Jeff and Me

Contents

1. I Am Sorry to Jeff
   • a | A Moderator
   • b | Political Speech
   • c | Public and Secret
   • d | Assumptions and Suspicions
2. The Mods Aren’t Sorry To Me
   • a | Responding to my First Complaint
   • b | “Did Nothing”
   • c | Trust
   • d | The Squeeze
3. What Now?

I Am Sorry to Jeff

(I need to remind people firstly that my talking about a mod’s behaviour and calling for action is me expressing an opinion, and simply disagreeing isn’t enuff to argue I did something wrong.)

A Moderator
I think the main thing that’s stopped my point about Jeff’s intervention in the Toburr Shine Heads ban from being understood is that I have a different understanding of what a moderator is. I consider a mod to have a high duty of care and of accountability. Both Jeff and his friend acted in the same way after I banned Toburr – they spoke to my friends about it emotionally, exerting a pressure that contributed, inadvertently, to some of my friends’ actions that led to the demise of our friendship. But they did so under an order of secrecy. I dislike this kind of backstabbing behaviour immensely, but I didn’t really care that Jeff’s friend did it, only Jeff. Because Jeff is a moderator, and because his opinion came from a hypocritical basis (we agreed on this point). The secrecy violated accountability and the nature of the opinion – interfering with me holding a harasser to account with claims of due process violation backed with zero evidence [SEE UPDATE BELOW] – violated his duty of care towards me. I do not believe a mod should have the same right a normal person has to speak freely, because of these violations. Therefore, I consider it mod abuse.

UPDATE: It’s emerged recently that many people actually believed that I banned Toburr without the consent of the other mods (and so thought Jeff’s opinion was justified). This is now debunked (1, 2). However, my comment that the other mods “didn’t engage” was interpreted as them not consenting. While it’s a plausible interpretation in itself, the problem here was that an SMS mod was relentlessly spreading this speculation, to my friends and other SMS mods, while actively refusing to investigate or even ask for clarification. Despin or the SMS mods may provide proof of this at a later point; I don’t have primary sources of mod chat or my friends’ DMs but do have one mod’s testimony and another’s evidence of pattern. UPDATE 2022/10/16: Evidence from mod chat provides important context.

When I wrote this up, I leant more heavily in the direction that the hypocrisy itself establishes responsibility for slander, rather than the factual misrepresentation around Toburr’s ban (which wasn’t as clear to me at the time for some reason). I do still believe that as well but think this other aspect is understood by more people.

Political Speech
I see the SMS mods as a governement and so interpreted criticism of a moderator as an act of political speech, and therefore free speech. I reasoned that if a politician comes under pressure, ey is always able to resign if it’s too much for em. I didn’t see it from a personal perspective, and that was a mistake. There are a couple of ban reasonings I find very compelling:

Purposeful disregard of the emotional impact of words chosen.

shout’s repeated behavior of attributing malice and intent to abuse, to rational actions performed by third parties he disagrees with, constitutes an issue grave enough to contribute to removal from the community.

The phrase “he disagrees with” is a lie – or, how might I put this, replacing “Jeff did something bad to me” with “I disagree with Jeff” creates a “serious accusation of malicious behavior, made flippantly or under undue speculation”… but also one that was evidently false from the fact the mods had already disciplined Jeff.

But the rest of this is true. I did not consider emotional impact because I felt like anything goes when holding a moderator to account. Not anything in the sense of language intended to hurt, but rather blunt criticisms (e.g. “too stupid to mod”) that I felt were just. Likewise, I made implications of malice without due care. There’s really no excuse for this and I feel fucking stupid because I made a big point earlier in the year about abuse of staff, and having spurious accusations and feelings floating around in public is exactly that. Jeff, I’m sorry. I said that Toburr’s secretive abuse of staff deserved a 1-month timeout ban, and I hold myself to the same standard for my public abuse of staff.

Public and Secret
The thing that made me think this was a reasonable thing to do at the time was the precedent Jeff had himself set about venting arbitrary feelings about me in secret. He never explicitly ascribed malicious motive, which is an important sense in which my action was worse. But he did speculate plentifully and slanderously. To mods, he speculated on my motives as being to target him when they were not (e.g. my “mod terms” proposal, where I was really thinking of Noki Doki stonewalling me on topics of organisation and practice codes just from having become an idle mod), and to both mods and my friends, he expressed copious discomfort on false premises (e.g. he asserted that my ban of Toburr was unilateral despite, in fact, 1ups having assented to it). [MODS/DESPIN: PROOF PLEASE] UPDATE 2022/10/16: Evidence from mod chat confirms this statement but provides extenuating context.

