[Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

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Thranos
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[Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

Post by Thranos »

BYOND account and character name: Thranos, Various. Discord ID Thranos#1789

Banning admin: Unknown

Ban type/duration: Discord, perma.

Ban reason: Got ticketed for posting "this kills the crab" and a gif of kitten getting squirted with a water bottle, was accused of posting "animal abuse", argued otherwise, got tired of being accused of something abhorrent and started shitposting until banned by the same admin

Your side of the story: It wasn't animal abuse. It was an old-ass meme, and a new meme. You could argue the crab was going to be harmed but it's a fucking crab. The kitten just got wet. I don't react well to being accused of awful things like that, and seeing as how the admin in question went at it in such an accusatory moral high-ground manner, I just started shitposting rather than give them and their accusation even the slightest amount of respect.

Why you think you should be unbanned: I didn't post animal abuse, no matter how much this individual argues that harmless images Totally Count (TM), and prior to this I don't recall having had any issues in the Discord. A single admin and their personal crusade against something they don't like shouldn't limit my access to the community. The shitposting I can understand having consequences, but surely the multiple months of the ban would make up for that.

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Jaybirdnerd
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Re: [Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

Post by Jaybirdnerd »

Hello Thranos,

I am the banning admin in question, strange that my first ban appeal wasn't even under my own name but when you don't ban people a lot I guess that's normal. That said, I'm here to explain the events in question to you so you know what fully happened and give my side a little bit that way this doesn't seem cockeyed on my part because in all honesty reading over this there's a lot of context that's missing.

To begin, there's rules in effect that have been in long-standing over this sort of content prior to it ever being posted in the discord to begin with. In our #Announcements section of our discord server we posted a clarification and explanation as to why exactly this is disallowed content.
Posting videos of animal cruelty is a direct violation of both Discord TOS and our own posted Discord server rules. That being Citadel Discord Rule #6, and further, in this current context, memes Rule #0. This alert represents a Final Warning for everyone on the server. Going forward, violating the stated rules will result in revocation of your ability to post in memes, nsfw, etc. at the very least.
So, while the images are questionably so, they do fall under this rule. Prior to you even being pulled into the ticket we'd been having an internal debate over the topic for a moment or so pending which images qualified as disallowed. It's one of those topics we personally feel need a strong boundary in order to not have them be breached in order to keep our server open due to Discord's Terms of Service policy. In order to campaign against people breaching said rules we have to contact them in a professional manner and pull them into a ticket in order to alert them of the situation at hand and inform them that this is, indeed, disallowed content and is something we do not want posted on our server.

From there, I'd like to explain my side of our ticket and what I was given to work with as per me doing my job and simply telling you not to post this content as it is entirely dire for me to do in order to fully elaborate on the why that you were banned.

When I pulled you into the ticket to discuss the matter at hand, immediately you started spouting off with belligerence and fully ignoring the request for peaceful and normal communication I had tried to get you to adhere to. I can remember one of the quotes being something to the tune of "Do you have fucking brain worms??" From there, I requested council from my peers on how to handle the situation, and I had suggested just simply banning you due to your lack of coherence in the ticket.
I don't react well to being accused of awful things like that, and seeing as how the admin in question went at it in such an accusatory moral high-ground manner, I just started shitposting rather than give them and their accusation even the slightest amount of respect.
We don't react well to people breaking the rules in our server and then getting mad and belligerent when told to knock it off. I wasn't even coming at you in a 'moral high-ground manner', I was confronting you as a peer telling you not to post something as it goes against the rules in our server. Instead of remaining fair and coherent, you began hurling insults at me like a toddler being told it can't draw on the walls.

From there, I consulted with my peers, and we decided that you had basically had full well shown how toxic of a person you were that we booted you out of the discord. That I had banned you from the discord.

Reading over your ticket, however, I can't help but need to reassure you that if you get unbanned and come back in with the same mindset doing the same things over again, we will have to step back in and reinstate your server ban. We can't have people running around posting images that constitute both a rule violation AND a discord terms of service violation and then acting in sheer belligerence as you have prior. That is unacceptable on this platform, and we do not appreciate having to deal with people acting as such. You need to remember that there's people behind the screen, and think in a bit more good faith than thinking that I'm out here trying to be holier than thou when I'm simply trying to get you to refrain from breaking rules.

If you personally feel affected by this ruling in such a way that you believe that it's required to have the ruling looked over by a member of staff, please contact a head admin and consult with them over the ruling rather than take it out on a random admin unrelated to the ruling itself. I didn't make the rules, the head admins did, and I'm doing my job in enforcing them to make sure the community isn't constantly teetering on the brink of Terms of Service violations getting our PUBLIC DISCORD SERVER deleted off the client.

You acted in more than bad faith that day, I'm sorry that I had to ban you, but the way you reacted to me confronting you basically warranted the ban at the time. If you're intent on coming back in and being more than fair when this sort of thing happens then I'm not going to deny you the right to return to the community, however, If you go out of your way to do this sort of thing again then it's no doubt similar will come of the the events of the last time. It's how you handled yourself in that situation, to reiterate, is what got you banned.

That said, I have to apologize if I genuinely came off to you as if I were trying to have a moral high ground. That was far from my intent, and if it read off as such then I genuinely do want to apologize and inform you that I didn't intend to come off that way on purpose. Again, I want to ensure this community is a safe and well place to be in, and at the time I was filling my role.

So, with that, I hope you understand the situation a little better at least from my perspective, and can think over it for the better as I feel it would probably be beneficial for the status of your ban, the situation, and how to react in the future to issues as such.

