meta, racism, question
I've seen a couple of comments now from various non-white folks saying that they get proportionally *more* racist abuse hurled at them here than on Twitter.
I'd like to better understand why that is - "equally much" makes sense to me, with the culture not being less racist here, but I don't quite understand how it can result in *more* abuse than a functionally unmoderated place like Twitter.
Does anyone have any insights for me about what is causing this to happen? What protection is missing, what misfeature is amplifying the problem, or what else about the environment *or* system here plays a role in this?
(If you're white, please only respond if your understanding is based on what non-white folks have said on the matter; I'm not looking for guesses here from people who aren't themselves on the receiving end, because you're very unlikely to have the right answer.)
meta, racism, question
@joepie91@pixie.town Most of the posts from Black people I've seen about this have specifically mentioned a couple of things:
- the N word. Twitter's automated moderation tools (as sucky and problematic as they are in general) will filter this out.
- repeatedly getting told by white people that the reason they're experiencing racism is that they're doing Mastodon wrong. Nobody says that on Twitter!
- the denial or dismissal of the racism by many white people, saying things like "everybody's so nice here' or "it's so much better than Twitter"
In terms of functionality, Mastodon lacks some of the basics that Twitter has: limiting who can reply, quoting (which can be used for community defense), and the ability to make your profile private. Also, federated systems are harder to moderate, and there isn't any built-in support for distributing blocking information or instance moderators to communicate, so when a new bad instances show up they tend to be able to wreak havoc for a while. This doesn't only affect Black people of course -- I saw a thread a few months ago where Flipboard's CEO got hit with the N-word from somebody on noauthority.social, which had started up at the beginning of the year -- but the impact's going to be disproportionately on marginalized groups.
meta, racism, question
@jdp23 Thanks! All of those make sense, and that clarifies a lot.
I also wasn't aware that Twitter did any word filtering at all. I guess I'd assumed it didn't due to the large amount of slurs I still regularly encountered there. But perhaps their list just wasn't very complete.
meta, racism, question, aside
@joepie91 @jdp23
I could never get filtering to work over there as well as it has here. But that might be a browser or computer issue. Not so much about the quality of the platform itself.