24 year old white male from a Dayton suburb fired on a crowd outside a popular bar in the city's downtown district he wore a body armor and a mask covering his face police on a routine patrol shot and killed the suspect in less than a minute 4 women and 5 men were killed in the attack one victim was the sister of the suspect Anthony Reynolds was nearby when the shooting occurred when they shot at 1st I mean just this echoed I you know the stand was going oh you go there's just your one fire to the fire and then it's ratified the Yorks there was one of those if you will so I just or it's had its way to go police have not disclosed a motive in the case for n.p.r. News I'm April Leslie in Yellow Springs Ohio a general strike is underway in Hong Kong after another weekend of sometimes violent demonstrations Beijing is condemning the protests calling them illegal and a wanton destruction of social peace N.P.R.'s Emily Fang has more China's top office in Hong Kong affairs appeal to protesters saying that the region's residents should cherish its hard won international financial center status and when the protests would exacerbate the risk of an economic recession China have blamed the protest against its governance of Hong Kong on foreign interference and radical activists Meanwhile probating counter protesters raised a Chinese flag outside Chinese government offices Sunday night while Hong Kong protesters faced off yet again against riot police who fired tear gas at crowds certain public transport lines including metros remain blocked on Monday by protesters and transport workers on strike and leafing n.p.r. News Beijing this is n.p.r. News from Washington. India imposed an indefinite security lockdown in the Indian controlled portion of Kashmir today authorities say there will be no public movement and schools are closed regional leaders fear the Indian government may move to abolish Kashmir as a Hama status and intensify a crackdown against anti Indian activists United Nations investigators are urging world leaders to impose financial sanctions on companies linked to the military in ma'am are because of human rights abuses the Navy says Jonathan Head has more last year the u.n. Fact finding team issued its 1st report calling from the top military commanders to be charged with genocide and with that campaign against the ranges now it's recommending what is in effect complete international isolation of the military through an embargo on all arms sales and through sanctions against at least $45.00 companies including some of the largest in Myanmar over there close ties to the armed forces officials from these companies say the report's authors could also be prosecuted for complicity in crimes against humanity the report also advises more than 60 foreign companies with links to the military and associated Bernie's businesses to disengage to avoid being tainted by human rights violations the B.B.C.'s Jonathan Head The search continues for people still missing after 3 ferries capsized in the Philippines they overturned Saturday and strong winds and powerful waves 31 people died the Philippines has a poor record of ferry safety scores of people die every year I'm nor rom n.p.r. News in Washington support for n.p.r. Comes from n.p.r. Stations other contributors include the doors do Charitable Foundation which provides unrestricted support to individual artists and jazz dance and theatre through the doors to Duke artist awards and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at our Deb u j f dot org. I'm . Going to. Tweet. Tweet. A tweet over what may or may not have been. But which instantly triggered an Internet mob Exactly. Particularly. Women like Brianna Woo an independent game developer was even driven out of her home all for simply tweeting her opinion. Gamer gate in which womb and other women in and around video gaming called out the industry's culture of massage mini out came the trolls threatening sex crimes arson and murder the mob clamored so self righteously and was so motivated by festering grievance that it became the foundation of a political movement the altar right and has since attracted such odd aggrieved bedfellows as militant evangelical Christians and white nationalists I'll get me Mz direct message to me like my face Photoshop into Holocaust gas chambers Slate senior writer Ashley Feinberg deals every day with the risks of muckraking in her case while Jewish a lot of these writers kind of have to not look at my mentions for a few days until things calm down Feinberg who Sacco all bullied all victimized but at least all adult she was known as Becca and police say she took her life after getting bullied relentlessly by kids on the Internet but was said to back again. You'll never ever be able to erase from your memory you haven't killed herself yet . That's because that's exactly. On this program we have previously discussed the volatile combination of mob psychology and the online disinhibited an effect group think plus an annuity yielding a sense of both power and impunity online but increasingly the aggression is seeping into the physical world sometimes that means having a dozen pizzas delivered to your victim sometimes it means tricking cops into dispatching a swat team Tyler Barrett says admitted to swapping calling authorities in triggering swat teams across the country to surround the homes of unwitting victims in 2017 Berets thought he was wanting to home of a video game rival after a fight over a bet for a dollar 50 cents but police swarmed Andrew finches home innocent man with no connection to the game he was shot and killed by police who thought he was reaching for a gun yes online dystopia has a death toll in me and Mar in India hundreds died in pogroms instigated by Facebook posts other Facebook incitements led to violence in Ukraine Libya Germany and Philippines. The historians Will and Ariel Durant's wrote that civilization is a clearing perpetually at risk from the encroaching jungle on line the jungle creeps steadily toward us Pew did some work in 2017 and found that in America about 40 percent of adult Internet users have personally experienced some form of online harassment researcher Lindsay Black Well we're looking at 2 thirds of adult Internet users who know