There is a point in every online community where you start wondering whether you have accidentally turned the TV onto one of those social vewing experiments – yesterday was definitely one of those moments.
Let’s call her Sharon – she joined the group quite happily enough about 18 months ago, then, like many people who discover an online community and decide they rather enjoy having an audience, started mithering to become an admin. Eventually she got what she wanted, and that was pretty much the point at which the wheels started to come off the bus. What followed has been a rather spectacular demonstration of why online communities need clear rules, consistent moderation and people who understand that having an admin badge does not suddenly confer ownership of the group to them. There are no rules saying you have to live in a particular area to join, or have to have a profile pic to prove your existence, and certainly no clause along the lines of “thou shalt participate regularly or face immediate expulsion” – and yet established members have been removed because they have not chatted for a while; Sharon has also removed people who have tried to join because they don’t live in the North West of UK…
The really interesting part, from an online safety perspective, is how quickly she was able to turn perfectly ordinary questions about her admin rules into abuse, bullying, personal attacks and deflection. In my own case, a couple of months ago, I had the temerity of questioning the logic of one of her rules saying people could only post images and videos about people in the group; I wasn’t rude, just said if that was the case, she had been in breach of her own rules the day before by posting a video of Jack Grealish. She called me argumentative and deleted all the rules.. Yesterday my faux pas related to raising an issue about why she was going to ban someone who kept leaving the group and returning just because he was “pissing her off”, especially when the person had said that the app was glitching. This resulted in being told, and I quote, “Grow up you daft cow. you’ve not been around for months and now you act like you’re top admin”, followed later by the assessment that I was “full of shit”. Apparently I had somehow managed to go from being a longer established admin to a “daft cow” simply by questioning what was going on, Quite what my absence had to do with the issue remained unclear, particularly as I had already explained privately to her that I had been dealing with two close bereavements as well as having to have my dog PTS earlier this year. So naturally I did what any sensible person would do and told her I would make sure to call by the chemist on the way home and pick up some Senna – as she brought up being “full of shit”, I thought it only polite to offer a pharmaceutical solution, but this did not placate her at all.
And then there’s a previous “fat bitch who posts fake pics” issue, which is particularly entertaining when you consider that I weigh approximately 58kg. I’m not entirely sure what measurement system was being used, but if 58kg now qualifies as “fat”, I suspect the rest of them may need a rather larger set of bathroom scales. There is something wonderfully revealing about resorting to insults about somebody’s appearance or weight simply because you don’t like what they are saying, particularly when the insult doesn’t even survive contact with basic arithmetic. And if she has a problem with me saving up my pocket money to buy Choos when on sale, it’s not really my problem…
Challenge the behaviour and suddenly the issue isn’t the behaviour at all; apparently the problem is the person who dared to question it. Tell someone their conduct is inappropriate and, rather than addressing the conduct, the conversation becomes about how awful you apparently are for mentioning. It’s a familiar pattern online, and it’s precisely why moderation cannot simply be about having the technical ability to remove someone. It has to be about using that ability responsibly, consistently and within a framework that people actually understand.
We spend an enormous amount of time telling people that online abuse and bullying are not acceptable, so people should report harmful behaviour rather than simply shrugging and walking away. Platforms need more effective systems for dealing with problems when they arise and ideally some form of feedback (which can be automated) so reporters are not felt like they are talking to the wind. Yet we still seem remarkably comfortable with the idea that once someone is behind a username, normal standards of behaviour can somehow evaporate and they can release their inner Dr Hyde… Being online should not enable people in group admin roles to rename bullying as banter, abuse as moderation, or arbitrary behaviour into leadership simply because they have been given a little digital crown.
Then there’s the small matter of what happened to the group last night, because things finally went properly feral. While members were apparently being judged on whether they lived in the North West of UK and had chatted recently enough, Sharon and her “bestie xxxxxxxx” were encouraging men to share videos of themselves “playing solo” because obviously that is the natural progression from community moderation. Nothing says “responsible online environment” quite like throwing people out for geographical inadequacy while the room turns into a male OnlyFlaps channel.
