Community Discussion: The mods need to apologize to TransEra for what happened in Kyuuji's CP2077 thread

[Portmanteau]

And not just with a post buried in a thread. This needs to be done with a pinned thread. The mods made a colossal mistake.

Kyuuji made an excellent thread that has been stickied for a while about CDPR's transphobia around Cyberpunk 2077 here. At the other end of this, another member, Black Chamber (who has been perma-banned, but we will get to that) volunteered to do the Cyberpunk OT. Black Chamber was known as being the resident hype person for Cyberpunk 2077. CP2077 avatar, CP2077 banner, tons of CP2077 threads.

A lot went on, so I'm going to synthesize parts of it down. People can fill in context and what not.

TransEra asked Black Chamber whether a message of some sort about CDPR's transphobia would be included in the OT, to which BC kept responding with cagey, unclear messages such as "The thread will be welcome to everyone." No direct answers. Eventually, the mods got involved, stated that BC was intending to put in a paragraph, and left it at that.

This obviously got both sides extremely heated, but the important part is that a lot of TransEra members got banned for asking questions around the OT and demanding the mods do better with their statements and doing some level of due diligence on BC. The mods had a habit of defending BC, going out of their way to explain that his intentions were pure and good. Trans members were bullied for wanting more - essentially framing TransEra as a group of bullies.

Earlier today, someone noticed that BC was the creator of this thread from a while ago. The thread is a link to a video about Naughty Dog's "agenda." The video is hella homophobic - you can probably guess what it's about. This caught BC a week long ban. After digging through more posts, people noticed he had a habit of going against left leaning people and politics, which prompted in a Twitter search, revealing that he was not only a supporter of Donald Trump, but had strong alt-right stances.

This prompted the mods to close the thread, and then reopen it with this message:

Thread reopened. In light of recent events we'll be reviewing recent bans issued in Cyberpunk threads, and changing how we vet members who handle controversial OTs in the future.

To address the elephant in the room, yes, we were fooled by Black Chamber. When staff reached out to him with concerns about Cyberpunk 2077 we expected confrontation, but in every conversation he was more cooperative than we had have hoped for. He put on a very good impression of a well-meaning idiot. The recurring accusations against him were that he was a shill; to our knowledge nobody had ever suggested he was a Trumper. I can't understate how devastating it is to learn the truth.

If you suspect that another member might be a troll or a Trumper please raise the concern through a report, a ticket, or a private message. If you have proof, we absolutely want to see it.

Click to shrink...

Not a single apology was given to TransEra. The synthesis of the message above is "We are sorry to ourselves for being fooled that he was a Trump supporter."

Going through Black Chamber's profile, it takes about a minute of digging to find his problematic stances. The mods have access to ban histories. It takes two seconds to do a Twitter search. Not only did the mods go to bat for BC every single time, but they banned members of TransEra for pushing back against spineless actions from the mods.

Black Chamber ran off back to The Other Site, where they welcomed him as a hero. The mods screwed up, and the community deserves better.

We as a community need to not only have a discussion around how we handle OTs moving forward to prevent them from being free marketing and astroturfing that ignore whole communities in the process, but we also need the mods to do better. We need the mods to apologize to TransEra.

 

[catswaller]

The mods didn't do a good job but I'm not sure its productive to Demand An Apology -- they're, i assume, a bunch of volunteers? probably mostly kids. its a sunday night.

Internet forums are brittle, often unsafe spaces, and better moderation is desperately needed, but its hard to say anybody managing to keep the lights on and eventually ban fascists Needs To Do More, for free, on their spare time.

Unless i'm missing something and theyre paid staff.

 

[Portmanteau]

The mods didn't do a good job but I'm not sure its productive to Demand An Apology -- they're, i assume, a bunch of volunteers? probably mostly kids. its a sunday night.

Internet forums are brittle, often unsafe spaces, and better moderation is desperately needed, but its hard to say anybody managing to keep the lights on and eventually ban fascists Needs To Do More, for free, on their spare time.

Unless i'm missing something and theyre paid staff.

Click to shrink...

Wasn't hard for them to make multiple statements about BC's good intentions. They drove members of the community away from Era.