that this is a problem and they're seeing these types of behaviors in their feeds when they sign on to Facebook a sign on to Twitter or they hop on Instagram I mean that's huge and that's just in the u.s. But how to fix it here's the rub the law is too vague too slow and too easily evaded to have much impact the golden rule treat others as you want to be treated doesn't fare well when nobody knows your name so society has looked to big tech companies themselves to somehow police their own platforms which is difficult expensive politically fraught and extremely slow to develop as a stopgap a patchwork of human and algorithmic moderator's vainly seeks to identify and remove bad stuff which is approximately like trying to remove needles from haystacks with a bunch of fridge magnets you have this massive workforce I have underpaid it mostly contingent workers who are sitting in front of a screen all day and being asked to review horrible horrible content one after the other with very little time given to look at any individual case there's also the question of corporate priorities and a paucity of imagination or simply will to address the problem spurred by her own experience of being bullied and docks to Slate's Ashley Feinberg called for Twitter c.e.o. Jack Dorsey to just shut. Down his site and then somehow got him to sit down with her for an interview it was awkward thanks to someone like treats out our home address or phone number it's like a crapshoot whether or not that's unacceptable so yeah we're not in a great state right now with our systems because they're here they rely on reporting we're moving to a world that's a lot more proactive by utilizing the churning. That will have errors and mistakes them so. We don't we don't feel good about anyone being darkest they really want to question everything as as much as we can or there are limitations 2 of us we don't worry actually we're on it well not completely on it but you know technology we have that and also jargon but ultimately we want to make sure that the number of reports that we receive is trending downward better preservation in the meantime or more transparency clear actions are within the product we're going to make their actions I just you know finding the report isn't the most obvious to integrate So let's certainly sourcing stuff so what will it be like an alternative that make them are obvious Dorsey's big solution for taming the encroaching jungle of barbarism as it threatens to swallow a civilization to make their report a violation but bigger maybe not right now but you know they're working on it with more content moderation enjoys and yet they're at the progress nor the urgency it deserves it would seem in fact that all the king's horses and all the king's men are completely have a loss and so in this hour we're going to explore a wholly different approach for moderating online behavior one that has nothing to do with artificial intelligence or report buttons or armies of her. Asman police what it has to do with is Sociology the big problem with the Internet is really but the big problem with humanity at large is that you know we are very nice to Lindsay Blackwell intil platforms shift their focus to behavioral change and really digging into the root causes of the behavior I don't think content moderation alone can ever solve this problem and. Coming up we'll look to a theory of rehabilitation from our analog world to understand how to abate anti-social behavior in our digital one. This is all in the media. On the Media is supported by Indeed with indeed employers can post a job in minutes set up screen or questions then 0 in on a short list of qualified candidates using an online dashboard learn more at Indeed dot com slash hire and buy a new room offering a personalized weight loss program that uses psychology and small goals to change habits with a goal of losing weight and keeping it off for good learn more at noon and o.m. Dot com. You're hearing on the media on k.q.e.d. Public radio support for k.q.e.d. Comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Edgewood top hole resort in South Lake Tahoe Edgewood tunnel is a luxury lakefront resort offering an all your plan retreat experience for loungers golfers and adventurers alike bookings available at Edgewood dot com and Rhythmix cultural works presenting pour your heart out a celebration of women driven talent in the wine food and music industries to support youth arts Saturday August 10th info at Rhythmix dot org. Mostly cloudy skies over night in the Bay Area with lows in the upper fifty's to low sixty's tomorrow will be mostly cloudy in cooler around the bay highs in the sixty's to low seventy's for the most part. It's 60 minutes now 17 minutes now past 12 midnight. This is on the media I'm Bob Garfield and at this point I hand the mike over to our producer Michael Lo injure who has been immersed for months in the content moderation question. And conducted an experiment that he's going to tell you about right quick Facebook Twitter You Tube all the big tech companies are asking questions that humankind has been trying to answer since ancient times namely how do we get people to be nice to each other and follow the rules and when they break the rules what do we do about it for instance if I call you kind listen or a big. And then threaten to kill you repeatedly on Facebook then Facebook will probably suspend my account for 30 days or ban me all together in theory to stop me from being a jerk on their site and send a message to other potential jerks it's that I furn I Old Testament style of punishment called retributive justice that you see throughout our society today but researcher Lindsay Blackwell who we heard from before the break says that that approach is not working platforms right now are instituting harsh punishments that are fundamentally about deterrence these 30 day bans these things that we absolutely know are ineffective it's not actually going to influence people's propensity to reengage in that behavior unless you're treating the underlying causes we know in society in criminal context increasing the severity of punishments doesn't actually do much at all to deter crime there is no proof that the death penalty for example all actually deters