On the one hand, these secretive contexts allow for speculation. Mods are trying to ascertain truth, and friends offer an ear to any kind of emotions. I was stressed by Jeff showing a consistent pattern of saying inaccurate bullshit about me in private, which is bad in itself, but arguably not as bad as me airing speculative accusations out in public for the world to see. Understand this, however. Lumardy destroyed my friendships by doing this exact secretive thing. He actually additionally lied about facts, manipulated people into not finding out the truth, and protected his lies with two faces for 7 months – so it’s not a comparison at all to what Jeff did. But this is why I think in the way that I do now. If something is in public, the subject knows what was said about em, and to me that is a fundamental right and fairness that I will never undermine, because I never want to do to anyone what lu did to me. This has led to me becoming very sensitive when someone has a persistent pattern of secretly expressing negative opinions about me that, while they are sometimes rational, are rarely with any factual basis. And it had convinced me, wrongly, that it’s always OK, at least when punching up to power, to behave similarly in public instead.

Assumptions and Suspicions
It’s not OK to make unproven statements about someone in public, but in my mind I wrongly thought I was not stating, because I was not assuming. The latter is actually true; I tried to clearly demark my suspicions from facts – but suspicions are not assumptions. They were of course speculative, because I was trying to awkwardly apply the principles of emotional speech (being like Jeff) and non-secrecy (not being like lu) at the same time. I never said, for example, that Jeff was self-redacting to undermine me. I said I suspected it, and gave a rational basis for why. I said that the way he went about this was the same as the way he went about what I earlier called mod abuse. I tried to explain that it triggered me – maybe I wasn’t clear when I said “ptsd-ish” reaction, but Jeff’s action actually gave me an anxiety attack. I left the reader behind thru my odd take on how a mod should behave, because I expected transparency from Jeff as a mod in this situation, and for him to not single out only one part of the community with his action. Those two beliefs are why it was really hard for me to see why he would behave this way if not to target me. This is, unfortunately, just the obscure way in which I think, and my expectations from mods. But the emotions I’ve caused him via speculation are the same ones he’s caused me via the same thing.

However, let me be clear. There were a lot of facts and actual evidence in my allegations. We agreed on hypocrisy, and Jeff’s flagrant bias, like in his defence of PK, was discussed by the mods even before I sent them my first corruption complaint. This from the mods

the claims made are based entirely on speculation

is 💩 a huge lie.

On a charitable reading of how I came to be accused of this, I would cite, for example, people reinterpreting my nuanced point that “a mod who has already caused harm via secrecy/being uncomfortable should be forced to come clean when his victim suspects malicious intent” with the boneheaded point that “this mod definitely has malicious intent”. Maybe?

The Mods Aren’t Sorry To Me

It’s an essential part of this story how I came to express my feelings about Jeff in the way I did, first in the events discord and then on Twitter. I thought I summarised it well in the chain of tweets itself. But here it is in more depth.

Responding to my First Complaint
After I realised the problem I had with Jeff (following the conclusion of community reconciliation), I wrote the first corruption complaint to the mods. They never responded. I asked Warspy at some point what was going on, and he gave a draft opinion that the mods had decided to prevent Jeff from being involved in abuse/conflict cases where he had friends and/or enemies. After that, nobody followed up with an official response. I think I should’ve tried harder to pester them, in this case and in many others. But I have diminished responsibility here because I was the victim. What I mean is, it was starting to get really hard for me to engage at all because I’d become emotionally destroyed by the sheer number of apologies I had to process, separating the sincere from the disingenuous, after the bingo abuse case was finally settled.

“Did Nothing”
I’ve said a few times that the mods “did nothing” about my complaint, but this was misleading wording I apologise for. What I meant was they didn’t give me an actual response, and the measures they took against Jeff were, in my opinion, no measures at all. It’s important to note that this is a conviction – one I treated as fact and so biased my speech in a misleading way, but also one I strongly believe in. I think that it’s important for a government to signal accountability by removing someone from a role that that person actively caused harm by doing (so-called people-modding in this case) – regardless of whether the behaviour was expected to recur. I think making this restricted to certain people (me) is imparting culpability on me, rather than recognising that whatever drove Jeff to behave as he did towards me was not my fault but rather a defect of his. This, in fewer words, is the concept of victim-blaming. It’s something I extol a lot in my feminist thinking, and so I let my interpretation of the mods’ response to my complaint become a bit too declarative. Sorry again. Again, tho,

To pretend that the moderation team did not evaluate any and all of these claims is false.

