks. Why? Because they are an actual oppressed and persecuted minority IRL. Their religious leader lives in exile. Their second most important spiritual figure is the youngest political prisoner ever taken (and to this day no one knows if he’s alive or dead!). China has actual prison and labor camps. Tibetan people get sent there for “re-education”.

Can you please think about what these “fans” are saying when they stomp all over this allegory in TLA and try to frame Aang as the oppressor?

Do you really think it’s appropriate or these people who call Aang all these horrible (and inaccurate) things are being in anyway fair when they call Aang “white coded”???

Even without the real world context, Aang is explicitly the only survivor of a genocide. The last of his people. He has lost more than anyone else in the entire franchise. There’s a reason he clings so hard to Appa.

Do you think it’s fair to compare a 12 year old misreading signals and trying to kiss a girl who already consensually kissed him before, and immediately backing off and giving her space when she says no, to rape?

Tweens and teens miscommunicating and trying to comfort each other with kisses, only to realize that’s not what their friend needed and immediately backing off is the same as having your body violently violated against your will? The same as having your “no” ignored?

How do you think this makes survivors feel? To see people use their experiences as a shield and cudgel for ship discourse? It certainly upsets me as someone who experienced intimate partner violence, let me tell you! And I know I’m not the only one.

And how is it in anyway feminist or pro-Katara to ignore her own agency and deep love she shows for Aang? Yes, that includes her own crush on him! It IS reciprocated!

Lastly, you don’t need to demonize Aang to ship whatever you want to ship. Please understand that the majority of these takes are bad faith and born out of bitterness and insecurity over a friggin FANON SHIP.

And none of it is necessary! You can ship whatever you want! You don’t need permission or excuses. You can just ship them! You can make your case for why you like another pairing better without misrepresenting what happened in the show and what these characters are like, let alone what they represent.

There’s already plenty to work with in the show as it is! Otherwise why bother?

I’m imploring fans taken in by persuasive and manipulative metas to please just think about it. Get off social media and rewatch the show for yourself thoughtfully.

It doesn’t need to be like this.

[necronatural]

Context on Project Moon discourse

I did some digging and watched some internet slapfights between Korean users, and collected as much context as humanly possible, trying to avoid hearsay where I can:

Misogynistic dudes start complaining about how sexless and non-waifu-female-heavy the game is, feeling the skimpy Sinclair outfit with the thotty little collar VS the fully covered Ishmael outfit is pointed feminist jeering (a law Hawkeye Initiative). Korean anti-feminists are really sensitive to pointed feminist jeering. More on that in a bit

Upon learning the identity artist is male, they trawl the rest of the staff to prove their stupid-ass theory.

They latch onto the lead CG artist, who has tweeted about feminism before.

Project Moon receives countless threats and people marching on their office IRL demanding to speak to the CEO.

The resulting hate campaign leads to Project Moon firing the lead artist for violation of contract; it was specifically requested by the company that all users delete political statements and controversial topics before joining, and the tweets the incels are using seem to prove that the worst case scenario for not adhering to the request has come to pass.

The thing is, she did delete the tweets.

This user has screencapped incels scrambling to justify their belief the game is for man-haters, including a statement that he had dug up deleted tweets. These are old records.

These are the retweets, all made before joining the company (but again, the policy was that the tweets like this should be scrubbed). Most of them are just being catty. The most extreme statements are a scathing satire even a child could understand, and some general feminist sentiments which are not incendiary in any way. It seems they were screencapped to cement a pattern of passionate feelings on feminism.

In Korea, feminism is considered a wedge issue, which means basic activism becomes extremely politically charged. Think of it like how trans issues are being treated in America at the moment, or how "Critical Race Theory" was a wedge issue like 2 years ago. Nevertheless, the most hateful statements in these tweets are not "feminist", but rather annoyance at misogyny, and pretty obviously jokes.

The tweet that the incels are latching onto here states "if being a feminist makes me Megalia, I am Megalia. If being against patriarchy makes me anti-social, I am anti-social". Megalia was a scumbag leftist radfem group originating from Korea's 4chan (anonymous messageboards). It was bad enough that banning gay slurs created a splinter group. Megalia was well-known for mirroring misogynistic behaviours back onto men. They were reviled. An actress lost her job for wearing a T-shirt this group sold, even though the funds were going to supporting women seeking legal actions. Association with Megalia was reputation poison.

Notice I refer to them in the past tense, because Megalia shut down in 2017. The tweet was in 2018. You could not get any more obvious that the statement being made was "you can insult me by calling me Megalia, but I still believe in feminism". There is no association with this incendiary group.

Incels "supported" their argument with an image of Yi Sang holding a vial in basically one of the only 2 ways you can hold a vial, calling it a reference to 🤏, an emoji used as the Megalia logo interpreted to mean "men have small penises". This insane interpretation is being used to cement the whole company as misandrist.

Therefore: Project Moon fired their lead artist even though she didn't violate her contract because insane incels did a "how dare you say we piss on the poor" bad faith misinterpretation of deleted tweets in order to justify their belief that Project Moon is a man-hating company, and as a man-hating company deserves to be annihilated, leading to threats to staff.

The artist for Leviathan later stated that Project Moon pushed the comic forward with no buffer, and when the schedule became unbearable, they just cancelled it. They were told there was an issue with production (supported by the fact the company dropped the translation in favour of focusing on the game), but this news has made the artist pessimistic about the company's treatment of their art team. (Update: deleted, with a statement they feel they felt attached to their debut work, and struggle with feeling like they ran away.)

