Notice: part a of this document is retracted and available only for the historical record; read this for more about the retraction.

jeffcompass corruption complaints

part a (slander argument, 2022/09/14) [retracted]: as linked from my twitter thread today, i wanted to re-examine jeff’s covert involvement around toburr’s shine heads ban, and argue why i consider it an impeachable betrayal of mod duty, and then explain how that impacted my reaction to his self-deletion from the 2022 custom il competition.

part b (corruption complaint, 2022/07/10): the original complaint i sent to mods arguing why jeff should be prevented from influencing any abuse/conflict cases going forwards owing to bias and incompetence, which the other mods quietly dropped.

part a (slander argument, 2022/09/14) [retracted]

this part of my original complaint is the relevant one:

(1) the final [incident] was this incident of hypocrisy in jeffs reaction to me banning toburr vs (tacitly) condoning pk. i brought it up here (https://discord.com/channels/83214196182880256/976894515946336320/985333627913134142) but will re-explain. when i banned toburr, jeff started a huge fuss in mod chats and in dms with some of my friends, including about how he felt unsafe being in spaces i was active in. he left shine heads, but meanwhile stayed in gb cord, which had just been accused of chronic bullying, and pk the unapologetic bully in there had evaded his reaction wholly and was his personal mod. we agreed it was hypocrisy (https://discord.com/channels/83214196182880256/976894515946336320/987431905421066260)

having an emotional reaction is fine as a person, but not in his role as mod, whence it caused further problems. i constantly heard from friends about how i was losing support as a victim, which put much pressure on me, and particularly with 1ups it got to the point where she refused to affirm that i was even a victim, in our discussion about demodding me from shine heads.

at the time, i just considered it evidence for why he should be removed from abuse/conflict cases, and saw 1ups as being solely culpable for the consequences jeff’s covert discussions had on me, but i reconsidered on both fronts.

i argue this is an inexusable mod abuse because it satisfies 3 necessary conditions:

  1. jeff’s opinion of me as expressed in these dms was logically completely baseless, hence is slander;
  2. his expression of this opinion, under personal right to unguarded private communication, had negative repercussions on me;
  3. the context of the opinions was an ongoing conflict case that jeff was, as moderator, presiding over, hence had a duty of care towards me; however, jeff tried to prevent me from finding out that he had expressed these opinions, so abused secrecy.

point 1
jeff’s opinion was that i was threatening to him and he was uncomfortable being around me wherever i had authority because (1) i banned toburr from shine heads (2) without due process.

  1. toburr was at the time accused of bullying multiple people, with several witnesses, and refused to apologise until after these events. a member of shine heads (i.e. me) was uncomfortable with him being there.
  2. i ran the case myself, announced intention to ban, gave other shine heads mods 3 days to respond, then wrote rationale (shared with every relevant party) and banned, receiving acknowledgement from another mod. jeff had no insight and was speculating.

the reason this opinion is invalid is hypocrisy. pk at the time had much graver allegations against him than toburr, of bullying that was publicly visible. jeff left shine heads under pretense of me being a threatening mod, stayed in gb discord where pk had done the bullying, retained pk as mod in his discord, refused to take a stance against pk. after these events, jeff explicitly defended pk, saying pk had made “lapses of judgement” despite public evidence implying no regret. then he agreed that his opinion was hypocritical and regretted it.

i consider this slander because despite there not being a misrepresented fact, the opinion (coming from him in particular) has no rational basis and so the act of expressing it is itself deceit, which damaged how i was seen.

point 2
the main consequences i suffered were:

  1. this contributed to 1ups removing me from modding shine heads
  2. 1ups refused to take a stance on the underlying case, or reaffirm her assent to the ban
  3. 1ups remained silent on the issue and so gave jeff the room to argue that the ban was done without due process

i think jeff is partly culpable for these consequences because the content of what he said amounts to slander (point 1)

point 3
this case has to be tried as mod abuse; on a personal level, the offence is not severe enuff to warrant further thought really. jeff requested to not be named during these conversations, which denied me the right to defend myself, and removed any accountability for his opinion. as a mod, he must be fair and he must be accountable.

his reasoning for engaging in slander was expressing “feelings”:

relationship to custom il incident
the thing that triggered my anxiety was red flags in how jeff requested removal from documentation – secrecy (“discretion”), “being uncomfortable” explaining (compare: being uncomfortable talking to me about banning toburr), and the use of “feelings” to justify the discomfort of giving a reason (compare: to justify secretive slander).

the negative consequence was established after the person jeff talked to, google_cheese (compare: 1ups), acted against my interest and i lost control of reporting the scoring of the competition, which was important to me as i took on the responsibility.