criminals there's no proof I 1st called Lindsay back in December to hear about her research on how to reduce harassment and bullying online 15 minutes into the conversation we agreed to embark on an experiment that would keep us digitally tethered for the next 6 months honestly I don't know what I'm going to do when this is over like I feel like you and I have like bonded in the true. Inches and I don't like what comes next that's true I feel like we got like I got like mad at each other yeah we made up and did we went there a whole thing we wanted to test out Lindsay's idea a pretty radical solution to online harassment based on a progressive theory of justice it's an approach that's caught on in American schools and criminal courts called restored of justice the way that restored of approach is achieved just as the offender the person who's done something wrong gets an opportunity to make amends it's our job to intervene in a way that reduces the likelihood that that harm or that poor behavior will happen again that's Danielle Sarat a superstar in the world of restorative justice and the author of the book until we reckon violence mass incarceration and a road to repair I'm in the business of ending violence and we know that the core drivers of violence are shame isolation exposure to violence and an inability to meet ones economic needs the 4 core features of prison are saying isolation exposure to violence and an inability to meet one's economic needs and so we've baked into our central response to violence exactly the things that generate it that's not what a society that wants to be safe does nearly 65 percent of Americans who commit a violent crime and go to prison end up back in the criminal justice system because Erin says Our system isn't designed for rehabilitation prisoners are disproportionately black and bright. By the violence they witness behind bars and they can't get a job when they're released because of the stigma compare that to Sarah's restored of program called common justice which is rehabilitated over 90 percent of violent offenders serious book is full of stories about her mediation with victims and those who hurt them sitting in a circle the parties settle their problems in face to face conversation each case can take hundreds of hours but by the end both the offender and the victim find relief from the anger shame and trauma of the crime a young man who worked at a restaurant for cash was on his way home from work and was robbed of his week's wages and brutally beaten and in the aftermath of that he did experience typical post-traumatic stress symptoms he had difficulty sleeping he had headaches he was not and he also had great difficulty in public he would walk down the street and said even if a quote unquote little old lady came up behind him that his mind would race and his stomach would turn and his heart would race and he would sometimes miss work just because the overwhelming feeling of going and returning was more than he could bear and once we got to the circle part way through it he and the person who hurt him were in real conversation with each other and the responsible party said to him he said every man older than me in my family has served at least 10 years in prison my older brother served 11 years and each of those 11 years he won the prison boxing league championship he's the person who taught me how to fight and that night on the street I showed you the wrong end of it but he's also the person who taught me how to defend myself and if you want me to I'll teach you back to the victim said I'd love that and so we went we did it and we went to a local martial arts studio. And so 1st the young man who had committed the robbery was standing as though he was being held and demonstrating how you get out of different holds and then they switched position and this young survivor who had gone through this terrible experience who was still suffering from p.t.s.d. Was standing there and he was being held by the same person who held him that night by the end the young man was holding him with all his strength and over and over and over again the survivor was able to break free of that grasp and so the next day the survivor called me on the phone he's a genuine calling to tell you nothing happened but I just walked by a 6 foot 4 man and nothing happened meaning his mind and races stomach going to turn his heart to race and he had about half an hour before he had to be at work so he went to Times Square so he could walk by as many people as possible and he's on the phone with him and you hear him saying like hold on I see a tall one running across the street and saying nothing thing. I challenge anyone to tell me that young man didn't deserve her that if we could produce that outcome for him without in any way endangering anyone else to safety that it's not our basic moral obligation to do so the robber here put in the time and effort to make amends to help the victims heal and in return he paid his penalty with community service instead of jail time years later he hasn't committed another crime learning from a start of justice we can think about a more empathetic model that treats people not as singularly bad you know as like quote unquote trolls who are here to cause trouble but understands the nuance and the very human reasons why people engage in things like harassment and hate speech online Yes absolutely there are people who are coronating harassment campaigns on a large scale for the express purpose of silencing people often marginalized people but that's a minority of cases I also think that if people thought of mediation as a valuable tool they may be more likely to resolve a conflict than say Doc someone harass them violence begets violence begets violence begets violence what excites me about the notion of mediation is if you can just sever that chain of online violence and harassment earlier you save in theory infinite harm down the line Absolutely I think that's super spot on the only way to test out the idea was to test it out with real people with real problems in a real community instead of punishing online jerks by simply kicking them off the site could we work with them to reform their behavior so we turn to read it and I know you're thinking and you're