Here's the artist Vellmori's twitter if you would like to support them through this period.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lisa Needham at Public Notice:

You’re forgiven for forgetting about TikTok for the last couple of days, what with the horrorshow avalanche of executive orders and gleeful deployment of Nazi salutes (plural!) from the world’s richest man. Nonetheless, TikTok is ostensibly banned in the United States as Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly voted only nine months ago to outlaw the app unless its parent company, ByteDance, agreed to sell it. The US Supreme Court even upheld the law just last week. However, TikTok lives, thanks to the whims of Donald Trump, the same person who, in August 2020, issued an executive order giving ByteDance 45 days to sell the app or see it banned. Trump has been extremely transparent that he flip-flopped on TikTok because the app helped him win the election last year, in part because it became a hotbed for criticism of Biden’s support for Israel. “We won young people and I think that's a big credit to TikTok,” Trump told Newsmax earlier this month (even though he in fact lost the youth vote). “So I'm not opposed to TikTok ... I had a very good experience with TikTok." Lost in the current discourse about TikTok is an important conversation about whether it violates the First Amendment to ban a social media app based on national security concerns about its Chinese-owned parent company. Also lost is a debate about whether it’s fair to single out TikTok over worries about user privacy, data harvesting, and manipulative algorithms when such issues are common to all social media platforms. There’s also a discussion to be had about whether singling out TikTok is racist — though there’s a good argument it is. Instead, what’s happening here is the creeping oligarchy of companies and capital aligning around an authoritarian president, with everyone fully aware that sucking up to Trump personally, ideally along with staggering sums of cash, is the only way to evade scrutiny.

[...]

The art of the deal

To be scrupulously fair to Trump, he isn’t the only person who reversed course on TikTok. Once it was clear that the public opposed the ban and that the Supreme Court might not step in to save legislators from themselves, the Biden administration spent last week trying to figure out how to keep TikTok alive. Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Markey introduced legislation to delay by 270 days the initial January 19 deadline for TikTok to be sold, despite having voted for the ban in the first place. The problem these efforts faced, however, is that TikTok wasn’t interested in working with the Biden administration or Senate Democrats to fix the problem. And why would they be, when Democrats are hobbled by a persistent inclination to actually follow laws rather than treat everything as an episode of The Apprentice, where flattering Trump as a master dealmaker is all that matters?

It’s exactly the latter approach that TikTok took. The ban required Google and Apple to remove it from their app stores or face steep fines for each user who downloaded the app. What it did not do, however, was penalize anyone who already had the app on their phone or accessed TikTok on the web. So the real financial peril would initially fall on Google and Apple if they kept the app available. After the Supreme Court decision last week, the Biden administration suggested it would not penalize those companies for continuing to host the app, a move TikTok said didn’t provide them enough “necessary clarity and assurance,” and they would therefore shut down in the United States on January 19. Thus began the public kayfabe of TikTok pretending that only Trump could fix it, knowing full well that he would happily go along. So the app went abruptly, ostentatiously dark on the evening of the January 18, only to pop back up some 12 hours later on January 19 with a gushing message to Trump: “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”

One might note, of course, that Trump was not president on January 19. One might also note that what Trump did promise — basically, that he would not enforce a law passed by Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court — is not functionally any different than what Biden or Markey were trying to offer, albeit without a demand the company show them personal fealty. But if TikTok had simply left the lights on for those 12 hours and waited for the incoming administration to decide how to enforce the ban, it would have missed the opportunity to let Trump be the savior who brought the app back from the dead. And the one thing social media companies have learned about Trump is that their success will rise and fall with his impulses.

When social media platforms let Trump and his hangers-on say and do whatever they like, he loves them. Once X was purchased by president-unelect Elon Musk, it became transformed into a MAGA megaphone and no longer faces scrutiny from Trump. That’s a change from January 2021, when Trump complained that then-Twitter was “not about FREE SPEECH” after it banned his account following the insurrection. Though Meta didn’t change hands, it still transformed — or more accurately, perhaps, deformed — to meet the new Trump era. CEO Mark Zuckerberg got rid of third-party fact-checking on Facebook, calling it “politically biased,” and revised its hateful speech policy to explicitly allow for attacks on trans people. Zuckerberg donated $1 million to the inauguration, went to church with Trump Monday morning, and hosted a reception Monday night. For the inauguration itself, Zuckerberg, along with Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Google head Sundar Pichai, was basically in the front row. Nothing says “incipient oligarchy” like an inauguration dominated by the richest men in the world, private citizens all.

TikTok’s cozying up to Donald Trump is a bad thing.

[darkmaga-returns]

Democracy™, to the extent the worn-out term retains any significance whatsoever in modern discourse, obviously means that unelected bureaucrats get to slink around in the dark, illegally funneling public money to manipulate municipal-level politics to ensure local governments continue violating informed consent by subjecting residents to known neurotoxin fluoride with no real public debate or disclosure of its risks.

Related: Report: The Science™ Hid Data That Fluoride Lowers IQ

Two states, Florida being the latest, have recently made history by banning the consent-free fluoridation of their respective public water supplies.

Via USA Today (emphasis added):

“Florida is set to become the second state in the country to ban fluoride from being added to public water supplies after Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on May 6 that he planned to sign the bill into law. In Miami, DeSantis, accompanied by Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, said he's signing the "Florida Farm Bill" (SB 700), which prevents local municipalities from adding fluoride to their water. The bill doesn't explicitly mention fluoride, but rather bans certain additives in the water system… During the governor's news conference, behind a sign that said "Free State of Florida," DeSantis said: "It's forced medication when they're jamming fluoride into your water supply."”

Last year, for the first time ever, a federal district court admonished the EPA for its pseudoscientific, stealth drugging of the public, finding that, even at approved levels per federal guidelines, fluoridated water permanently damages children’s brains.

[rosszulorzott]

Hungary’s Pride ban is a breach of European Union law. Urge the EU to step in and protect basic freedom now!

Hungary’s government has launched its most aggressive attack yet on LGBTQ+ rights.