in this case, it’s easy to establish that jeff influenced cheese to not tell me, and easy to argue on balance of probability that jeff intended for me to not find out for at least a while, but hard to establish further conspiratorial/manipulative motives. however, it is reasonable for me to suspect malicious intent given the red flags connecting it to the prior case.

this incident is nbd by itself (i hold no ill will to cheese), but takes on further significance to me as showing a corrupt mod is still not done with me.

i argue the same as i did regarding the toburr ban – that a mod, and jeff in particular, should not be entitled to certain personal liberties, owing to the requirement of fairness, accountability, and demonstration of how jeff in particular previously used those liberties as cover for mod abuse. in simpler terms, it’s extremely sus for a mod to self-redact and give no reason, and target a specific segment of the community with the action. the fairness (impartiality) and accountability violations are really obvious.

closing argument
to me, all this shows that problems will not stop until jeff is deposed. to say nothing of the wider case that exists against him (my original complaint). he will continue to preside over bans he has conflict of interest in and so skew justice, and there’s no reason to expect the mod abuse to not recur. if he knowingly slandered me, then him being mod is unethical; if he unknowingly slandered me, then he is too stupid/irrational/emotionally incompetent to mod, and this incompetence has had consequences on victims. in either event, he is biased and acts in the interest of friends not justice, hence is corrupt. his ongoing behaviour means that he can’t be trusted to only not engage in abuse/conflict modding, so he should be removed completely. that’s my opinion

citations

initially she thought it wasnt that big a deal cause it was temporary + she thought ud talk it out w the concerned parties, as was referenced in ur doc. but then she realized a non negligible amount of people are either upset at you for this, or are directly uncomfortable sharing spaces/servers w u now

– a witness to 1ups’ intentions

[me:] ah yes the anonymous minority. sequel to the dogpile clique i’m sure [witness:] nah // the couple i know are not part of it // but they have asked not to be named

– a witness to jeff’s deliberate secrecy (he gave himself away by leaving discords)

as for the toburr ban, sure, i shouldn’t have said i was scared of you having power over me. its unfortunate i let dumb emotions get a hold of me and said that, as much as its unfortunate someone leaked that to you because i dont remember saying it publicly, and i asked 1ups not to share my thoughts to you. it was dumb of me to say that, i was very angry with how the ban went down and i still maintain that, but that aspect of me saying that dumb shit overclouds the greater issue that i shouldve focused on more, the fact i felt the process of the ban was unfair. but again i am very curious who be leaking dms/mod chat :Birdge:. and you know what, ill take that a step further, because i felt i was in private spaces i felt i was safer in having a more emotional reaction rather than purely constructive. so was that wrong of me to have an emotional reaction sure, although i think its really unfair thats used against me later because i didn’t know it would reach out and i couldn’t have a sheerly constructive conversation with you. it be what it be. i let emotions get a hold of me and i thought i was safe in doing so. in the future i am going to work harder in mod spaces/dms with friends to hold it back a bit

we were not “handling” anything and we were just discussing the situation, you were not going to be banned/have any action take against you so there was nothing to handle rly. regardless it was a dumb thing of me to say that overclouds the greater issue. it was hypocrtical and im sorry.

– jeff’s full explanation for this incident in community reconciliation

part b (corruption complaint, 2022/07/10)

[annotation 2022/09/14: the community reconciliation is archived here; use the search function there to look up quotes from here]

r.e. jeff… forgive me for not citing my statements to my usual extent but this is really a final thing i wanted to quickly do before moving past this entire conflict. i am trying to not care too much about the outcome of this complaint but do hope the things i say get carefully considered

jeff has consistently acted against my interests in the sms community on matters of conflict and abuse, which is in itself not a problem if his modding was fair, but i have reasons to think it wasnt. im gonna talk about bias and conflict of interest seemingly caused by his attitude towards friendship. starting with 3 incidents i witnessed

(1) the final one was this incident of hypocrisy in jeffs reaction to me banning toburr vs (tacitly) condoning pk. i brought it up here (https://discord.com/channels/83214196182880256/976894515946336320/985333627913134142) but will re-explain. when i banned toburr, jeff started a huge fuss in mod chats and in dms with some of my friends, including about how he felt unsafe being in spaces i was active in. he left shine heads, but meanwhile stayed in gb cord, which had just been accused of chronic bullying, and pk the unapologetic bully in there had evaded his reaction wholly and was his personal mod. we agreed it was hypocrisy (https://discord.com/channels/83214196182880256/976894515946336320/987431905421066260)

having an emotional reaction is fine as a person, but not in his role as mod, whence it caused further problems. i constantly heard from friends about how i was losing support as a victim, which put much pressure on me, and particularly with 1ups it got to the point where she refused to affirm that i was even a victim, in our discussion about demodding me from shine heads. thats not jeffs fault but it indicates the extent of his reaction, and having a similarly biased reaction be so prominent in mod discussions (which i havent seen) is the big concern here