I said you did nothing about it, not that you didn’t evaluate it (note: this comment from Lego was made after I was banned, and contradicts what I had previously heard from Warspy (1, 2), which suggested Jeff would only be uninvolved in cases of friends/enemies). Maybe I didn’t understand the mods (whose communication was evidently dismal), and maybe they made a genuine mistake from my previous ambiguous use of the phrase “did nothing”. But it’s hard to believe that given the sheer magnitude of spun statements the mods have made in the ban justification. Leading me to a key point:

Trust
Between their non-reply and their nothing action to my complaint, I lost trust in the mods completely. It is anyone’s right to distrust authority, and I think their continued assertions that I had to keep coming to them about allegations of mod abuse, or needed to “listen” to them and “change” my law-abiding behaviours, belie accountability. On the contrary, I think they were obliged to give me a space to air these kinds of concerns in public. Because this wasn’t a personal trial, but one of mod abuse. That’s what I thought I was doing by putting it in the events discord, and then on Twitter. But both platforms are inappropriate for that. Rimato at least acknowledged this problem:

I do think the event cord might not be the best place to hash out drama. Granted idk where that place would really be anyways.

I worried for days how to say something about the fear Jeff’s unaddressed actions were causing me, and then tried a conflict-averse strategy where I wrote very short, unsubstantiated logic for how I felt as part of an announcement. I didn’t want to separately draw attention to it, but it was also stupid that it was borrowing a context of authority from the rest of the post. I wanted to leave it there; it was pressing down on me that it’d never be understood properly, but at least I’d made my fears known. But then censorship ensued so I took it to Twitter.

On Twitter, I hoped to at least publish a complete thought that was there to explain myself to the almost-nobody I expected cared. But it was also meant to be open to cross-examination (example of what I mean by that here). I wanted that to be as public as my opinions, to form a balanced whole. This is something that I think has to be allowed as a recourse for mod abuse, but it should be sanctioned by the mods themselves in a specific opt-in channel, rather than leaving the comments just hanging there, showing only my point-of-view. In short, if you don’t trust the mods, then you should have the ability to publicly petition them about situations of potential mod abuse that hurt you.

Or something. I wanted them to do something that wasn’t just trusting them to handle it privately, because they clearly weren’t worthy of my trust.

I knew how hopeless it was to get public scrutiny on what Jeff did, so I felt a pressure to make my point as convincing as I could, meaning I used words (“slander”, “manipulation”, “corrupt” etc.) in an embellished way to try to convey in fewer words arguments that were really more nuanced than I made out. Because I felt I was outstaying my welcome by even daring to have been targeted by Jeff in the first place. This was rightly interpreted as “flippant accusations”, and you have my apology for that too.

The Squeeze
I’ll repeat what I said about the chain-reaction/downward-spiral dynamic I’ve been suffering. People being bad towards me doesn’t stop, because of the knock-on effects of more serious situations and the friendships linking them, but other people’s patience goes to zero even faster. This traps me between a rock and a hard place. I think the crux of my ban is an intolerance to conflicts that involve me, an expectation that I will bury them from now on, or trust the mods to keep it out of public view, whether because people fully disagree with my complaint or just don’t care that bad things continue to be done to me.

What Now?

It should be easy to say that what the mods did doesn’t excuse what I did. Because it’s true; Jeff didn’t deserve it. Mutual abuse always works like this. I just wish it were as easy for the mods and Jeff to admit the same thing. You can’t condense this kind of issue into one side being right. Because, in order to do that, you have to start lying about motives. Jeff is just a person “I disagree with”. My accusations are “based entirely on speculation”. Lego literally pushed me out of my mod consultant positions using these kinds of lies (see next doc), so such statements should only fool said group that’s hated me this entire time.

Warspy apologised to me heavily for not getting back to me when I asked for an official response on my Jeff complaint. But he refused to acknowledge the connection between the mods not responding and my later emotions and actions. He said the situation was “tricky”. I didn’t let him get away with not acknowledging this as a reason I then acted publicly. So we defensively argued we were right to each other. This contributed to me leaving the conversation, whose purpose he had not revealed was to warn me to stop certain behaviours lest I get banned, and he took that as me being unable to be reasoned with, hence the ban. (Warspy actually denies this was the purpose of the conversation, so I’ll revisit this comment in the next doc).

It is not hard to own up to your own wrongdoing, but taking responsibility is a two-way street. I’m sorry, Jeff. You apologised to me already once for your intervention around Toburr so I will make peace around that. But these mods didn’t give Jeff actual consequences (at least, if they did, they didn’t tell me), and they didn’t reply to me, which left me in a vulnerable anxious state. They can own up to their own shit for a change instead of pretending I owe them unconditional trust and obedience when I’m not breaking rules, and coming at me with disingenuous abuse cases and manipulated history instead. I’m frustrating all these “opportunities I’m being given” to change, but so are you. At least I’m not so entitled as to unironically be demanding it. That’s why rules and legal procedure exist. That’s why we don’t ban by feelings and peer-pressure.