Calling Up Justice believes that agreements should be specific to the space and co-created with that ensemble. We share different guidelines we use to help you build yours. These are from One Free Community’s Discord. It covers OFA Core Values, Moderation Tools, Quick Bank Issues, Watch List Items, Disagreement/Interpersonal Conflicts, One-Sided Issues, General Moderator Considerations , Dog Whistles & Hate Symbols, Trigger Warnings, and Consent Documents.
OFA Moderator Processes
Table of Content:
- OFA Core Values
- Moderation Tools
- Quick Bank Issues
- Watch List Items
- Disagreement/Interpersonal Conflicts
- One-Sided Issues
- General Moderator Considerations
- Dog Whistles & Hate Symbols
- Trigger Warnings
- Consents Docs
OFA Core Values
- Anti-isms: Founded by BIPOC disability and LGBTQ+ members. We are against discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, sexuality, neurodiversity, disability, race, nationality, class, and status.
- Inclusivity: We center, uplift, and listen to marginalized voices and operate with social justice in mind
- Accessibility: We strive to be neurodivergent friendly and operate with disability justice in mind
- Free to users: Money from donations, grants, and sponsorships will help to fund the function of OFC. We will not sell data, or advertisements.
- Community Built, Community Organized, Community Run.
- Abundance Mindset: Assume positive intent and give grace.
- Collaborative Spoonie Model – Holacratic working method: decentralization of management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holacracy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy. Holacracy has been adopted by for-profit and non-profit organizations in several countries. The Spoonie model adopts a social model of disability, wherein people are disabled by lack of accessibility and inequity in systems.
Moderation Tools
- Discord Creation Date Checker – to check the creation date of a discord account if you suspect a previously banned individual has joined under a new account
- Timezone converter (for Discord) – good for setting up times to chat in sync with people so there’s no confusion re: timezones
Quick Ban Issues
Hate speech: This includes any speech or behavior that targets individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or other personal characteristics.
Harassment: Any behavior that is intended to intimidate, bully or harm someone else is considered harassment. This includes cyberbullying, stalking, and sending threatening messages/unsolicited pictures.
NSFW: Not Safe For Work Pieces of content, such as an image, video, or link that may contain inappropriate or offensive material. NSFW content may include graphic sexual images, language, or violence. This creates a toxic environment and goes against our core values.
Look for:
- People joining and instantly engaging in obvious racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic behavior
- People joining and spamming
- People revealing other member’s personal information on platforms outside the OFA community (this one may warrant a conversation first depending on whether it seemed intentional or not)
Mod Process:
Step 1) In rare cases if it seems unintentional or out of character, message the user to let them know what is happening and ask them to fix the situation.
Step 2) When a ban is being considered, get agreement from at least one other mod. The timeout function can be used while that decision is being made.
Watch List Items
Look For:
- Frequent conflicts/issues on the server
- Profile pics or profile names that include alt-right symbolism (see Dog Whistles & Hate Symbols section for more details). Mods can ask them to change it if it is outright hate symbolism.
- A brand new account that joined shortly after a problematic person was banned
Mod Process
Step 1) In rare cases if it seems unintentional or out of character, message the user to let them know what is happening and ask them to fix the situation.
Step 2) When a ban is being considered, get agreement from at least one other mod. The timeout function can be used while that decision is being made.
Disagreement/Interpersonal Conflicts
It is important that the issue be acknowledged, open discussion is encouraged, education, reflection, and atonement(some form of making amends).It can be very exhausting for the moderators to play peacemaker and get “in between” two parties. It takes a lot of labor and can get over used. If it’s an interpersonal disagreement, which is usually how it happens with two parties having two valid experiences; argue about different action plans, outcomes or meanings. It’s often best to moderate rather than “resolve” a conflict.
Look for:
- Heated disagreements
- Excessive speaking for other people
- Gaslighting
- Blatant or subtle disrespect of someone’s stated boundaries (e.g. intentionally misgendering people or continuing to misgender someone after being corrected)
- Centering themselves when someone else has asked for support
- Refusal to take accountability for inappropriate behavior when called out (“I was just joking” or “stop taking things so seriously”) or using their trauma as a method for dodging accountability
- Refusal to keep an open mind about other’s practices & situations
- Refusal to make reasonable accommodations for other people/refusal to attempt to find a solution that works for both parties.
- Looking for allowances for their own trauma while demanding other people’s trauma not affect them
- Trauma excuses: “When person A is upset with what person B said, and person B brings up their own trauma as a response.”