In March, Hungary’s Parliament rushed through a new law banning Pride marches and criminalizing peaceful protest. Just one day later, the President signed it into law. The legislation expands the reach of Hungary’s notorious 2021 “anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda” law – already under review by the European Court of Justice.

Now, those who dare to take to the streets face police intimidation, crushing fines, and the looming threat of facial recognition surveillance – a dangerous violation of privacy and dignity that directly contradicts the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, which bans such mass surveillance in public spaces.

This crackdown couldn’t come at a more symbolic moment. Budapest Pride is set to celebrate its 30th anniversary on June 28. But unless urgent action is taken by the European Commission by May 27 – the registration deadline – peaceful Pride participants will march in defiance of the ban and could face financial fines of up to 500 EUR. If not registered in time, pro-government far-right groups can register fake protests to block public spaces from the pride.

For the organizers, the consequences are even more harsh. Unless the European Commission takes action, organizers will face criminal prosecution and jail time of up to 1 year.

This law doesn’t protect children. It protects power.

While Hungary faces real challenges – like a child welfare crisis, healthcare shortages, and a crumbling education system – the government has chosen to scapegoat LGBTQ+ people and choke civil society. These actions echo the oppressive tactics of Russia, where dissent is criminalized and LGBTQ+ lives erased. For the first time in EU history, we are witnessing a country criminalizing its citizens' right to peaceful assembly, to be seen and to be heard.

An EU government banning Pride marches is an unconscionable attack on the very values of freedom, equality, and human dignity that the European Union was built to protect.

By signing this petition, you are standing for the right to march, to gather, to speak out. You are telling the EU loud and clear: Pride is not a crime. Peaceful protest is not propaganda. Visibility is not violence.

The European Commission is the guardian of the Treaties of the EU. The Commission needs to demonstrate that it protects the right for peaceful assembly as much as other fundamental rights.

✊ Sign now to stop this assault on LGBTQ+ rights and freedom to protest. Don’t let Orbán bulldoze democracy. Stand with us. Stand with Budapest Pride.

To President Ursula von der Leyen, Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, Commissioner Michael McGrath, and Commissioner Hadja Lahbib of the European Commission:

We, the undersigned, urge you to take immediate and decisive action to protect the fundamental rights of citizens in Hungary. 

In March 2025, Hungary passed a law banning Pride marches and criminalizing organizers of peaceful LGBTQ+ protests. Those who protest now risk steep fines, police harassment, and surveillance through facial recognition technology. Those who organize prides, face criminal prosecution and jail time up to 1 year.

These actions are in clear violation of European Union law, including the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and the European Convention on Human Rights.

This new legislation builds upon the 2021 “anti-LGBT+ propaganda” law, currently under legal review in case C-769/22 at the European Court of Justice. Disguised as a “child protection” measure, that law erased LGBTQ+ people from schools and public discourse. The 2025 amendments weaponize the same rhetoric to now silence Pride and punish peaceful dissent.

This is not just a national issue – it’s a threat to civil liberties across the European Union. If Hungary is allowed to criminalize Pride and public assembly without consequences, it sets a dangerous precedent that others may follow and weakens the EU’s credibility as a bastion of democracy and human rights.

We urge you to act immediately through requesting interim measures from the Court of Justice either through the ongoing infringement procedure already pending at the CJEU (C-769/22), or through a fresh infringement procedure against the new amendment package. This legal mechanism would allow the Court to suspend the application of Hungary’s 2021 propaganda law, including its new use as a basis for banning protests.

The clock is ticking. Without action by you by the registration deadline for Budapest Pride on May 27, the Hungarian police will ban this historic event and act to silence LGBTQ+ voices even more.

You must demonstrate that the EU will not tolerate such sweeping violations of its most basic values.

You have the power – and responsibility – to act and defend the Treaties of the EU. Defend democracy. Protect protest. Stand with Hungary’s LGBTQ+ community.

[mariacallous]

Six months ago, Jewish groups celebrated a policy win when Meta banned the use of “Zionist” as a coded slur against Jews and Israel. Now, the same organizations are condemning the company for dramatically loosening restrictions on speech across its social media platforms.

“It is mind-blowing how one of the most profitable companies in the world, operating with such sophisticated technology, is taking significant steps back in terms of addressing antisemitism, hate, misinformation and protecting vulnerable and marginalized groups online,” the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement.

Greenblatt was responding to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that the company would do away with its fact-check program and broaden the terms of what can be said on Facebook and Instagram. It will also stop using automation to detect and remove hate speech — limiting its use to catching terrorism, child sexual exploitation and other offenses.

“This is a trade-off,” Zuckerberg said in a video message. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, said the moves respond to what he called a “cultural tipping point” following the U.S. presidential election. Conservatives have long alleged that Meta suppresses right-wing speech, and Zuckerberg’s advisors and detractors both explained the move as a strategic pivot toward accommodating a political era increasingly shaped by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

To replace its fact-checking program, Meta said it would introduce a “community notes” feature similar to the one on X, the social media platform owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, and otherwise favor allowing users to rebut posts they view as objectionable over removing them entirely. 

“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” the company said in its announcement. “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”

The changes could significantly affect what users see on social media. Last year, Meta’s automated systems detected approximately 95% of hate speech violations on Facebook and 98% on Instagram, according to data self-reported by the company. Millions of posts were removed as a result.

That was a positive sign for advocates who have battled the proliferation of antisemitism and other hate speech online. Meta has historically invited outside input when faced with content questions, and Jewish groups, such the ADL, the World Jewish Congress and a nonprofit focused on online antisemitism called CyberWell, have lobbied the company for years hoping to rein into online antisemitism.

Now, those groups are balking at the social media giant’s retreat from policing the content on its platforms, which it announced after a six-week post-election policy overhaul reportedly conducted by Zuckerberg and just a handful of confidantes.

