This post is, probably, the most personally upsetting post I’ve had to write here.
User Karl_Jones has been permanently banned from the BBS.
It appears Karl maintains a third party site where he keeps a record of his posts. That’s fine, but at one point, he chose to post a quote from another BBS user to their site. This user requested that their name (but not their comment) be removed from that site.
As I mentioned in my earlier post on this topic, this is a public forum, and folks are free to copy the post of the BBS elsewhere. However, we also expect that users of this BBS will treat fellow users with respect and honour their wishes should they not want their posts on another site. While we can’t control third parties or their sites, we can choose to remove users from the BBS who will not extend this small measure of kindness to their fellow members.
Additionally, users (and Authors) who choose to identify as female face increased acts of misogyny, intimidation, and mistreatment online. I have personally witnessed this sort of behaviour in the sort of comments, email, and other posts directed towards female Authors on Boing Boing itself. But even here on the BBS, we have been called in to see Private Messages sent to female users often written with extreme amounts of abusive language not repeated to users who do not openly identify as female. As the user affected by Karl’s actions, in this case, falls into both cases (being female, and having faced online harassment in the past), I asked this user to consider the request in this light and simply remove their name .
Karl did not respond to either my request, nor the polite request of the user themselves. Instead, they chose to double-down, by creating a profile page for the user on their site, and creating more entries. At the same time, they also decided to brand the request as a request to “self-censor.” This, more than anything else, tells me what I, as a moderator, need to know about this user - that another member’s name had apparently become property of Karl - that despite the request asking only to remove a name, and not either Karl’s own words, nor even the quote he was responding to, they apparently considered that something they owned enough that a request to remove it was “self-censoring”.
At this point, my course of action from a moderation standpoint was clear, but to make matters worse, I was then directed to a post where Karl had specifically asked permission from another user to repost their content . Apparently, users he respects are given the right to choose how their name and words are presented, but not users who identify as female. or that are otherwise undeserving.
I am truly, truly amazed, disheartened, and angry that another user’s name would be such a point of contention. However, IMHO it goes to show how entitlement, privilege, and systemic bigotry can take even simple requests and produce ugly, terrible results.
