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Content Moderation Case Study: Knitting Community Ravelry Bans All Talk Supporting President Trump (2019)

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Summary: When people think of content moderation and political debates, they may not think about knitting. However, the knitting community at the online site Ravelry has become a fascinating place to explore content moderation questions. This actually goes back many years, as Ravelry's content moderation practices (handled by dozens of volunteer moderators) were studied for a PhD dissertation by Sheila Saden Pisa that was published in 2013, entitled: In search of a practice: large scale moderation in a massive online community.Knitting and Ravelry have also been quite political at times. All the way back in 2009, a blog post was written by someone who was kicked off of Ravelry, and she believed it was because of her conservative political views. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Ravelry was where the initial plans for the now famous pussyhats (for the Women's March protesting Trump's Presidency) were first released and shared. Ioana Literat and Sandra Markus studied Ravelry's role in online participation, civic engagement and craftivism.

Still, it caught many people by surprise, in late 2019, when Ravelry declared a new policy, saying that it would no longer allow any posts supporting Donald Trump. From the announcement:
We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that we will not destroy project notebook data. If a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. Even if you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.The Community Guidelines have been updated with the following language: Note that support of President Trump, his administration, or individual policies that harm marginalized groups, all constitute hate speech.
The company noted that this was not a statement of support for other candidates, nor was it saying that it would ban people who (outside of Ravelry) supported Trump. It also made clear that it was not banning other political topics or statements in support of other candidates. Instead, it said: We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions. The decision created quite a lot of attention with many supporters and detractors.Decisions to be made by Ravelry:
  • How do you decide when one politician's positions are so problematic to your community that you ban any support of that candidate?
  • How will this policy be enforced? Should it apply to earlier statements of support or just future ones?
  • How will attempts to get around the ban (such as with hints or euphemisms) be dealt with?
  • Can volunteer moderators be supporters of Trump?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
  • What are the pros & cons of banning support for Trump v. banning all talk of politics?
  • Would other approaches -- such as moving all political talk, or all talk about Trump, to a specific area -- work as effectively?
  • If, as has been suggested in some Section 230 reform bills, the laws change to require political neutrality in content moderation, how will Ravelry's moderation practices be impacted?
Resolution: After Donald Trump left the White House on January 20th, Ravelry reiterated that its policy remained the same, even though Trump was no longer President. A year and a half after Ravelry's decision, the New Yorker published a long, and detailed article about the decision to ban Trump support on the site and how it is going, entitled How Politics Tested Ravelry and the Crafting Community.
On the day of the ban, Kim Denise, one of the volunteer moderators, told me, I was, like, I'm so psyched. I'm so proud to be part of Ravelry. Then the ban happened. And it was, like, Oh, my God. I wish we'd thought this through. Right-wing trolls began signing up for Ravelry accounts and spamming threads with anti-Ravelry or pro-Trump sentiment. Denise described it as hordes of screaming people lining up to sling feces at us. . . . It was terrible. Users scurried to help moderators by flagging posts for deletion. They recruited a retired moderator to help deal with trolls. Within a couple of months, most of the activity generated by the Trump ban had subsided. Conservative users banded together, in a movement hashtagged #RavelryExodus, deleting their accounts and shifting to other platforms to sell patterns.
The company's founder also admitted that after the ban was announced, she realized the difficulty in figuring out the exact boundaries of enforcement:
Jessica admitted that Ravelry has struggled to pinpoint exactly what constitutes inappropriate content. Some of this stuff is so nuanced, she said. Think about what tweet got Trump banned. It was not about attending the Inauguration. She went on, We went through some pretty crazy rabbit holes: 'O.K., this is an eagle, but it isn't really the Nazi eagle. Or is it?' It's just, like, ugh.
Originally posted to the Trust & Safety Foundation website.

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posted at: 12:00am on 15-May-2021
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Angry Joe Tears Into Twitch Over Its One-Sided Approach To DMCA Takedowns

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Famed YouTuber and Twitch streamer Angry Joe, or Jose Antonio Vargas, has made it onto Techdirt's pages in the past. True to his name, we've discussed his responses on a couple of intellectual property issues he's suffered through. When Nintendo flagged a video Angry Joe did about Mario Party 10, preventing him from further monetizing the video, he simply and angrily swore off of doing any Nintendo videos in the future, rightly noting that with the decision all the free advertising he'd given Nintendo just disappeared. When CBS blocked a review video he did because the review used 13 seconds of Star Trek: Picard, he took to Twitter to rip them to shreds as well. The point is that when Angry Joe encounters the frustrations many others deal with thanks to overly restrictive intellectual property practices, he doesn't stay silent. He gets... well... angry.With that in mind, it's probably not all that surprising that the way Twitch is handling its DMCA process has finally caught up to Angry Joe resulting in yet another angry rant. Like many other Twitch creators, Angry Joe has been hit with DMCA notices. As he goes on to note, the process Twitch has designed for how this all works, well, sucks out loud.

Joe highlighted two major issues with Twitch’s system. The first is the strikes on people’s accounts are permanent, and don’t expire after 90 days like YouTube.“Copyright strikes do not depreciate after a set period of time. If I receive three strikes my channel is terminated, yet I can’t see the strike, I can’t submit a counter-notification, I can’t submit a dispute,” he said in a recent rant. “It can’t get any worse than this.”
This seems both like it should be an easy problem to fix and an easy problem to have completely avoided in the first place. If anyone had bothered to test out Twitch's DMCA process prior to putting it in place, especially from the perspective of someone who had received multiple DMCA notices, it would have been immediately obvious that multiple strikes create a situation where the accused can't even counter the notice.But the issues with the dispute program go deeper than that.
Joe used an example of a copyright strike he received in February 2021 for a Warzone clip dating back to November 2020, which had the Astronomia song — popularized by the coffin dance meme — playing inside the game.“Here is your DMCA strike. What is the clip? We don’t have a link to the clip. We told you to delete all of your VODs. There is no ‘Dispute’ button,” he explained. “You can’t even review the VODs identified in DMCA notifications in your dashboard, and they don’t plan [on adding that feature] that until December 2021.”
If this all sounds absurd, it very much is. We've made this point before, but Twitch creators are Twitch's biggest and most important asset. Twitch is owned by Amazon. Amazon has virtually unlimited resources. Instead of bringing those resources to bear on all this nonsense, Twitch has instead hung its most important assets out to dry. The roadmap items are half a year away. Creators are getting slammed with these DMCA requests. Twitch is mostly doing nothing other than admiring the failed program it has rolled out.It should be noted that Angry Joe has a very loud voice when it comes to streamers. If this doesn't get fixed soon, this could lead to a creator exodus.

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posted at: 12:00am on 15-May-2021
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