I’m pretty surprised and disappointed by this warning. I made 3 claims about ways that Phil has interacted with me.
I didn’t share the facebook messages because I thought it would be a breach of privacy to share a private message thread without Phil’s permission, and I don’t want to talk to him, so I can’t get his permission.
I also don’t especially want to link to the piece calling me a racist, which anyone familiar with Phil’s output would already know about, in any case.
There is a reason I didn’t share the screenshot of the the paedophilia/rape accusations, which is that I thought it would be totally unfair to the people accused. This is why I called them ‘celebrities’ rather vaguely.
As you say, I have shown all of these claims to be true in private in any case.
This feels a lot like punishing someone for having the guts to call out a vindictive individual in the grip of a lifelong persecution complex. As illustrated by the upvotes on my comments, lots of people agree with me, but didn’t want to say anything, for whatever reason. If you were going to offer any sanction for anyone, I would have thought it would be the people at CSER, such as Simon Beard and Luke Kemp, who have kept collaborating with him and endorsing his work for the last few years, despite knowing about the behaviour that you have just banned him for.
I appreciate that these kinds of moderation decisions can be difficult, but I also don’t agree with the warning to Halstead. And if it is to be given, then I am uncomfortable that Halstead has been singled out—it would seem consistent to apply the same warning to me, as I supported Halstead’s claims, and added my own, both without providing evidence.
With regard to the people mentioned, neither are forum regulars, and my understanding is that neither have plans for continued collaborations with Phil.
(As with other comments in this thread, I’m responding as an individual moderator rather than as a voice of the moderation team.)
Thank you for sharing this comment. While I read your comment closely when considering a warning to Halstead, I don’t think it encounters the same problems:
Regarding your support for Halstead’s claims — I think the original claimant should try very hard to present evidence, but I don’t think the same burden falls on people who support them (in part because they might not have evidence of their own).
Regarding your own claims: While your comments had some unsupported accusations, many of the accusations did have support, and most of what you wrote was a discussion of Phil’s writing rather than his actions or character (making it easier for someone to verify). To the extent that you violated the norm of providing evidence for accusations, you violated it to a lesser degree than Halstead — the accusations were less severe, and weren’t essential to the overall message of your comments.
That said, I don’t think it was fair to only “warn” Halstead — looking back, I think the ideal response might have been to reply to the ban announcement (or write a separate post) reminding people to try to avoid making accusations without evidence, and pointing to examples from multiple users. Our goal was to reinforce a norm, not to punish anyone.
(Since I drafted the original message, and it was only reviewed and approved by other moderators, I’ll use “I” in some parts of this thread.)
I owe you an apology for a lack of clarity in this message, and for not discussing my concerns with you in private before posting it (given that we’d already been discussing other aspects of the situation).
“Warning” was the wrong word to use. The thing we were trying to convey wasn’t “this is the kind of content that could easily lead to a ban”, but instead “this goes against a norm we want to promote on the Forum, and we think this was avoidable”. There were much better ways to express the latter.
You’ve been an excellent contributor to this site (e.g. winning two Forum prizes). We didn’t intend the comment to feel like a punishment, but the end result clearly didn’t match our intentions. It’s understandable that you kept your comments brief and vague — particularly the one addressed to Sean, who presumably had the necessary context to understand it.
I also should have said that I think the discussion resulting from your comment was really valuable, and I’m glad you wrote it — I prefer the norm-skirting version of your comment to the comment not existing.
But I still think the norm is important, and I also think that comments like yours are more likely to have good consequences when they include more evidence.
*****
...which anyone familiar with Phil’s output would already know about, in any case.
While most voters obviously endorsed your statement, I got a concerned message from one user (good Forum contributor, fairly new to the community) who was confused about the situation and didn’t know what had happened. They didn’t understand why Phil was being attacked for using language similar to the people who were attacking him, or why his claim that you had lied was being downvoted with no responses to disprove it.
When I wrote the comment, I was trying to keep that person in mind, and others like them — both by encouraging the use of evidence, and by clarifying from a neutral perspective that your claims actually had more backing than Phil’s.