right read it does have a reputation. For hosting some of the most vile speech on the Internet but we chose it for a few reasons one a lot of people use it more people visit read it then Instagram or Netflix it's the 6 most popular site on the American Web 2 strangers on Reddit tend to congregate around shared interests so we can assume that the harassed and the harasser at least share some common ground yes you have different cultures interacting and different people from all over the world but there uniting around sort of a common cause or a common theme or common topic eventually Lindsey and I set up shop on our Christianity one of the biggest online forums for discussion about the religion with about $200000.00 active members that's so ironic because restored of Justice is like so Christian at its core and retributive justice which is the foil for restorative justice is like straight out of the Bible like eye for an eye so I just think it's a really funny that we ended up in our Christianity Yeah we ended up there because I was originally speaking with the guy who runs a popular political sub Reddit I don't I don't want to get this got any trouble any more trouble than I've already gotten him in and basically just from speaking with me he ended up being Doc's multiple times and I think I reached out to like 10 different communities just putting feelers out being like hey I want to talk to you here about what you do. And I heard from Bruce the top moderator of our Christianity and I could tell just from the way his name is written on the sub read it that he was an atheist and I was like a weird. I got to talk to this guy. How do people feel about an atheist at the helm of the Christianity said read it I think some of them are very furious about it and use that as a reason to go other places other people look at what I've done and what I've done is tried very hard to be respectful of the range of opinions within Christianity Bruce is a key. Puter programmer living in the Pacific Northwest he's nocturnal so we often spoke at odd hours he told me that he became the highest ranking moderator in the Christianity sub read it because he's been around the longest of anyone on the mob team that authority grants him final say on the community's policy decisions taking down posts and banning unruly read it years it's super time consuming but Bruce sticks with it because he's genuinely curious about what it means to be a good person and finds Christians to be thoughtful people we get people with relationship issues like we've been having sex and I want to stop and he doesn't because I've had some sort of spiritual awakening or I have fallen in love with an atheist what do I do. And do you respond to that. No I don't feel the need to say something in response the Christians usually handled That's the whole sum altruism excited of the forum but Bruce's mob team 15 of them total spend much of their time containing its darker elements they're volunteers scanning the forum day and night for language that breaks the subjects rules the big categories for what we deal with every day the 1st one is our rule $1.00 which is for bigotry like calling a gay person a Saddam might This is another our Christian a-T. Maad who goes by the screen name Agent Smith radio but I call him a.s.r. For short or there's interdenominational bigotry you can say for instance that I believe that the Catholic Church is messing up how they should be handling the abuse of clergy upon young children that's fine but if you were to say the Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon as represented in Revelation that crosses the line off line s. R. Is very active in his Canadian Baptist Church he takes immense pride in his work in the forum but he told me that he seen a lot of mobs burn out because of the psychological toll of the work I've had attempts docstring against me I have had death threats against me we have a lot of atheists who are part of reform certainly Jews Muslims come by as well every threat I've gotten every hateful message it's been from another question Ok so I'll be honest one stereotype that I have of Christians is like Flanders from The Simpsons. To the neighborhood. Which is why it shocks me when you said that people send you death threats and try to dox you in the name of Christianity that doesn't that sort of seem contradictory it does in a sense and the issue is that if you read the Bible itself especially the New Testament you'll find that Christianity doesn't really look the way that Ned Flanders looks. If you read Jesus himself in the Gospels he ends up in a lot of debates with a group of Jews known as the Pharisees especially as they try to find ways to frame him in order to have him executed by Rome. Is that. No no no no no no. No Not runs through no mind. You know scary I'm no good stuff so you're saying there are some some pug Nations sides to Christian figures Jesus included in the New Testament that's precisely it people try to emulate these figures because they found the truth faith everyone else is wrong and because I'm hiding the truth from other Christians I'm going to hell oh my God Bruce the top moderator eventually agreed to let Lindsay and me tanker around in our Christianity in part because he'd become frustrated with how liberally his team was banning difficult users especially those fire and brimstone fundamentalist read it or described help one guy through the 6 months of nonstop attempts to ban him he called homosexuality a vile affliction and I think he might have gotten from something Paul said but it was all it all seemed to me to be grounded in Scripture. There was a lot of backlash about it we have a lot of gay Christians we have a lot of liberal Christians we have a lot of liberal atheists and there was a pretty major outcry Why do you invest so much time in in these people who many others would say don't deserve your or your Because I don't feel that way I don't think that if someone is expressing a viewpoint of someone as is their good faith. I support that like what you said about why do you spend some time on this watch on people or worth that just enraged me. I'm not going to take it out on you but is that attitude. Just it just offends me to my core. That these people are not