Now, before anyone starts clutching their pearls about what people do privately, let me be very clear: what an adult chooses to do in their personal time is their business. I have absolutely no interest in policing anybody’s private life, nor do I particularly want to know about it. The problem arises when that behaviour is brought into a public-facing online environment, particularly when the same people involved are presenting themselves elsewhere as professionals whose roles depend on public trust. Sharon’s bestie claims to work in medical triage, while Sharon handles claims in insurance, and personally speaking, that makes me wonder: would their respective employers be comfortable seeing the way they behave in a public online community, particularly where they are also involved in encouraging or facilitating inappropriate content and engaging in bullying or abusive exchanges? Not to mention that some of their acitivities are taking place on company time…
There’s another problem here too, and it’s one that gets overlooked constantly: deflection. When somebody is challenged about their own behaviour, the easiest trick in the online playbook is to change the subject, attack the person asking the question, invent a new grievance, or start pointing at somebody else’s behaviour. Suddenly we’re no longer discussing why members were removed without any rule being broken; we’re discussing how often somebody has been online, whether they have the right to speak, whether they are “top admin”, whether they’re a “daft/fat cow” or “full of shit”, etc. The original question about moderation has conveniently disappeared somewhere underneath the insults.
So that’s one of the ways how communities go feral: not necessarily because one person wakes up intending to destroy them, but because small abuses of authority are tolerated, reasonable challenges are treated as personal attacks, rules become whatever somebody wants them to mean that day, and eventually everybody is arguing about personalities instead of behaviour. The irony is that this group originally existed as a community; it had people, history, friendships and an established identity despite the fact that the actual Group Owner has been absent for years. Instead of there being a sensible mechanism for dealing with an abandoned ownership structure and ensuring that active admins can collectively manage the community, we have somehow arrived at a situation where one admin appears to believe she has inherited the keys to the kingdom, invented her own constitution and is now apparently setting up another kingdom next door.
There is also something rather amusing about the holier-than-thou image Sharon and her bestie seemed to have been cultivating in the group chat prior to yesterday, because what’s presented publicly and what actually happens behind the scenes appear to be two rather different things. If I am an admin in a group, I keep my private messages open because being an admin is supposed to mean being approachable; sometimes people want to ask something personal, raise an issue privately or simply say something they don’t want to put in front of an entire room, and that is perfectly reasonable. If someone genuinely does not want to receive private messages, the platform gives them the option to turn them off, so nobody is being forced to have their inbox open. What makes this particularly entertaining is that both Sharon and her bestie apparently claim not to want PMs, yet neither of them has actually turned them off …
At this stage, I’m not even particularly upset about it because it’s just a group and they come and go – I’ve had some laughs there in the past and those laughs will continue elsewhere, but there is something almost anthropological about watching an online group go from “you haven’t spoken recently enough, so you’re out” to “come on lads, show us your d1cks” in the space of a couple of hours. If nothing else, it demonstrates rather beautifully why online safeguarding is not simply about removing obviously bad content; it is about culture, accountability, consistent rules, responsible moderation and recognising the point at which a community stops being moderated and starts being controlled. So perhaps that is the biggest lesson from the whole ridiculous episode: give somebody an admin button without accountability and eventually they may start behaving as though it comes with a tiny velvet throne.
The rest of people are apparently just expected to bring their passports, proof of local residency and evidence that we have spoken within the last fortnight. Sharon must be absolutely seething that her little kingdom has one rather significant flaw in its constitution: her control cannot remove me from the group because I am also an admin and only a group owner can remove me. Apparently it also bothers her enormously when people come into the group and actually choose to chat to me, because she has repeatedly mentioned being ignored; it appears that posting something on an online community somehow comes with an obligation to queue politely at her throne and wait for royal approval before speaking to anyone else – heaven forbid people should simply gravitate towards whoever they enjoy talking to without first kissing her ring before they are permitted to type.
Personally, I’ll bring the popcorn.