The World Jewish Congress, for example, criticized Meta’s new reliance on user-generated “community notes” to combat misinformation, arguing that it shifts the burden of addressing hate speech onto marginalized groups.

“In an online environment already rife with hostility, reducing protections and clear guidelines will open the floodgates to content that fuels real-world threats, including violent acts targeting Jewish communities,” said Yfat Barak-Cheney, executive director of the organization’s Technology and Human Rights Institute.

The debate of how to police misinformation is a matter of enormous consequence for Jews given that studies show a strong link between the spread of conspiracy theories and antisemitic attitudes. 

“This change means one thing, very in line with the trend of both the quantity and quality of content that we have seen on X since Musk acquired Twitter – more hate speech, more politicized content, more silos and less effective responses from the platforms,” Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, who heads the Israel-based CyberWell, said in a statement.

“This change particularly undermines the safety of all marginalized communities, including the Jewish community which is currently experiencing one of the worst onslaughts of widespread Jew-hatred in both online and offline spaces,” Montemayor added.

Soon after Meta announced the policy shift — first in an Instagram Reel by Zuckerberg, then in a Fox & Friends appearance by Joel Kaplan, a Republican operative who has long worked for Meta and was recently named president of global affairs — leaked training materials surfaced with examples of derogatory statements that will now be permitted on the company’s platforms.

The materials, obtained by the left-wing news organization The Intercept and not disputed by Meta, include antisemitic examples, such as “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians.” Other examples of permitted hate speech target other groups, with statements like “Gays are freaks!” and “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

Some hateful statements about Jews remain prohibited under the new policy. For instance, content moderators are instructed to remove comments such as “Jewish women are slutty” under guidelines addressing “insults about sexual immorality.” Similarly, Meta’s rules continue to ban the use of certain curse words directed at protected groups; for example, “Ugh, the fucking Jews are at it again” would not be allowed.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request about the fate of the ban on using “Zionist” as a proxy for Jews and Israel in hate speech.

The company also did not signal any changes to its ban on Holocaust denial in its announcement, and the leaked materials also did not address the ban, which Zuckerberg announced in 2020, reversing a previous position under pressure from Jewish groups. Some education and advocacy groups say automatic detection of hate content has ensnared their efforts to create educational content about the Holocaust; nearly all “algorithmic overreach” of that nature would be a thing of the past under Meta’s new approach.

[bereft-of-frogs]

I do think people are going to be Insufferable about That One Monologue, so here is where I start to retreat from the fandom-at-large

Aka I’m deleting Reddit off my phone

[dramarising-replacement]

hella late on this but not really jiving with fr's feb new policy updates on IRL issues talk onsite

tbf i do agree that such things dont really have a place on dragon game for children. but the way the policies are worded are incredibly vague and up to mod interpretation. it leaves a concerning amount of room for staff to target players they have beef with while saying others dont violate the same rule

the most sus part to me is they have 'political slogans' banned but there's like. a list of Approved ones that staff likes which are allowed. like if the aim is to keep Discourse off the site then you cant make... Exceptions

and theres now a sitewide ban on All religious imagery except for sometimes?? which is SO vague and unenforceable. you can post art with angel wings and halos but u can't like...say the name of a specific angel.like girl.... theyre such common names..... ur gonna ban MICHAEL ?

and also like where exactly is the line denoting something as "religious imagery" like are you not allowed to use a crescent moon and stars anymore. can you post a pic of a lion with a lamb. how specific are we getting here are we allowed to post pelicans. can we post the greek letter chi. its SO subjective and also like... entirely based on what Imagery a specific mod would even recognize from their sphere of experience.

In Summary it's a decent and commendable policy at base (avoiding drama) being implemented in a skeevy way that gives staff plenty of room to get around their own rules

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Troy O. Fritzhand

Canary Mission, an antisemitism watchdog group, has made headlines since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war for its work exposing groups and individuals that support the Palestinian terror group and express hatred for the Jewish state.

Critics have accused Canary Mission of what they call unfair “doxing,” or publicizing information about a person or organization without their consent. However, that has not stopped the watchdog from calling out a wide range of entities for allegedly antisemitic behavior and spreading hateful ideology throughout North America, especially on college campuses.

The organization, which operates anonymously, spoke to The Algemeiner about its work since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel. To stay anonymous and protect the safety of staff, the group did not attribute its remarks to a specific individual.

Since the outbreak of the war, Canary Mission has been working on what it calls four “significant” developments.

“First, there has been a sharp escalation in global antisemitism, both in frequency and severity,” a representative said. “We are no longer discussing simple breaches of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Discourse has alarmingly shifted to overt expressions of hate, including endorsements of Hamas’ violence against Jews, coupled with a stark indifference to the suffering of kidnapped, raped, and murdered Jews.”

Antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed globally since the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7. Most recently, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported a 360 percent surge in such incidents over the past three months, with about two-thirds directly related to the Israel-Hamas war.

“Second,” Canary Mission continued, “antisemites on the left and right seem even more willing to work with each other in their common cause against Jews and Israel.”

“Third, a bipartisan consensus has emerged with a clear recognition of the extreme antisemitism fostered within the anti-Israel movement,” the group added.

Lastly, Canary Mission addressed the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) refusing to say at a congressional hearing last month that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct against bullying and harassment.

“Fourth, despite the dismal failure of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT leadership to condemn calls for the genocide against Jews, there have been some positive campus developments,” the watchdog said. “Several universities have finally understood that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is essentially an incubator for hatred and have taken action against them.”

Some schools have banned or suspended SJP chapters, which have orchestrated pro-Hamas demonstrations on campuses across the US, for violating school rules.