worth. Coming up Lindsay and I put our thoroughly unscientific experiment in Restored of justice to the tests this is on the media. And the media is supported by Progressive Insurance offering its home quite explore designed to provide information about available home insurance options in one place more information at progressive dot com And by hand to water still or sparkling water infused with fruit essences including watermelon Black Berry and cherry no sugar no sweeteners no calories available in your local grocery store or a drink and dot com hint mouth watering water. Next time you know us say a week of nonviolent protests led to a governor's resignation on the island of Puerto Rico we focus on the women journalists and activists who started it all. That's next time. You know USA coming up at 1 o'clock this morning after the occlusion of on the media here on k.q.e.d. Then at 2 o'clock and never felt anxious walking into a room full of strangers all the time but if you could really frame all those interest into something different I can sense my heart beating but I definitely. A surge of energy that is encouraging me. How to be better next time on the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. . 2 o'clock this morning after Latino USA at one. Time of the California report utility companies have been blamed for sparking some of California wildfires in response the companies are working to make sure their power lines and equipment don't spark the state's next deadly blaze but who pays the bill the cost of California's electrical system and other news from around the state that's next time for California before. California. 851 this morning. This is on the media I'm Michael. My online restorative justice experiment and I'm using that word experiment very loosely with researcher Lindsay Blackwell officially began on April 17th when we posted a summary of the project to the our Christianity forum. Yeah. A harsh punishment. Person who hurt you or who you hurt. But it can lead to. The reaction to. This this is the. We need to. Do. The punishments aren't really. Need to be punished regardless if they become better people. Would be. Over the next 3 months we took on 3 cases one success one failure and another one that was somewhere in between I expected that we'd have to hunt for a willing guinea pigs but the 1st one fell into my lap a user James sent me a private message and said he wanted to participate in the process. I got in trouble times and then eventually received. Something. With me he was very moved by something that you wrote which was that people we write off as quote unquote bad people online often have very human motivations for treating others like crap you're going to make me cry. James is an atheist and an amateur theological historian he has a lot of the. Pinions about the Bible sort of Bible and theology nerd so obviously I go to the sub read it's a kind of do a sort of misinformation policing what I think is correcting factual errors over 5 years of posting in the forum James earned a reputation for being really aggressive towards others with less progressive interpretations of the text especially Catholics in a nutshell for being a big or to other commenters on the sub Reddit the final straw was when he plainly admitted to gaslighting Christians in the forum picking arguments that would make them question their faith revenge he said at the time because Christians had been meaner to him than anyone else in his life and. Eventually he was banned and that's what led to this process with you that's Bruce again the forums atheist top moderator I invited James to a private chat room using a program called discord where the 3 of us could speak in real time not voice chat text chat the way most strangers communicate online as far as restorative justice goes this case was a bit more like how it looks in schools Bruce was the teacher the authority figure in James was the student acting out getting into fights I took on the role of the neutral mediator my job was to help James reflect on his behavior honestly I kind of felt more like therapy and than anything else very non judgmental which I definitely appreciate it in the chat room Bruce and James examples of times when he had been particularly harsh with other writers My strategy was to ask James lots of questions why did you say that why do you tend to get so upset with certain renders I called him up afterward as he combed through our questions and his old posts I was surprised by what he said rereading these things is almost kind of shocking to me in one particular conversation I thought someone else was the instigator of the conflict and I felt ganged up on but rereading it looks like I'm clearly the aggressor I certainly didn't remember it that way I think I've been going through some like re-evaluation about the way that I communicate an aspect of my personality is to say things I don't mean when I'm at the peak of frustration. Outside of the Internet one person that's not contact with their parents and saying I wish I was. You know I asked him to give advice to other people and he and he basically just said No your triggers to use a very 21000 words like know what sets you off and you don't have to necessarily censor yourself but you can ask yourself Is this the kind of conversation I want to get into so I thought that was really insightful that is that's amazing James told us that he's been apologizing to a few of the registers he peeved with in the past so Bruce decided to unbend him and since then Bruce says his behavior has been different I looked at his recent stuff and he seems to be doing quite a bit better. I will say that I do think he participated in this project as he wanted to get back into the community this was not some act of altruism which I think is totally fine it's not even just totally fine it's totally expected the carrot on the stick is like if you confront what you've done and who you heard and why you did it we will welcome you back like will welcome you back into this community that you've enjoyed or that you benefit from well if everyone were like James I think this would have been a slam dunk project yes seriously like college make our fair lake we saw the Internet everyone really and it pains me