This is a specific tactic for
1. avoiding accountability
2. making it seem like “we’re both the victim here and I might actually be more of a victim than you because I was traumatized as a kid”
3. saying it’s “not an excuse, it’s an explanation” but no one asked for an explanation and that explanation is all about making the offender out to be the “real victim” of the situation so that they can gain sympathy instead of holding themselves accountable.
Mod Process:
Step 1: If a conversation is getting too heated in real-time (ex: Ad-hominem attacks, guilt by association, misattributions of what was actually said, consistently turning “up” the temperature on interactions and picking out fights), ask both parties to step away from the conversation using a phrase like “This is approaching dangerous territory. Can we please take a break from the current topic and get back to it later?” If the parties in question refuse to drop the conversation, feel free to use a 1 hr timeout to enforce this and explain via DM why you timed them out (see next section for specific language)
Step 2: Reach out to the hurt party/parties to provide a place for them to release their thoughts. This may be tackled by as many moderators as it takes to make sure all hurt parties are being heard. Moderators are not meant to be peacemakers. We are here to give the parties space and time to cool off and create opportunities for harm reduction and relationship repair between the parties involved. Please consider the labor of the moderators when planning and executing interventions.
Step 3: Once all parties are heard, set up a time to resume the conversation via group DM to figure out a way of moving forward that makes everyone feel comfortable.
One-Sided Issues
One sided issues are usually problems that primarily affect one group of people while the other group is not affected. As long as there is nothing that would warrant a quick ban the moderator should revert to
Look For:
- Racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, any kind of discrimination
- Excessive use of CW topics in non-approved channels
- Giving advice they are not qualified to give (esp medical advice or other advice that could greatly affect someone’s life) or claiming to be an authority on a subject or making inferences that would require a deep personal understanding of the person, when they’re not an authority.
Mod Process:
Step 1: Ask them to stop via DM with language such as “In case you weren’t aware, this language you used is inappropriate for X reason. Please delete your message (or move it to the correct channel) and apologize to the community.”
Step 2: If behavior continues, delete inappropriate messages and time them out for 1 hour and give them a formal warning using language such as “OFA is a safe space for whatever community is being affected and we cannot allow you to keep speaking like this on the Discord. I need you to take a break from chatting on the server while you think about why you’re speaking like this to people.” At this point, the rest of the mod team should be looped into what’s happening and the person should be put on a watch list.
Step 3: If the person is unapologetic or returns to doing it again, you and at least one other mod may choose to kick them from the server. If they return to the server to continue the same patterns, then ban them.
General Moderator Considerations
We don’t want to create hierarchies. All moderators are community members who have volunteered to assist with helping out when community members bring to our attention any issues they are tagged in.
- We should always approach moderation from a problem-solving & harm reduction perspective vs a punishment perspective. Even people who we disagree with and who are acting poorly towards others have a right to be here as long as their presence and participation can be managed in a way that keeps others safe.
- A potential ban must be agreed upon by at least two moderators. If there are no other moderators awake, use the timeout function until another one can be found unless continued access to view the server would be harmful (use your best judgment).
- If you are involved in the conflict or do not have the spoons to handle emotional conflict, do your best to involve another moderator. If there is no other moderator that can help, please delay any resolution (timeout all involved with brief explanation if situation is escalating) until another mod can be found.
- De-center yourself, be patient, and try to assume all parties have positive intent. If ever you find yourself unable to do any of those things in a specific situation or if the situation is triggering your own traumas, it is perfectly acceptable to pull in another mod and step away.
- Do your best not to assign thoughts, feelings, or tone that have not yet been expressed. If you are unsure of the tone of someone’s message or intent, be sure to ask for clarification. If communication is proving difficult, consider adding tone indicators to your messages to avoid miscommunication (see graphic to the right)
- In general, we should be acting (and encouraging the community to act) within the style of OFA culture (see OFA Culture)
- Documentation: Whenever any action with another member (messages sent, timeouts given, bans, etc) is taken, make sure to write it down in #mod-documentation on the main server (please make sure discussions don’t happen in that channel to keep it easy to skim for future reference)
- There are many tools that make the job of moderation a lot easier. See Moderation Tools for more info
- Feel free to tag-team when dealing with a situation! If you have the capacity to be the punching bag but have a hard time coming up with language, ask the mod team to help with that aspect! We’re all a team and we all want to work together to ensure the heavy labor is spread in a way that feels lighter for everyone.
Dog Whistles & Hate Symbols
- 👌 symbol appropriated by alt-right community to identify other white supremacists. The ‘W’ with the fingers, ‘P’ with hand/wrist for White Power (under the waist, upside-down is likely just the circle game)
- Pepe the frog – appropriated by alt-right community, though publicly disowned by the creator and swathes of online communities who like ugly funny frog. People may be unaware. Easy false-flag, context matters.