Over the past three months, Canary Mission has, among other projects, linked US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) to fundraisers with Hamas ties, profiled dozens of signatories of a letter denouncing Israel just one day after the Oct. 7 massacre, and exposed the organizers of a recent rally in Philadelphia that targeted a local Jewish restaurant for having a history of backing Hamas and calling for the destruction of Israel.

“Our support has significantly grown since the war began,” Canary Mission said. “The traffic to our website has substantially increased, reflecting the heightened interest in our cause … Our new support comes from across the political spectrum from individuals and organizations who understand the danger and hatred Jews are facing. Naturally, we have also received plenty of threats and abuse from neo-Nazis and anti-Israel activists alike.”

Canary Mission described its work as necessary and “far from finished” in combating “unfounded hatred towards Jews and the Jewish state.”

“Since our inception in 2015, Canary Mission has stood as a vigilant watchdog against antisemitism, with a particular focus on the spread of antisemitism in academic institutions,” the group said. “From UPenn to Harvard, our findings reveal an unsettling reality that has been simmering in American academia for years … Our work is comprehensive. We highlight instances of antisemitism across the political landscape and refuse to ignore or excuse it regardless of its source. The profiles we create are not just records but tools that hold individuals accountable for their words and actions. In doing so, we create lasting consequences for those who propagate hate against Jews and Israel.”

Canary Mission dismissed criticism that it’s doxing, saying it does not release any personal information such as home addresses, emails, or phone numbers. The watchdog added it “presents an individual’s words and actions. This enables the public to form their own opinion and decide on their own response to the content presented.”

Concluding, the group said, “Critics will continue to dislike the Canary Mission platform, and supporters will continue to recognize the vital importance of shining a light on anti-Jewish hatred during this difficult time in our history.”

“And a note to our critics: We are not going away — we have only just begun.”

[darci-tbh]

don't really vibe with the whole proshipper tendency to compare this discourse to real world problems like acab and maga tbqh. we're not being oppressed. the issue of fictional freedom is not comparable to the issue of police violence. can we all take a step back and realize that pro/anti ship discourse is an online, fandom issue pretty much exclusively, and antishippers online have nothing to do with wider scale censorship issues and freedom violations?

like it's fine to be an activist for the freedom of fiction online and in fandom and in totality, including things like book bans and other infringements on our free speech that happen on a wider scale, but we still need to acknowledge sometimes that the issue of proship vs antiship is, by itself, not that wider scale, and exists exclusively online, so that we don't say stupid shit like "antishippers are literally worse than (trump supporters/fascists/cops/lgbtphobes/other actual bigot) at this point". because the 16 year old puriteen shouting about how incest shippers should die is just an immature asshole, not a fascist, and we as proshippers (this label SPECIFICALLY) stand for freedom to create what we want online, and that does not inherently have anything to do with wider scale politics.

obviously censorship on a wider scale is a real, very political problem, but I promise you the puriteens are just as much a victim of this as we are, and are not somehow conspiring with fascist government for our demise

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Yascha Mounk

Published: Dec 21, 2024

After Donald Trump won reelection, scores of Americans once again failed to make good on their loudly shared and oft-repeated plan of moving to Canada; but a good number of them did partake in a different, rather less cumbersome, exodus. Complaining that Twitter had been unrecognizably transformed under the ownership of Elon Musk—whom they also blame for supporting Trump—hundreds of thousands of progressives decamped to Bluesky.

Widely touted as a “kinder, gentler” alternative to X, Bluesky aims to emulate the up-to-date news and specialized information-sharing in which Twitter has traditionally excelled. It also promises to cut all the toxicity. In the past weeks, the platform announced plans to quadruple the number of moderators it employs. "We’re trying to go above what the legal requirements are, because we decided that we wanted to be a safe and welcoming space,” Aaron Rodericks, the head of the Trust and Safety Team at Bluesky Social, vowed.

The platform has some features that really do put the user in charge in appealing ways. In traditional social media networks, the executives of profit-driven companies control the algorithm that governs the content which is presented to individual users. Especially on micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, this feature—since well before Musk turned it into X—meant privileging controversial posts that elicit angry debate over milder, more consensual ones. On Bluesky, each user can choose between a great variety of open-source algorithms, which theoretically makes it possible to curate a less rage-inducing experience.

When Bluesky launched, I hoped that it would succeed. But the platform has quickly shown that it is hard for any social network to deliver on its promise of being the place for a kinder or gentler discourse. At its best, Bluesky has become a giant progressive echo chamber, with Blue MAGA accounts freely sharing “misinformation” such as the notion that the vote count in the 2024 election was fraudulent because millions of Democratic votes inexplicably went missing. At its worst, it openly revels in violence—so long as that violence can make a claim, however tenuous, to defend or avenge righteous victims.

In accordance with the platform’s policy of moderating content much more aggressively than X has done under Musk, Bluesky’s moderators have been quick to act when users flout the site’s ideological consensus. In the last weeks, both small accounts with few followers and well-known writers with an established audience have seemingly been banned for such trivial “infractions” as suggesting that the Democratic Party leaving X would be a counterproductive form of “purity politics.” And yet, it was on Bluesky that prominent journalists—including, but not limited to, the infamous Taylor Lorenz—openly rejoiced in the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. As long as progressives perceive the victim of a crime to be morally evil, the moderators on Bluesky appear to believe that threatening violence against them is justifiable.

More recently, Bluesky users with major followings reveled in the prospect of violence against Jesse Singal, a center-left journalist who has ended up in progressive crosshairs because of his reporting about detransitioners and involvement in other heated debates regarding trans issues. Some consisted in crude death threats: “I think Jesse Singal should be beat to death in the streets,” one wrote. But a surprising number explicitly justified calls for violence as being necessary to defend themselves against the ways in which he supposedly put them at risk. “Jesse Singal and assorted grifters want us dead so i similarly want him dead,” another user wrote.1

Though they blatantly violated Bluesky’s restrictive community guidelines, the platform hardly took action against such accounts. It even failed to ban users who shared what they believed to be Singal’s private address or made especially graphic threats against him. Evidently, the people making decisions for the kinder, gentler platform don’t mind actual death threats—as long as they are directed against those who, in their judgment, have it coming to them.