to pop that balloon because the next case was kind of an utter failure basically one of the moderators a.s.r. Came to me with this case and said that he was concerned about a very conservative member of the community we've been calling him user l user l is an interesting case he's been using out of Christianity sub read it for at least 5 years if not longer than that he doesn't really have many friends amongst the user base there are a few topics he's obsessed with but the one that really really takes a lot of people off this is. Hughes on homosexuality being gay itself is a sin this view is somewhat divorced from traditional Christianity but you find it very popular with evangelicals and independent fundamentalist Baptist in the United States are told me that user l was being harassed by what seems like 5 or 6 different pro l g b t Q Christians accusing him of killing someone else on Reddit one in particular was very persistent over the course of about 2 months made a new account every single day just to say hey this is your daily reminder that user l. Leads people to suicide we had no idea what the heck this user was talking about when these posts 1st started showing up a.s.r. Invited user l. Into our discourse chat so we could get to the bottom of this use or else send us something he'd written on a different Reddit forum years ago a short eulogy for a woman he'd met online they'd become friends running a very fringe community where she shared videos of quote unquote x. Gay testimonials which are stories of Christians who claim that through conversion therapy or an alleged act of faith defeated these troublesome feelings. Emotionally shore and not having those emotional investments with women knowing that what I'm starting to cross a line in my heart that's based on what I found in her old Reddit posts user L's friend was open about suffering from bipolar disorder and the pain that God was judging her for her attraction to women things got worse when she divorced her husband and she unfortunately committed suicide several years ago and when he saw the news he was noticeably shocked he talked to room in a while and we really don't know much about it beyond that however some l g b t Q supporting users noticed this and said Well your philosophy drove this woman to sue. Wolf whether or not that's true we'll likely never know what we do know is that study after study have shown that not only does conversion therapy not work it's deeply harmful to those who receive it. Adolescents that experience conversion therapy or rejection from their families and faith communities are 8 times more likely to attempt suicide than those from accepting environments Colorado governor Jared Polis signed a bill Friday that makes Colorado that 18th state to ban gay conversion therapy for minors I will admit that when you brought this case to us It horrified me because we agreed to take on whatever issues seemed at the time in the forum and frankly this is a really messy scary one now. I tracked down 5 people who had alleged that user elf killed his friend and I asked them if they would join us in our discord session to talk with him and hopefully through mediation find some way to move forward but we never were able to start it because none of them would talk to this guy and they basically said to me that I should f. Off of course they're going to tell him to screw off it's like you're supporting evil in their minds there was another thing that I heard from a couple of years or else critics that stuck with me they said they were doing this not to terrorize user l but to warn the young l g b t Q Rhetors who scour these types of forums looking for advice on how to reconcile their sexual orientation with their faith I told a.s.r. That as long as people like user l. Are allowed to advocate for conversion therapy in our Christianity this form of harassment would likely persist there are many moderators on Christianity who don't believe that it's wrong to be gay we would all say that conversion camps and conversion therapy are wrong but is it alright to say that the fundamentalist belief is not a legitimate part of Christianity that it should be excluded from the discussion it's really the question of censorship in a place where we claim that all opinions are welcome. At a certain point I sensed that we needed to stop for fear of just making the problem much worse so we failed and I guess I'm curious to know what we can learn from this I'm so torn on this like I honestly can't land somewhere on this make I Because the way that society progress is is through push back. On people like news or oh that's how we achieve progress and change but at the same time I don't want everybody to be docs and everyone that they don't make what we're sort of justice shouldn't do is ask marginalized people to do even more labor to explain themselves to be more civil and be less angry to people who are fundamentally oppressing them so I don't know I don't know how we succeed in a case like that I don't know the answer and I feel like every single day I'm trying to figure that out it's easy for me to say that user l was an insurmountable challenge I don't feel that way about the 3rd case now it could have gone differently and that's why it makes me not feel so awesome it's a mixed bag it's a real mixed bag we have some wins and we had some losses now for our 3rd and final case after we announced to the sub Reddit that we would be providing mediation I heard from a woman named Melissa Fein she told me that Bruce the top moderator in an old maad had banned her website Figtree Christian from the sub Reddit big trees u.r.l. Has been banned and any mention of bigotry has been banned Melissa is a pastor with a Protestant denomination called disciples of Christ that website Figtree Christian is her ministry a 100 percent online church for people who want to pray together victories started with ready users people who needed to communities know badly because most of them were physically hurt by the church can you tell me what that means in some cases it's the me too movement it's people who have dealt with sexual abuse are misconduct. And they were pushed out of the church because of that or they were witness to sexual abuse and saw the church didn't handle