One of GrangerHub’s priorities is to ensure that the forums provide a safe, productive, friendly, & fun atmosphere that minimizes distractions from: civilized debates, creative problem solving, and the actualization of major progressive change. Such words/terminology described in the above mentioned change to the ToS is not hate speech on their own, and I personally do not believe any single word should be treated to hold such emotional power over people.
However, such words/terminology do carry negative connotations for the majority of English speaking people, can emotionally distract many people from considering the valuable content of discussions on the website, and can give a negative impression to potential new GrangerHub members & Tremulous players. So GrangerHub Site Administrators came to the aforementioned decision to update the ToS.
This update only applies to the content of the GrangerHub website, and not to the chat of game servers hosted by GrangerHub
It might be better to ban using the racial slurs in certain contexts, ie: if the word is used with intent to cause emotional harm to someone. Context is always important in these cases.
Banning certain words is the first step on the path to full censorship.
While I think it’s important to make people feel safe participating on Grangerhub, I don’t think we should cater to the recent wave of hypersensitivity on the internet. It’s destroyed enough as it is (see: Django, Dongle controversy).
I think Shuffle is right. Everything must be seen within its own context. Direct hate towards people is inexcusable, but banning words is just shutting the issue out instead of solving it.
Imho it shouldn’t be censored. You can trash talk people with many other words and in many other ways than the N word, you can even disrespect black people without using this particular word.
We should be on the lookout actively for hate speech and other things that disrupt productivity in general. Just as for the word faggot, and many others. Homophobia is as much a concern as racism, yet I don’t see anyone going batshit crazy about it.
Censorship (when propagated by governments or news media) is detrimental to society.
Instead of ignoring hate speech, people should actively stand against it by fighting back using their own speech.
With that being said, GrangerHub is a privately owned site, where user “rights” do not exist (only privileges), but where the owner’s right to exercise free speech does exist, including the freedom to not have hateful speech be posted to any publicly accessible part of the site.
Any appearance of slurs and or inappropriate content may be flagged or removed or moved to private areas of the site. I have no interest in being “the language police” but because there is the potential that someone could take offense to slurs it is best to disallow them outright.
They are also the first targets of the word’s use as a way to degrade or dehumanize someone, and that’s why it is unacceptable for anyone else to use it casually.
It really depends on how you use the word. In my experience, a lot of times the following flamestorm is caused by white people taking black people’s defense, which is a good thing, but is really not needed in most situations where the word is used.
Sounds like a lazy policy to me. The easiest example I can provide is, OTC drugs: A minority of people will misuse them and do stupid shit, that doesn’t mean they should all be banned.
If people want to disrespect a religion, a skin color, or anything, they can and will do it regardless of the censorship. They can be bypassed quite easily aswell: Nîgger, niggër, etc.
Yes a “cover my lazy ass” policy. Really I have no personal interest in enforcing the terms regarding this, but it has to be in the terms, just in case.
Not a bad idea and this can be passed along to discourse developers. The currently implemented censorship system is not used as it is inadequate (no partial word matching, no word replacement, no option to have users disable it).
Really in any context that is public is where I have a problem with them. However, also in private (in a private category or group), even if there is no perceived harm, someone could be invited there later who might take offense.
I agree with the general sentiment here, but each topic that might be considered sensitive where a hypersensitive response has occurred should be carefully examined when determining GH policy.
Yes, where “lookout” means bringing it to staff attention, as this matter falls into staff jurisdiction. Name calling and ad hominem attacks are discouraged in the community guidelines, but otherwise “hate speech” is hard to define (outside of legal definitions in case law where it is part of a “hate crime”). We want our terms and other rules to keep people WAY BACK from crossing the line into anything that could be considered “hate speech”.
Yes, things that go against community guidelines and the Code of Conduct (to be published soon), should be flagged and fall into the jurisdiction of all users and mods.
I edited in a colon in case there was confusion regarding what I meant.
What makes saying the word “N*****” fun (not a rhetorical question)? Btw, the banning of the word “N*****” and other terms/words that would violate this new change to the ToS, only applies to the website (including forums).
If there are any coders here who are familiar with Ruby & interested in coding such a plugin, we wouldn’t have to wait for the developers at discourse to implement this feature. Another handy aspect would be to allow the poster to use tags to designate text/images as content that would be censored for people who have personal censor turned on, in addition to the forum’s censor dictionary.
What if we turned on the current censoring system in the meantime, and only have posts flagged that attempt to evade the censoring, then we can revert should a new appropriate censor plugin become available?
There may be posts that are mostly or partially useful, that might have content that violates the community Guidelines and/or ToS that could be useful , where if the poster edited the post, the post would be unfledged.