- Nazi/confederate symbolism. Common ones in online spaces right now are (((“echo chamber”))) quotes, and as always numbers “14/88”.
- ((())) and/or [[[]]] = echo, or triple parentheses or brackets; antisemitic symbol to “highlight” the names of those with Jewish background
- 5 Words = referring to a phrase white supremacists advocate be the only words ever spoken to the police, “I have nothing to say”
- 9% = refers to the world’s population of white people
- 14 and/or 14 Words = shorthand for the slogan “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”
- 14/23 = used with 14 Words, referring to the “23 precepts,” a list of rules that Southern Brotherhood members must follow
- 13/52 and/or 13/90 = code used to portray African Americans as savage and criminal, claiming African Americans make up 13% of the US population but commit 52% of all murders and 90% of all violent interracial crime
- 18 = meaning 1 = A and 8 = H, or Adolf Hitler, also known as Combat 18 or C18
- 23 = a two-handed hand sign, with one hand showing/flashing 2 fingers, and the other hand flashing three fingers, meaning 23 = W, for “White”
- 88 and/or 1488 = meaning HH, since H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, meaning “heil Hitler”
- 100% and/or 112% = meaning “100% white,” used often with “100% Aryan Brotherhood”
- 109 and/or 110 = 109 meaning the number of countries white supremacists claim Jewish people have been expelled from, and calling the United States to be the 110th
- 111 and/or 1-11 = meaning the Aryan Knights, whose symbol is a shamrock, often with a swastika
- 311 = meaning the Ku Klux Klan, 11 = K, and 3 times 11 equaling “KKK”
- 6mwe = meaning “6 million wasn’t enough”
- 21-2-12 = slogan of the Unforgiven, meaning 21 = U (Unity), 2 = B (Brotherhood), and 12 = L (Loyalty)
- Cookie monster and/or “Cookie monster couldn’t bake that many cookies” = metaphor that means Hitler(Cookie monster) couldn’t kill(bake) 6 million people(that many cookies)
- wooden doors = antisemitic resentment, in reference that if the doors on the gas chambers during the Holocaust were wooden, it could not have happened
- AKIA = Ku Klux Klan shorthand for “A Klansman I Am”
- Anti-Antifa = meaning Anti-Antifascist, within context if it is bashing anti-fa then the commenter is using white supremacist sentiment
- Anti-SHARP = SHARP meaning SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice, within the punk community combating white supremacist skinheads
- Anudda Shoah = antisemitic phrase to mock Jewish people, implying they bring up the Holocaust when confronted with anything they don’t like
- Aryan Fist = taken from the black power fist to mean white power
- AYAK = shorthand meaning “Are You A Klansman?”
- Boots and Laces = boots are common within the punk scene, and the specific laces used with boots signify whether one is antifa or fascist; normally, red and white laces are associated with white supremacy when laced a particular way, but lace code is very particular to location and varies regionally
- Celtic Cross
- Confederate flag
- Creativity Movement and/or WCOTC or COTC, white supremacy group claiming to be a religion for white people
- Day of the Rope = slogan referring to The Turner Diaries, written by William Pierce, advocating for mass murder of “race traitors” that occur similarly within the book
- Diversity = White Genocide = slogan meaning multiculturalism will mean the death of the white race
- FGRN = a Ku Klux Klan shorthand meaning “For God, Race, and Nation”
- Happy Merchant = antisemitic meme within the alt right to convey a “greedy Jew”
- Hitler Salute
- It’s okay to be white = slogan by 4chan more recently and quickly adopted afterwards by white supremacists
- Love Your Race = white supremacy slogan
- Moon Man = meme derived from a McDonald’s commercial in the 80’s and later attached with neo nazi sentiments
- Muh Holocaust = antisemitic phrase used to imply Jewish people routinely bring up the Holocaust to gain attention or deflect negative attention
- No Race Mixing = idea within white supremacy that multiculturalism and interracial couples will “pollute” the “pure” white race, and therefore should be prohibited
- Noose = a hangman’s noose referring to lynching
- ≠ = meaning “not equal,” claiming that different races are not equal to each other
- Pit bulls = dog favored by many white supremacists for being “savage fighters”
- SS Bolts = refers to Schutzstaffel, double lightning bolts meaning the concentration camps guards
- Swastika
- Thor’s Hammer = used within neo Nazism and appropriated from neo-pagan religions
- Trollface = appropriate meme format used by many fascists
- White Power
- White Lives Matter
Trigger Warning
Consents Docs
