Read on Twitter
The internet sucks for women. It’s not just obvious harassment and hate. It’s also the hostile, subtle, passive-aggressive misogynistic conversation tactics used by men — mansplaining, microaggressions, sealioning, gaslighting, endless replying etc. /1
A small group of men on the internet silence and drive out women from participating in open spaces. It’s hard to say whether misogyny or disinformation is the biggest problem with online conversation, but both are a crisis. /2
So with that said, I want to explain a bit how @Telepath thinks about kindness, online misogyny, and community moderation. /3
One of the most important problems Telepath is focused on is making the community fun and safe for women. We want women to love Telepath, ideally more than the men do. Making women feel good/comfortable/confident — that’s critical to an awesome modern conversation community. /4
Given the complexity of online hostility toward women, our moderation philosophy focuses on *intent*. We won’t hesitate to be aggressive if we conclude a man has bad intentions. We won’t allow trolls/misogynists to get away with repeatedly trolling on the edge of our rules. /5
In addition to misogyny, we’re also focused on racism & transphobia. These 3 often go together! Rules intended to protect the most marginalised groups often end up being weaponised against them. We don’t allow identity-based attacks and we call out microaggressions. /6
We care about creating a kind community not characterised by hate and personal attacks. “Be Kind” is our central rule. We aren’t tolerant of intolerance, and we aren’t wedded to free speech as a North Star that stops us from taking action against garbage and meanness. /7
Scaling Telepath’s anti-hate systems/enforcement is one of our top priorities. We plan to scale via a combination of software and people. /8
A huge fraction of the moderation burden on the internet is driven by bots, sockpuppets, and banned users returning. Even though it will mean we’re going to grow more slowly, we will require a real phone number (no VoIP numbers) to sign up for Telepath. /9
Also, we plan on scaling our moderation team with a layered and wholistic approach, building the team entirely in-house instead of outsourcing the work, routing reports and issues to people with the context to help and ability to follow through beyond the initial report. /end