What can possibly explain the descent of a platform populated by progressives who claim to abhor all forms of violence into an echo chamber that revels in violence against anyone who defies its taboos or threatens its ideological conformity?

Some of the dynamic likely has to do with the nature of social media in general, and of microblogging platforms like Twitter and Bluesky in particular. There is also an ideological element—a justification of violence has been interwoven with far-left ideology for well over a century. But as I puzzled over the strange transformation of Bluesky, I was also reminded of a series of interesting social science papers published over the course of the last years. They suggest that the tendency to justify violence by the need to help virtuous victims serves a strategic purpose that is less than benign—and may even have worrying psychological roots.

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Traditionally, most people have wanted to avoid being seen as a victim.

In “honor” societies, like the aristocratic milieus of early modern Europe, the impression that you could not defend yourself spelled dishonor and invited further attacks. When someone failed to pay you the respect to which you believed to be entitled, you did not claim to be a victim; you challenged them to a duel.

The same aversion to casting yourself as a victim persisted even after feudalism gave way to capitalism, and aristocratic “honor cultures” transformed into bourgeois “dignity cultures.” For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, people who were maltreated in some way would insist that such forms of disrespect did not have the power to undermine the dignity we all have as humans. If the duel is the canonical encapsulation of honor culture, the canonical encapsulations of dignity culture are an adult’s determination to keep a “stiff upper lip” in the face of adversity or a child’s resolve that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words shall never hurt me.”

But as Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have argued in The Rise of Victimhood Culture, we are now entering a new era. Dignity culture is waning rapidly. In its place, we are witnessing the rise of victimhood culture. This new dispensation “differs from both honor and dignity cultures in highlighting rather than downplaying the complainants’ victimhood.” Under these circumstances, people who portray themselves as victims enjoy an elevated moral status. And that, Campbell and Manning write in one of their papers, “only increases the incentive to publicize grievances, and it means aggrieved parties are especially likely to highlight their identity as victims, emphasizing their own suffering and innocence.” (Anyone who has spent time on social media—whether it be Bluesky or Instagram or TikTok—in the decade since Campbell and Manning first wrote that line can’t help but feel that it has proven to be prophetic.)

Ekin Ok and three co-authors from the University of British Columbia pick up on this thread in a 2021 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Because of the spread of egalitarian values and the paramount importance they give to alleviating suffering, Ok et al argue, contemporary Western democracies have become highly responsive to people who are perceived as victims. Under these circumstances, making a claim to victim status may allow a great variety of people “to pursue an environmental resource extraction strategy that helps them survive, flourish, and achieve their goals.” As a result, “claiming one is a victim has become increasingly advantageous and even fashionable.”

But being a victim may not be enough. Even in contemporary Western societies, the perceived moral status of the victim is likely to influence how much assistance they will receive. As Ok et al demonstrate, for example, respondents are more likely to offer financial assistance to a man who gets shot while volunteering at a charity softball game than they are to a man who gets shot while patronizing a strip club. For “victim-signalling” to have the desired effect, it needs to be accompanied by “virtue-signalling.”

Some people, of course, really are “virtuous victims.” They have suffered genuine injustice. But since managing to establish your status as a virtuous victim is potentially lucrative, it also stands to reason that others will falsely claim to fall into this category. As Ok et al write, some people “intentionally and repeatedly convey their victim status as a manipulative strategy with the explicit aim of altering the behavior of receivers to the signaler’s advantage.”

The authors of the study even have a hypothesis about who is most likely to do that. People with Dark Triad traits such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, they argue, are especially likely to engage in “self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity and [a] tendency to take advantage of others.” Narcissists seek the limelight. Machiavellians are obsessed with gaining and exercising power over others. Psychopaths don’t care about social norms and disregard others’ emotions. People with all three traits are thus likely to be hugely overrepresented in the “subset of the population both adept at and comfortable with using deception and manipulation to attain personal goals.”

In a succession of clever tests, Ok et al provide plausible evidence that their theory is borne out by reality. Their first striking empirical finding is that people with dark personality traits are also more likely to falsely portray themselves as victims. In one of their studies, they ask you to imagine that you are an intern who is asked to work closely on a project with a peer who is competing for the same full-time job. The other intern is friendly to your face but you get a bad vibe from him. He doesn’t take your suggestions seriously, and you suspect that he may be talking badly about you behind your back. How do you respond?

That seems to depend on who you are. Asked to report on the behavior of the other intern, most participants in the experiment shared some negative opinions but refrained from making false or exaggerated statements. Respondents who had scored high on the dark personality triad, by contrast, were more likely to falsely report that the other intern had engaged in discriminatory behaviour such as making “demeaning or derogatory comments.”

The paper’s second striking empirical finding shows that the tendency of people with dark personality traits to falsely claim being a virtuous victim may also give them cover for engaging in bad behavior. In another experiment, they asked respondents to play a simple coin flip game, which was manipulated in such a way that its participants could easily use deception to increase their monetary payoff. It turns out that people who have portrayed themselves as virtuous victims were far more likely than their peers to lie and to cheat.

This helps to explain some of the features about Bluesky and other social media platforms that might otherwise feel puzzling. The kinds of claims to virtuous victimhood that are so common on that forum don’t just create cover for manipulative people to serve their own ends; they also seem to create license for disregarding moral norms—whether these consist in a prohibition of lying about others to ostracize them or (apparently) even calling for them to be killed.

