"I wanted to make sure that the moderator team was one that was fine-tuned to the kind of content that we were going to have and what we were going to have to fight against. We were still gonna have our share of racism and bigotry," he said. "I knew what we were going to have coming to us. Moderators who were personally familiar with the realities of being a minority on the platform, he felt, would be prepared to act swiftly in the event of racist attacks and bad-faith participation. While he did not mandate that his fellow moderators be Black or fathers, Kelley attempted to assemble a team of mostly people of color with histories of positive participation in other Black-designated subreddits. The following year, however, Reddit updated its content policy regarding "harassment and bullying" to address what users said was the "narrowness" of its existing rules, which required behavior to be "continued" or "systemic" to be classified as harassment.Ĭreating a safe space on Reddit, Kelley says, requires careful selection of moderators and cautious promotion.
In 2015, The Southern Poverty Law Center classified the platform as a source of "the most violently racist internet content." Three years later, in the comments section of Reddit's 2017 Transparency Report, CEO Steve Huffman told a user that "open racism" and "slurs" were not against the platform's rules. Reddit has long been understood as a space that fostered the spread of racist content. Moderators of the subreddit kept the community locked and didn't allow users to post, ensuring the message would appear anytime a Reddit user searched "Black fathers."
The jab - engineered by an unknown user and reliant on the debunked racist trope of Black fathers as absent from their children's lives - was seemingly intentional.
"The joke that Black fathers aren't there." "It was a joke that was allowed to run for several years on the site," long-time Reddit user and r/BlackPeopleTwitter moderator Jefferson Kelley told Insider. Until June of 2020, Reddit users searching for the community r/blackfathers would be redirected to a page that read: "There seems to be nothing here." The phrase, a default message that appears on subreddits with no content, was actually a racist quip.
0 kommentar(er)
