Toburr Ban Rationale (for Shine Heads)

2024/08 Foreword

There’s been a lot of recent scrutiny on this case so I want to run some elaborations and corrections. I will inline them thruout the doc below.

The case is a bit of a strange one because there was an outcry over Toburr being banned for bullying and refusing to apologise, which turned into a culture war down the line. 1UpsForLife unbanned Toburr and demodded me from Shine Heads the very next day, and refused to elaborate. We do know why she did it tho, since we have a screenshot of her agreeing to the ban and another of her caving to peer pressure. My action of banning someone for bullying was then used by some SMS mods to justify banning me from SMS. So we can conclude that I fucked with the pro-bullying culture of SMS and found out.

The case is set out with more details now so you can decide for yourself if taking action against the bullying was the right choice, or whether the culture war was the move.

I think, especially after someone left the SMS community and pointed to the hate movement toburr incited as the reason (1 2), I became assured I did the right thing at the time in banning him. When I reviewed this with current moderators, the only problem we identified was that I hadn’t pinged the other Shine Heads moderators for a reaction to the case, even tho I did wait for 3 days in the moderation channel.

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2022/07 Original Case

(originally unlisted and sent by me to toburr and the sms mods)

1. one case of harassment directed at me

this particular comment i found sadistic

EDIT 2024/08: Context/explanation

Context: toburr reacted to my post here:

Explanation: I’ve been asked why I considered this sadistic. To me, it signals ganging-up on someone behind that person’s back, like a dogwhistle in place of an actual criticism the target can react to. So intentional psychological destabilisation of someone, for the gratification of him and his “friends”.

2a. one case of private hate and manipulation directed at the il mods, in a discord channel i wasn’t in. 3 witnesses left the discord in protest. witness testimony:

from what i remember, he was calling the il mods and their decisions ‘gross’ and ‘disgusting’, and trying to manipulate them into doing things by holding his own il vids hostage

EDIT 2024/08: These accusations were made by 1UpsForLife and turned out to be false and withdrawn. 1UpsForLife explained herself to toburr here. I notice that toburr contradicted this testimony, yet didn’t reveal any of his “hurtful” actions. However, Jpep did reveal some of it, which shows toburr dehumanising the moderators he disagreed with.

2b. from mlarvitar’s paste (https://pastebin.com/f6D9ULyf):

But that is something that IL mods got demonised over. Like, awfully so, to the point where I and a few others left the [secret discord] where it happened (referring to: https://discord.com/channels/715421729199226920/934967168368541727/976628771681607710). It also motivated me to leave this Discord when I did.

3. #1 and #2 also created fear among the il mods and reluctance to engage with you and the issue, which i cited in a report i sent to the discord mods in which i argued for intolerance towards harassment of staff (the discord mods didn’t engage with the case). report:

EDIT 2024/08: Interestingly enuff, when I said “the [SMS] mods didn’t engage”, I had been referring to moderator Despin saying that he knew it was a problem but had no idea what to do about it (which is odd cos you can just, y’know, ban someone). But the thing I didn’t know is that moderator peaches reacted to this by saying nothing and instead leaking the mod chat to toburr, which inflamed his anger.

4. these two incidents were part of what i called out, leading up to the two big discussions in gb cord (2022/01/24 and 2022/05/18-19). you didn’t engage with them at all, no apologies, and continued interacting in those spaces as if nothing had happened. the second time establishes an intent/pattern. no apology → indefinite ban is an easy decision for me anyway

5. i can say personally that all this, particularly #4, made me uncomfortable being in shine heads, like i’d mute you in calls on my end and that kind of thing

Notes

i ran this by the other mods in shine heads (1ups and fyg) but they didn’t engage. i’d rather get other mods who are capable of discipline/conflict resolution in there to evaluate these cases w/o conflict of interest but at least for now i’m acting independently bc, particularly given case point #3, i don’t trust the sms mods to handle these cases properly for now. and i also think i can hold shine heads to a stricter standard of behaviour bc it’s not needed for basic rights in the community like the main discords or leaderboards.

i’ve heard work is being done towards a mediation in the future, where the issues in the case and many others implicating all sides of the conflict can be cleared up, and this ban is only an interim, which is needed to leave things in a safe position in the event that no further actions (like the mediation) are taken.

i would prefer if any appeals, or complaints about my actions as il advisor or discord mod advisor, are taken up during the planned mediation or with the sms mods directly.

this doc is intended to be unlisted but free to share. i will copy it to lego in the first instance.

EDIT 2024/08: Interesting that I told him to complain to the SMS mods, me assuming they were responsible people, because they ended up just building resentment over it and banning me for it later on lol. So there wasn’t any kind of reasonable appeal process done for toburr’s case, and indeed toburr didn’t need to appeal because the angry mob could just press 1UpsForLife to take me out instead.

2024/08 later developments around this case

I want to add an appendix going over the political fallout of this case from my PoV.

The details around my saying the Shine Heads mods “didn’t engage” and I was “acting independently” were not included on this page originally because I didn’t think they were useful, and nobody told me they wanted to know. Instead, it turned out that moderator JeffCompass just assumed the other mods didn’t agree with the decision and started spreading this behind my back and telling his targets to not tell me he’d told them (see also here). He even refused moderator Despin’s request for him to ask me because Despin knew I didn’t handle things undemocratically and so something was amiss. Hmm. A breakdown of how Jeff acted can be read here.

This, predictably, led to a situation of toburr spreading misinformation many months after community reconciliation about me banning him “with[out] consent of any other mods” – a tweet thread that Jeff liked. I addressed it, tho I was unable to prove at the time that 1UpsForLife agreed the ban because moderator Lego6245 suppressed the evidence. As a result, I was sent this by rudhira, which received 10 likes including from the SMS moderator team’s crétin-en-chef Noki Doki. It contained quite a lot of misdirection:

i’m not sure what this screenshot is supposed to prove. 1ups is … not interacting with your message about banning people.

referring to the evidence Lego suppressed

“she thought it wasnt that big a deal” is directly contradicting what you are claiming. if anything, it shows that she wasn’t properly informed of the events and what a ban would entail. did you intend for it to be temporary? did you talk it out with the concerned parties?

referring to this, gaslighting

the impression that i got from participating [in the community reconciliation thread] was that you were holding people accountable for offenses not committed, like assuming… what toburr allegedly said about you in secret channels. many of the points you raise about you specifically reconciling with toburr cannot be addressed because they include untrue assumptions (secret channel, underlying problem)

reinterpreting toburr’s refusal to come clean about what he had done as my fault

jeff didn’t know what happened in the mod chat, but you’re still certain he speculated?

?

for the second point, you are using a witness testimony starting out with “from what i remember”

rudhira had witnessed 1UpsForLife apologising and retracting her testimony before making this comment

i honestly can’t see much in the il mod chat that signals distress or reluctance to engage… if there is proof, this is not it

woah

I get it lol, you don’t have to tell me again, bully lives matter 😤