*****
On your points 1-3:
I’m not sure which part of your comments this maps to, but I assume the Facebook messages in question were insults from Phil. I agree it’s reasonable not to share those.
I understand your reluctance to link the piece, but in this case, it’s public writing that has been widely shared (and heavily criticized as unfair and misleading). I think that sharing it would have made the conversation easier to follow and validated your claims against Phil — in particular, by showing that his denial at the end of this comment was wrong.
That reasoning makes sense. There may have been a way to show what happened without compromising the people accused (e.g. sharing a screenshot with names blotted out), but the post being on someone’s Facebook wall (and presumably not publicly viewable) could still make that dicey.
I don’t mean to argue that every Forum comment needs to have as much evidence as possible. But when a personal accusation is at stake, and can’t easily be verified by an outside reader, I do think it’s important to provide at least some backing — at least if there’s a quick way to do so without violating someone’s privacy (e.g. linking to a public paper).
One complication in this situation is that Phil doesn’t have a good reputation among the Forum’s users, some of whom have had unpleasant personal interactions with him (myself included, several times over). But I don’t want our norms about personal accusations to depend on how popular or pleasant the targets are. If you were accusing me of calling you a Nazi, I’d hope you would link to evidence, and I want the same standard to hold for Phil.
If you were going to offer any sanction for anyone, I would have thought it would be the people at CSER, such as Simon Beard and Luke Kemp, who have kept collaborating with him and endorsing his work for the last few years, despite knowing about the behaviour that you have just banned him for.
As we said in our ban announcement, Phil was banned for his behavior on the Forum. It’s not impossible that someone’s conduct outside the Forum might lead us to ban them, but that would require much more evidence. And I find it hard to imagine a realistic scenario wherein we’d also sanction that person’s academic collaborators just for working with them.
*****
To close off this reply, I want to reiterate that I’m sorry for the message. I could have handled this better, and I understand your frustration. But while I wish I’d expressed my concerns differently, I still think that the norm of making at least a small effort to back up personal accusations with evidence is an important one.
Hi Aaron, I appreciate this and understand the thought process behind the decision. I do generally agree that it is important to provide evidence for this kind of thing, but there were reasons not to do so in this case, which made it a bit unusual.
I’m pretty surprised and disappointed by this warning. I made 3 claims about ways that Phil has interacted with me.
I didn’t share the facebook messages because I thought it would be a breach of privacy to share a private message thread without Phil’s permission, and I don’t want to talk to him, so I can’t get his permission.
I also don’t especially want to link to the piece calling me a racist, which anyone familiar with Phil’s output would already know about, in any case.
There is a reason I didn’t share the screenshot of the the paedophilia/rape accusations, which is that I thought it would be totally unfair to the people accused. This is why I called them ‘celebrities’ rather vaguely.
As you say, I have shown all of these claims to be true in private in any case.
This feels a lot like punishing someone for having the guts to call out a vindictive individual in the grip of a lifelong persecution complex. As illustrated by the upvotes on my comments, lots of people agree with me, but didn’t want to say anything, for whatever reason. If you were going to offer any sanction for anyone, I would have thought it would be the people at CSER, such as Simon Beard and Luke Kemp, who have kept collaborating with him and endorsing his work for the last few years, despite knowing about the behaviour that you have just banned him for.
I appreciate that these kinds of moderation decisions can be difficult, but I also don’t agree with the warning to Halstead. And if it is to be given, then I am uncomfortable that Halstead has been singled out—it would seem consistent to apply the same warning to me, as I supported Halstead’s claims, and added my own, both without providing evidence.
With regard to the people mentioned, neither are forum regulars, and my understanding is that neither have plans for continued collaborations with Phil.
Simon Beard is providing the foreword for his forthcoming book, and Luke Kemp has provided a supporting quote for it.
(As with other comments in this thread, I’m responding as an individual moderator rather than as a voice of the moderation team.)
Thank you for sharing this comment. While I read your comment closely when considering a warning to Halstead, I don’t think it encounters the same problems:
Regarding your support for Halstead’s claims — I think the original claimant should try very hard to present evidence, but I don’t think the same burden falls on people who support them (in part because they might not have evidence of their own).