Thank you for coming through to the appeals board and making your appeal,

~Jay

Nik707
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Re: [Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

Post by Nik707 »

What gets me about this so much is that we made this ruling because at the time, discord was doing a string of community bans related to animal cruelty. Their TOS is fairly vague, and we decided "Hey let's play it safe."
Apparently the gif of the cat having water squirted up it's nose is LITERALLY the FUNNIEST gif ever made because for some reason you and several others absolutely lost it in a 1984 esque screaming match. It's literally just asking not to post random gifs of animals being fucked with for the funny because we don't wanna have discord nuke us for it when some salty dork mass reports us. It's really not a big deal. I honestly cannot imagine a world where someone sees this, and thinks "Ah yes a reasonable response to them wanting to play it safe is to toe the line and scream 1984"

Anyway, if you can control that yeah sure come on back.

Thranos
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Re: [Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

Post by Thranos »

I still maintain that neither of the posts I made were even remotely something that should be or even could be considered "animal cruelty".
Maybe and I mean MAYBE "this kills the crab" if someone was actively looking for the flimsiest excuse to cause trouble, but in absolutely zero ways was the waterbottle cat.

The reason I was so incandescent with rage is that I've witnessed actual, genuine, and actually genuinely fucked up animal cruelty, and it is abhorrent in a way I can't describe.
Posting something as innocuous as what I posted and then being accused of posting animal cruelty was as out of nowhere, jarring, and enraging as if I had (as a rough example) posted a SFW image of a Touhou character and was immediately accused of posting CSEM. It's the kind of accusation that's just fucked up to have levelled against you.

The primary reason that I so quickly became belligerent with you in the ticket is because of what I perceived as a lack of understanding/care about what animal cruelty actually is, and how fucked up being accused of posting something like that is. Frankly, it struck me as similar to the whole "tag your pomegranates as gore" thing you see floating around making fun of tumblr- someone taking a reasonable "hey let's not post awful things" stance and running so far with it that they wind up on another continent. I understand that Discord ToS is vague as hell, and that they're infuriatingly difficult to communicate with or get specifics out of, but I still maintain that in this case, both examples would have been safe, especially the gif in which the most "harmful" thing was a squirt of water. I am in no way advocating in favor of people posting actual animal cruelty, attempting to justify it, attempting to downplay it, excuse it, etc. To be blunt, seeing someone who does wind up being doxxed on a thread on *Chan/Reddit/Etc and reported to the authorities gives me a bit of faith in humanity- when it's actual abuse. And trust me, what's being discussed here?

Not even close.

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Putnam
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Re: [Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

Post by Putnam »

Thranos wrote:
Wed Oct 27, 2021 5:18 am
I still maintain that in this case, both examples would have been safe, especially the gif in which the most "harmful" thing was a squirt of water.
You're not the one taking the risk here. The choice is between asking a single user not to post a single gif or... let's say a 1% chance of the entire discord server being nuked. The choice to make here is pretty obvious.

Thranos
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Re: [Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

Post by Thranos »

Okay, and I get that now, but what I'm getting maybe approaching that out of the gate with "you are posting animal abuse" instead of "hey, Discord T&S is going apeshit again, please don't post that because one of them might take it to somehow be animal abuse and nuke you and us" wasn't a good call.

Well, I say "out of the gate", but what actually happened was posts mysteriously vanishing with no communication at all over the course of like a week before people figured out what was going on. THEN the immediate "you are posting animal abuse" started, and was maintained until I started shitposting and got banned.

The point I'm getting at is that it's not the content of the request but how it was handled- zero communication followed by immediate accusations of something awful, rather than "hey, we deleted post X because we're concerned Discord is going to go monkey bananas over it, regardless of what you or we think of it". Accusing the user rather than explaining.

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Re: [Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

Post by Hjorthorn »

Sorry for the long delay.

While I was not yet staff at the time, or if I was it was as trial or EM, I do recall this event and the uproar surrounding it. I understand you feel justified in what you did, but what I'm mostly seeing in this appeal is you acting defensive and coming on the attack against the original ruling against you versus acknowledging the conditions which led to the ban and showing us a willingness to avoid such incidents in the future. As it stands I support maintaining the ban as it seems your attitude is more "I did nothing wrong and there's no validity to the reasons behind my ban" which fails to address your combative and inflammatory behavior surrounding the initial incident. I'd worry about a repeat offense.

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PlumeOfSmoke
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Re: [Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

Post by PlumeOfSmoke »

Just chiming in on, but I think this ban should be lifted. Thranos has already been banned for several months now, and what they did warranted that. However, now they seem to atleast partially understand the reasoning behind it. I hope in the future they keep in mind discord TOS shouldn't be fucked with, and just delete whatever dumb gif admins are worried about and dont shitpost in a ticket (maybe ask for a different admin or something if you have issue with a certain one). Thranos obviously didn't intend to post animal abuse, but if they've been problematic in the past (aka this is a recurring sorta thing) or they continue to be in the future then it really ain't that hard to just reapply/keep a ban.

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Re: [Unknown] Thranos - Discord Ban for "posting animal abuse" and shitposting

Post by zI-H482 »

After discussion among the headmins, we’ve decided to keep the Discord ban in place for the foreseeable future. We came to this decision not just because of this specific incident because that alone wouldn’t warrant keeping it place after so long. Rather, after considering your history with the place, we consider the problems with your behavior long-standing and unlikely to change with passage of time. If you do decide to make an another appeal much further down the line, I would heavily advise having vouches of improved character at the ready.

The appeal is denied.

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