(2) the two prior incidents indicated the same problem in more benefit-of-doubt situations. firstly, in gb cord he accused the il mods of actively disrespecting toburr by not replying to him promptly about row deletion in january, saying their non-reaction was in itself a reaction. at the exact same time, i was waiting weeks and having to nudge him for a reply after confiding to him (and despin and peaches) about lumardy. that was the other of two incidents of hypocrisy. for context, il mods were afraid of talking to toburr, and jeff was going thru personal problems that made him unable to handle my at-the-time extremely messy lu case

(3) secondly, his reaction to our mutual misunderstanding, about my role as il advisor and whether i was criticising him for asking me to do something, was incredibly personal. he said to me that he was going to stop participating in the entire il side of the community in reaction to things only i said to him. the level of blame and failure of empathy there was really jarring to see from a mod who decides abuse/conflict cases

jeff says a lot how his goal is for us all to be friends, but in that way he disguises the inconsistent reactions and opinions to situations he has, and how they depend on who his (real) friends are. indeed, this is how i realised he was never my friend and so decided to cut him off. having this in a mod presiding over conflict/abuse is dangerous, and i think this danger was realised in 2 ways:

(1) firstly, his attitude in the reconciliation was dodgy, specifically in how when i first brought up accusations against pk in my tweets, he responded:

I don’t condone everything my friends have said but I still think they are…human, they and don’t deserve to be basically soft-cancelled over lapses of judgement or areas of conflict they can improve in.

characterising pks “i will make discords worse” comments on his behalf as the bolded comments despite no indication from pk of regret. theres that bias once again

(2) secondly, some things in the context of the urbani case. i wanna first note that i think the mods all share fault for two large procedural errors in handling urbani and lumardy – (a) the lack of victim interviews and (b) letting jeff preside over urbani despite obvious conflict of interest

– a: i agree with the principle of not letting victims suggest ban lengths directly; however, interviews are useful to understand the gist of what the case is and the effects it has had on its victims. they de-bias mods understandings of victimhood thatre otherwise second-hand – say, when one victim is much more visibly distressed and another is suffering in silence

– b: jeffs history handling urbani was being at a loss, then trying to forgive him for bigotry as a mod as part of being his friend, then staying out of discussion when i brought up how they were letting him get away with no consequences, and then giving urbani a chance and being betrayed by him. thats a self-evident conflict-of-interest going into discussions about banning urbani

in whatever way things went down in mod chat, from what i understand, the situation where urbani was served a harsher sentence than lu was only narrowly avoided, which wouldve been an incredible travesty given the lu case was significantly worse. im gonna try to avoid directly criticising the outcome of this, cos i wanna emphasise that all opinions are valid and the important things to strive for are mod democracy and impartiality, to reach a natural consensus, rather than forcing mods to develop certain morals. so ill instead focus on things suggesting bias. however, i do really think its extremely hard to justify the urbani case as being worse and dont think anyone ive had critical discussions of abuse with (say, larvi) actually thinks that, so that does by itself make me suspect underlying bias

a lot of what ive said so far is about jeff compromising conflict/abuse resolutions by having emotions out over discourse so much, but id go further and say that while i was mod advisor, i saw no evidence i can remember of him being able to rationally analyse abuse and disconnect it from whether he was victim or how well he knew the victim

despin was heavily critical to me of the mods in general for where the lu case was going, but also singled jeff out as giving the impression that he thought urbani had done worse, based partly on victim count (he gave no further details ftr). he perceived a lack of effort to understand my long case from the mods in general (this is why victim interviews can be crucial btw), and noted that jeff tended to say he would stay out of things for conflict-of-interest but then didnt resist getting involved again

finally, my efforts to bring this up in the reconciliation were met with jeff getting offended about “attacks on his character”, and his reaction to all this so far has been removing me on twitter (albeit apologetically, asking for time away), which scores poorly on receptivity to criticism

thats about all i had to say. in summary, i think jeff is kind and benevolent to ppl directly, but also a big example of the widespread mentality of reacting to conflict/abuse surrounding others based on who your friends are rather than the content of the wrongdoing itself, which should ideally be reasoned about via empathy with a hypothetical abstract victim. i think theres been enuff dodgy shit for him to stop being involved in that side of modding, and im an example of someone whos consistently suffered from it. abuse/conflict resolution is the one part of modding thats high-stakes enuff to where this kind of stuff must not be tolerated imo. this report is for all mods to consider this

p.s. i hope ive been better able to avoid undue speculation than before, when voicing my concerns