Regarding your own claims: While your comments had some unsupported accusations, many of the accusations did have support, and most of what you wrote was a discussion of Phil’s writing rather than his actions or character (making it easier for someone to verify). To the extent that you violated the norm of providing evidence for accusations, you violated it to a lesser degree than Halstead — the accusations were less severe, and weren’t essential to the overall message of your comments.
That said, I don’t think it was fair to only “warn” Halstead — looking back, I think the ideal response might have been to reply to the ban announcement (or write a separate post) reminding people to try to avoid making accusations without evidence, and pointing to examples from multiple users. Our goal was to reinforce a norm, not to punish anyone.
(Since I drafted the original message, and it was only reviewed and approved by other moderators, I’ll use “I” in some parts of this thread.)
I owe you an apology for a lack of clarity in this message, and for not discussing my concerns with you in private before posting it (given that we’d already been discussing other aspects of the situation).
“Warning” was the wrong word to use. The thing we were trying to convey wasn’t “this is the kind of content that could easily lead to a ban”, but instead “this goes against a norm we want to promote on the Forum, and we think this was avoidable”. There were much better ways to express the latter.
You’ve been an excellent contributor to this site (e.g. winning two Forum prizes). We didn’t intend the comment to feel like a punishment, but the end result clearly didn’t match our intentions. It’s understandable that you kept your comments brief and vague — particularly the one addressed to Sean, who presumably had the necessary context to understand it.
I also should have said that I think the discussion resulting from your comment was really valuable, and I’m glad you wrote it — I prefer the norm-skirting version of your comment to the comment not existing.
But I still think the norm is important, and I also think that comments like yours are more likely to have good consequences when they include more evidence.
*****
While most voters obviously endorsed your statement, I got a concerned message from one user (good Forum contributor, fairly new to the community) who was confused about the situation and didn’t know what had happened. They didn’t understand why Phil was being attacked for using language similar to the people who were attacking him, or why his claim that you had lied was being downvoted with no responses to disprove it.
When I wrote the comment, I was trying to keep that person in mind, and others like them — both by encouraging the use of evidence, and by clarifying from a neutral perspective that your claims actually had more backing than Phil’s.
*****
On your points 1-3:
I’m not sure which part of your comments this maps to, but I assume the Facebook messages in question were insults from Phil. I agree it’s reasonable not to share those.
I understand your reluctance to link the piece, but in this case, it’s public writing that has been widely shared (and heavily criticized as unfair and misleading). I think that sharing it would have made the conversation easier to follow and validated your claims against Phil — in particular, by showing that his denial at the end of this comment was wrong.
That reasoning makes sense. There may have been a way to show what happened without compromising the people accused (e.g. sharing a screenshot with names blotted out), but the post being on someone’s Facebook wall (and presumably not publicly viewable) could still make that dicey.
I don’t mean to argue that every Forum comment needs to have as much evidence as possible. But when a personal accusation is at stake, and can’t easily be verified by an outside reader, I do think it’s important to provide at least some backing — at least if there’s a quick way to do so without violating someone’s privacy (e.g. linking to a public paper).
One complication in this situation is that Phil doesn’t have a good reputation among the Forum’s users, some of whom have had unpleasant personal interactions with him (myself included, several times over). But I don’t want our norms about personal accusations to depend on how popular or pleasant the targets are. If you were accusing me of calling you a Nazi, I’d hope you would link to evidence, and I want the same standard to hold for Phil.
As we said in our ban announcement, Phil was banned for his behavior on the Forum. It’s not impossible that someone’s conduct outside the Forum might lead us to ban them, but that would require much more evidence. And I find it hard to imagine a realistic scenario wherein we’d also sanction that person’s academic collaborators just for working with them.
*****
To close off this reply, I want to reiterate that I’m sorry for the message. I could have handled this better, and I understand your frustration. But while I wish I’d expressed my concerns differently, I still think that the norm of making at least a small effort to back up personal accusations with evidence is an important one.
Hi Aaron, I appreciate this and understand the thought process behind the decision. I do generally agree that it is important to provide evidence for this kind of thing, but there were reasons not to do so in this case, which made it a bit unusual.