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When the study by Ok et al first came out, it made some minor waves. My fellow Substacker and recent podcast guest Rob Henderson argued that people with dark personality traits do what they can in any particular social environment to obtain benefits like prestige or material wealth. In current circumstances, he concluded, “those with dark triad traits might find that the best way to extract rewards is by making a public spectacle of their victimhood and virtue.” The psychologist and podcaster Scott Barry Kaufman put a similar conclusion even more starkly: “Some people,” he wrote, just “aren't good-faith actors in this ‘victimhood space.’”

At the time, I found the paper by Ok et al to be intriguing. And I knew that both Henderson and Kaufman usually have a good nose for bullshit. And yet, I have refrained from writing about its findings until now. After all, social psychology suffers from a serious replication crisis. Time and again, findings that are a little too neat or pleasing—from the idea that a child’s ability to resist the temptation of eating a marshmallow predicts later life outcomes to the promise that striking a “power pose” can set you up for success in a job interview—turned out to be dubious or outright false. And isn’t there something a little too neat about the idea that all of those people attesting to their superior virtue are secretly just narcissists and psychopaths trying to manipulate you?

It also seemed to me that a piece of the puzzle was still missing. Some of the people who target others on social media really do portray themselves as virtuous victims. They claim that they are part of the group which the victim of their attacks has supposedly targeted. And many of them clearly have self-serving goals, ranging from increasing their social clout to asking followers to donate cold, hard cash. But others who gang up on, or even threaten violence against, anybody who breaks perceived community norms don’t claim to be victims themselves; rather, they invoke the existence of supposed victims as an excuse to engage in cruel behavior. For all of its strength, there is something about the phenomenon I’ve been trying to make sense of that Ok’s paper can’t quite explain.

But then my research assistant sent me a new paper about the same subject. In a major effort, Timothy C. Bates and five of his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh set out to test whether the finding by Ok et al would replicate. Based on a larger dataset and employing alternative ways to measure key concepts like virtuous victim signalling, they came to an unambiguous conclusion: virtuous victim signalling really does seem to be driven by what they call “narcissistic Machiavellianism.”

More importantly, the paper by Bates et al also adds the missing piece of the puzzle. The “willingness to assert victimhood,” they hypothesize, may also “be amplified by the motive of sadistic pleasure in the downfall of weakened opponents.” In other words, the people who invoke the need to defend victims in order to justify treating others poorly don’t necessarily have a concrete strategic goal in mind; some of them do so because they are looking for a socially sanctioned outlet for their sadistic instincts. In those cases, the cruelty is the point.

To demonstrate that this is indeed the case, Bates et al use a standard battery of questions to measure respondents’ tendencies towards sadism, asking them such questions as whether they would be willing to purposely hurt people if they didn’t like them. They then test whether people with such sadistic tendencies are also more likely to score high on what they call the “victimizer scale,” which asks them to report on such questions as whether they have recently “enjoyed helping cancel someone;” whether they have “joined in on the persecution and condemnation of an individual or group accused of victimizing others;” and whether they have “sought to hurt the reputation of someone accused by others of victimizing.”

Two things are especially notable about this. First, not all sadists claimed that they themselves were virtuous victims. But second, the claim that they were acting on behalf of such victims—whether themselves or others—was the crucial fig leaf they needed to get away with their behavior. This finding, Bates et al argue, supports

the suggestion that sadism may be adapted to exploit strategic opportunities, specifically the legitimization of punishing and inflicting harm on individuals or groups which is created by successful virtuous victim signalling. If individuals high on Machiavellianism and narcissism exploit the resource-release response of nonvictims, sadism appears, as predicted, to exploit the opportunity created by victims in the form of the moral license granted by non-victims, legitimizing attacks on the victimizer by removing moral protection from those accused.

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Many people really do suffer genuine injustices. It is on the whole a good thing that contemporary societies are much more likely to give people who claim to have suffered undeserved misfortune a respectful hearing than they might have gotten in the past. While trying to keep a “stiff upper lip” may have its uses, we certainly wouldn’t want people to fear advocating for a more just society, or coming forward about ways in which they have been maltreated, because doing so might undermine their dignity or bring shame upon them.

But to be sensible and sustainable, every social dispensation—whether it consists in an explicit set of rules or an implicit set of norms—must protect itself against bad actors. When a platform or political subculture allows anyone to portray themselves as victims without any real evidence, bad actors will recognize an opportunity to swoop in. And then these bad actors will quickly weaponize false claims to victimization as an excuse to harass or physically threaten people who supposedly have it coming to them. In a culture of victimhood that has no inbuilt defenses against bad actors, things will—as the recent blowup on Bluesky reminds us—always eventually get out of hand.

Every community, however noble its stated intentions and however progressive its purported values, needs a mechanism for defending itself against the small minority of people who are prone to exploit and manipulate their social environment. If yours doesn’t have one, it’s inviting the sadists, the narcissists and the psychopaths to run the show.

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1 Like many of the things that are said or written about Singal, this claim of course lacks any basis in objective reality.

==

When victimhood is currency, expect counterfeiters.

We must fully depreciate "victimhood" as a form of social currency.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Léonie Chao-Fong at The Guardian:

A US judge on Tuesday ordered the White House to restore full access to the Associated Press to presidential events, after the news agency was punished for its decision to continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage. The order from the US district judge Trevor McFadden, an appointee of Donald Trump, requires the White House to allow the AP’s journalists to access the Oval Office, Air Force One and events held at the White House. The White House “sharply curtailed” the AP’s access to media events with the US president after he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and the news agency did not follow suit, McFadden wrote in a 41-page decision. “Under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists – be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere – it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints,” McFadden wrote. “The Constitution requires no less.” The AP sued three senior Trump aides in February, alleging the restrictions violated the US constitution’s first amendment protections against government abridgment of speech by trying to dictate the language they used in reporting the news. Lawyers for the Trump administration have argued that the AP does not have a right to what the White House has called “special access” to the president.