it well and left with the person who was abused when your place of support. Is the place that hurt you it's a very deep wound and to know that Ok so I don't have to walk into Figtree Christian I can engage at my own time I can be disconnected at 1st so there's been people who have stuck around and found healing and there's people who have found healing and found their way back to a physical brick and mortar church and the fact that it has been taken away just it breaks my heart without access to our Christianity one of the Internet's biggest Christian forums Figtree was struggling to reach new congregants to regain access she told me she'd be willing to speak with Bruce about the conflict that got big tree band in the 1st place it's hard to explain because it's so fundamentally about like inner community politics it was this is a joint fiasco stay with me this gets low complicated. The drama was over the question of whether or not fundamentalist members of the community should be allowed to say Stream things from the Bible like criminalizing homosexuality and Bruce felt that the sub Reddit should prioritize freedom of expression but if they were going to outlaw this sort of speech there should be like a super thorough deliberation about it and then there was another cohort who are saying No why do we need to explain this that's just wrong and straight up homophobic it doesn't live up to societal standards of what is permissible speech some Alyssa was and a lot of. Things got much worse when a moderator and Melissa's cohort broke protocol in Bandon even Jellicoe user for homophobic comments he got so many passes at that point way more than the normal user it was not a good situation RINGBACK I wish it had been done better this all angered Bruce's ally outsiders the top moderator at the time then outsider caught wind of an active mutiny attempt in which Melissa and other moderators were going behind his back to the admins who are the most. Our full authority is an all of the land of Reddit to overthrow outsider and there was a lot of misinformation and uncertainty about who was talking to whom and whether people were being truthful then outsider began an investigation into Melissa's conduct she heard that outsider was saying things about her behind her back and so she leaked some private maad conversations to ended up spreading in our Christianity still with me when everything went down I did share some screen caps of some conversations in order to protect myself and my reputation it was an utter mess read it or started taking sides a bunch of mobs were fired some quick these now public conversations featured a picture of outsiders face which he used as an avatar only when he was speaking behind closed doors revealing his true identity to any savvy Reddit or who knew where to look therefore the leak registered as a Doxepin tempt in retaliation outsider band Melissa's online church they've hobbled they've hobbled an entire ministry I really will take any action to try to get that and. So Bruce Willis with Lindsay acting as the mediator this time chatted in discord for 7 hours over 2 days to see if they could resolve this 2 year old feud because they're seen as leaders in the community we hope that if they could achieve restoration and share the success story in the forum it might promote positive behavior in our Christianity and for a while it seems like we're making progress until there was a moment where he railed Oh totally and where if we were in the same room everyone might have been out of their chairs screaming at each other it's very possible Melissa had pulled up one of those old leaked conversations in which Bruce had called the whole 2017 ordeal a witch hunt and an. Necessary vendetta against Melissa but Melissa told Bruce that way back when she had interpreted that witch hunt thing as a sexist comment Bruce said that it wasn't sexist that he was actually defending her and that the whole restorative session was pulled it was impossible to move forward after that I couldn't knowledge of the way it made her feel I just won't take responsibility for it yes I can see how you would take it as sexist No it wasn't sexist Yes I can see how you think I was saying a particular thing I was not saying that I was saying something completely different I'll explain what I was saying and I explained what I was saying and then that made no impact but like you did lose your cool in that session Yeah you bet because I was pissed off when you look back at this fight that happened those 2 years ago the harm as I see it is it turned into a public flame war it led to a whole bunch of moderators leaving it led to a rift in the community that people messaged me about all of this is just like toxicity that is just now in the air and I wonder if mediation or some kind of deescalation technique might have saved our Christianity from the ridiculous turmoil that came after the fight between you and the other moderators Yes. Ultimately both Melissa and Bruce agreed that miscommunication had played a central role in the feud because of the session Bruce reinstated Melissa's posting privileges so she can resume spreading the word about her online church still neither are happy with how our discourse chat went down and Lindsey and I don't blame them if we had it training in mediation that probably would have gone a lot differently but on balance we were pleased with how the overall project had gone even just the basics of like taking a practice that's fundamentally about in person conversation in translating that into an online space like that is that's huge in itself so for me this is 100 percent of success just because of everything I've learned for the last bit of this hour I'd like to address the fine people who run Facebook Twitter Reddit and any site that moderate speech Hi there after working on this project for 6 months Lindsey and I came up with a few suggestions for you 1st ask yourselves how would the culture of your platform look if you invested in Restored of and rehabilitative approaches to moderation rather than just punishment and reactive ones I want to go back to what Daniel sarod of common Justice told us about the root causes of violence we know that the core drivers of violence are shame isolation