The week before Professor Jason Arday died, we put out a post explaining why the campaign against him was rooted in racism.
On facebook it was one of our most criticised posts, ever.
963 laugh reacts.
855 comments by the time we closed the comment section, nearly all of them negative, many of them openly abusive.
Up until now, we have allowed most of our social posts to have active comment sections.
We don’t want to live in an echo chamber, and much of our anti-racism work is about modelling how to have courageous conversations about racism. We felt that having our comment sections open was an important part of allowing that to happen, along with pressure to enable disagreement and “free speech”. The algorithm also rewards posts with lots of comments, allowing us to reach more people.
At the same time, we moderate our comment sections because we know that seeing racist hate underneath our posts causes harm to the Black and Brown people reading them.
This moderation has changed over time, especially as we began to attract a higher volume of comments and a growing number of dedicated hate followers. Our moderation includes removing comments which use racist, islamophobic, antisemitic, ableist, queerphobic or misogynistic slurs, any where people are overtly abusing one another in the comment section, image spam, or any targeted attacks aimed at ARC staff, ARCtivists or guest writers.
Up until now we have aimed to leave comments that are simply disagreeing with us untouched.
But when it came to our post about Jason, we made an error of judgement. Whilst we moderated the most abusive and racist comments, we left 100’s of comments as we saw them as simply ‘disagreeing’ with us. We did not acknowledge that whilst we didn’t personally know Jason, and there is a likelihood that he never saw our post, we inadvertently facilitated a space where people were able to ‘pile on’ with their opinions of a vulnerable individual. We can now see with clarity that the comments were a targeted attack, not simply disagreement with our content, and if Jason was someone we knew we would have shut the comment section down much sooner to safeguard him.
We’ve sat with our guilt around this and we’re making a change:
- We fully acknowledge that comments which target an individual, even one who we may not personally know, a celebrity even, are still profoundly harmful and could be seen by that individual. Any post which is about an individual or attracting comments aimed at an individual will have comments turned off from now on.
- We are shedding the societal idea that “debate” is required at all times in all spaces and that everything, even racist harm, is up for discussion. This idea upholds white supremacy culture, intellectualises racist harm, and dismisses the pain of Black and Brown people as well as their humanity.
- We are finally allowing ourselves to fully recognise the impact moderating the comment section has on our staff, even those who are in white bodies, but especially those who are Black and Brown and holding racial trauma from the racism they experience on a daily basis. The amount of racism and hatred in comment sections is toxic for everyone involved, from those spouting the hate, to those reading it whilst scrolling by, and to our team who have to painstakingly read every single one to moderate them.
- We are also asserting our right to turn off the comments if the team is busy, under-resourced, burned out, or simply not feeling able to deal with moderating them that day. It’s our page, and we don’t owe anyone a chance to ‘debate’ us, particularly when it’s clear that their intentions are not to discuss with an open mind. Sometimes all we want to do is put an informed view out into the world or publish a statement.
- We are taking a more hard-line approach to our growing body of hate followers. We see you. The ones who quietly undermine us and dismiss racist harm by laugh-reacting, those who negatively comment under every single one of our posts, the ones who spam the comment section with racist memes. Yes, we want to have fruitful conversations about nuance in our comment sections, but only with those who are there in good faith and WANT to engage in a productive way. We will be using our judgement to block those clearly there to undermine, disrupt, and distract us and we make no apology for that.
If you are a content creator or organisation reading this, we hope this gives you food for thought and encourages you to think differently about how you moderate your own comment sections. We don’t need to allow racist harm (and any harm linked to any form of oppression) to run riot in our spaces.
To those who are reading this simply as social media users, we ask you to reflect on how you engage online.
Do you stop and think about the impact of the comment you write before you click send?
Would you say this to someone’s face in real life?
Are you letting the algorithm toy with your emotions, whipping you into a rage which you channel into countless comment sections?
How does that make you feel?
Because there is another option!
Don’t comment. Stop scrolling.
Put your phone away.
Respectfully… go touch some grass.