In a big win for press freedom, Trump appointee Trevor McFadden rules in Associated Press v. Budowich against Donald Trump’s anti-press freedom move to bar the AP from presidential event spaces over refusal to use “Gulf of America”

See Also:

PoliticusUSA: A Trump Judge Just Ruled The President Can't Ban Reporters From The White House

Civil Discourse (Joyce Vance): Trump Versus the Free Press

The Advocate: Federal judge restores AP’s full access to White House events in victory for press freedom

[malichev]

Elon Musk breaking the laws of another country over the false ``freedom speech''. Nobody taught him that the discourse of freedom does not exist 100%, from the moment you violate someone's human rights (like racists, Nazis, pedos) you can be punished.Have you ever heard of hate speech disguised as opinion? Well then.

I've heard that Twitter has also been doing illegal things in Europe, and some places are also considering banning X. I hope they do. When your company is going to expand its services in other countries, you have to follow the laws and find a common denominator, something that both sides agree on, not just what U THINK is right.

Spoiled rich guy.

[damn-it-not-again]

18+ Proship Youtuber RPF Discord Server

i posted an interest post for this on my old blog, but that got nu*ked, so im putting it up here again:

I have an 18+ proship youtuber rpf discord server!

we work with an honor system in the fact that we trust you to be honest with the fact that you are over the age of 18. You don't need to disclose your actual age if you don't want to, but you do have to be over 18 to join. We have a strict set of rules that we expect to be followed.

Here are the rules:

1. Fiction =/= Reality This should go without saying but harassment or judgement based on someone's art or fantasies won't be tolerated. On the other side of this, do not share real abuse or illegal material.

2. Be A Decent Fucking Person Thoughtcrime isn't real and everyone is welcome here as long as they don't actively harm real people, full stop. No identity discoursing, no fakeclaiming. You don't have to understand someone to treat them with respect.

3. Adults Only This server is strictly open to users 18+ and as such allows NSFW content to be posted freely. We will not be implementing a blacklist. We expect you to be mature enough to avoid your triggers and mute channels surrounding topics you don't like or that make you uncomfortable. NSFW images (that includes gory and violent images as well as sexual ones) should be spoilered as a courtesy, but text is entirely up to your own discretion.

4. Anonymity While you must be 18+ to join, you are not obligated to share more information about yourself than you want to. You do not have to share any of your social media, your exact age, or any other information past the confirmation that you are over 18. Users found to be sharing the private information of others will be banned and messages containing this information deleted. If you wish to introduce yourself, however, you may do so in the intros channel.

Venting/Bitching And Complaing

Please only put these things in the serious chats. If found doing this in any other chat you will be timed out.

6. Reporting And Member Issues

If you have an issue with any member of the server please report it to the mods and we will handle it. It has to be a real issue of real life abuse, harassment, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, stalking, violation of server rules, or other offense for it to be considered an actual issue. No action will be taken if it is petty online drama of cheating (video games or relationships (not in cases of abuse)), not liking someone else's ship, or other petty drama.

7.Content Creator Support

We allow the support of cancelled creators (buying merch, going to creator events, etc) here; with the exception of creators who have been convicted in a court of law as, or personally admitted to being, a sex offender or violent criminal. Creators that are openly bigoted or hateful are also not allowed (this does not include those who have genuinely apologised and changed their behavior). If it is unclear if support of a specific creator is allowed here please ask about it in the suggestions-and-questins channel, a mod will tell you if they are allowed as soon as one is available to do so. Refrain from posting about said creator until you receive an answer.

We know that these rules are strict, but they are that way for a reason. We want everyone to have fun in our server, and that cannot be done without rules.

That being said: All you have to do to join is like this post or DM me for the invite. I hope to see some new people joining the server very soon!

(I am only putting this in the main tags for reach. this is the only thing I will post in these tags.)

[saturns-rings-sys]

Octocons recent statement on privacy and their stance on non traumagenic systems posted to discord:

Hi, I'd like to do a bit of clarification here. There's word going around (especially on platforms such as Tumblr and TikTok) that we're "anti-endo" and are going to go on "user crusades" to ban non-traumagenics like certain other SP/PK alternatives did.

**This has not happened and will never happen.**

We consider our community to be *traumacentric*, in the sense that our platform was designed specifically for people with traumagenic/medical DID/OSDD in mind. We explicitly develop our platform to accommodate symptoms such as dissociative amnesia. We are **not** going to stop anyone from using the app or bot, we just ask that our *Discord community* sticks to that theme so we can form a proper support group around that demographic. Going on "endogenic crusades" would be uncouth, childish, against our values, and quite frankly absurd.

**We have a neutral stance on systems not caused by trauma. Our platform just isn't designed for them nor around them.** If you came here with the intention of sparking discourse regarding this subject, please leave.

A part that bothers me in particular is that this also implies that we would violate user privacy (or have *already* violated it, which is even worse). As stated in our [privacy policy](https://octocon.app/docs/platform/privacy), this is also **not** the case. We will **never** look into someone's account unless we are legally forced to do so under U.S. law, or that person volunteers to share some information to help us fix a bug, at which point we will **consensually** collect as little information as possible.

I ask that anyone who notices this kind of rhetoric going around on external platforms help us to clarify any misinformation. It would help lessen our workload immensely so we can focus on developing features, fixing bugs, and stabilizing our community. For those of you I've seen who have already helped with this, **I thank you** from the bottom of my heart.

\- Atlas

(This is copied directly from the discord server, I do not have any claim to this information, I am just sharing it)

Apologies for spreading misinformation about them being anti endo, I had seen it posted everywhere and so believed it, I should have done more in depth research sorry.