exposure to violence and an inability to meet once economic needs are the so-called trolls on your platforms victims of hateful behavior themselves Today show up after being kicked off another social media site the platforming might be a good idea for the Alex Jones is of the world but the rise in right wing reactionary sites like gab have demonstrated that kicking hordes of hateful people off your platform might actually push them to far more extreme parts of the Web Why not try to talk with the people who sent actually Fineberg medic means like we did with James God knows you guys collect enough info on all of us to track them down and they're. More likely to listen and reflect on their behavior than you might think obviously it's not something that's going to work for everyone and there are definitely people who sort of cruise into a space just to cause trouble but those people are pretty easy to identify and remove And if a victim of online bullying or hate speech is in any way uncomfortable with participating in a restored of process they don't have to that's when you look at proxies so people who are equipped to do the educational work but are not going to be directly harmed by intense confrontation with someone who said something racist social workers social workers absolutely people who have experience with people in conflict tech is not invented conflict tech is just another vector for humans to get in each other's business and really aggressive ways like like we've been doing since the beginning of time I really hope you social media companies pay scientists and social workers to do this type of work because Damn I can tell you from experience it's really difficult but you could also offer free video courses for mediation and deescalation for Facebook group moderators or the everyday social media user why not empower the people who want to address conflicts in their own lives who want to intervene before online conflicts get worse and I think that would be an incredible service I mean a 100 percent agree but I also think it's really funny that you're framing it in terms of like service yes it's a service to the Internet and the world at large but also it's like it's a good sound business decision because all that's going to do at the end of the day is reduce operations costs for these mega platforms that have to rely on thousands of underpaid part time workers to review massive amounts of content if you're equipping the people who are to care about these spaces like you said with better tools they're doing your job for you I'm so glad you were able to rephrase my flower power sentiment with a. Strong capitalist backbone believe oh my god please don't describe me as a capitalist and on National Public Radio My dad will be thrilled but like Florida but. Listen I know how to appeal to platforms that I got to say Lindsay thank you for all your help thanks so much it's been a wild ride. Lindsay Blackwell is an online harassment researcher and a Ph d. Candidate at the University of Michigan School the information. Thinks to bats in the Christianity community who made this peace possible. On the Media Michael That's it for this week's show which was reduced to almost entirely by Michael low injured and was edited by our executive producer Rogers technical director is Jennifer Munson our engineer this week was Josh on the media is a production of the n.y.c. Studios. On the Media and is supported by the Ford Foundation the John s. And James l. Knight Foundation and the listeners have w n y c radio. Latino USA is next here on k.q.e.d. Public radio support for k.q.e.d. Comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the lamplighters Music Theater celebrating 67 years of nationally recognized productions of Gilbert and Sullivan touring the Bay Area with the hilarious yet poignant h.m.s. Pinafore this August more at lamplighters dot org And San Francisco International Airport offering nonstop flights to more than 130 destinations across Asia Europe North America and ocean Nia more at fly s.f.o. Dot com slash nonstop on 4 on this morning at 9 o'clock we'll get an update on the 2 mass shootings over the weekend and also discuss the rise of domestic terrorism and at the 10 o'clock hour a discussion with Cal e.p.a. Secretary Jerry Jared Blumenfeld on California's environmental priorities. This is k.q.e.d. San Francisco k.q.e.d. North Highlands Sacramento it's 1 o'clock. From n.p.r. And it's like you know USA. Today what's behind the leak messages that sparked massive protests in Puerto Rico and what led to the resignation of governor . Elevation of the body of the Puerto Rican saying. I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore and we'll hear from 3 Puerto Rican journalists about how women were central in the protest and how women journalists are taking charge of news rooms and the narrative when the chance will reveal. Became clear as to why the women have. They're not taking it seriously. And coming up on the. Stay with us. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm nor Rahm President Trump is to speak this morning on the steps his administration will take after 2 mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend N.P.R.'s Frank our Donya is reports President Trump has acknowledged that quote perhaps more has to be done to address gun violence the president has come under fire from Democrats who say his divisive rhetoric has fanned the flames of hatred that they said led to the shooting on Sunday Trump said he spoke with Attorney General William Barr an f.b.i. Director Christopher Ray about additional steps to take after at least $29.00 people were killed in the 2 shootings these are 2 incredible places. Where love the people. Hate has no place in our country President Trump called these acts a mental health problem Franco or Downey as n.p.r. News Washington vigils were held yesterday in both cities El Paso and Dayton for the 29 people killed in the shootings this weekend Gerri Kenney from member station w y I so I attended the vigil in Dayton in the popular entertainment district where 9 people were killed early yesterday thousands of people are here in this half mile stretch of businesses 6 entertainment venues.
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