How should we handle Stonetoss?

Racial holy war is a joke. It’s a game by a cult that fails its own internal logic with the trope page all but mocking it. Stonetoss is active for a movement going on right now.

I reiterate my objections to listing it on those grounds. With all this, it’s just encouraging bad faith actors. We don’t need to discuss it here. Lots of people do across the net. Deplatforming is an effective way to fight.

Edited by Lightysnake on Aug 17th 2020 at 6:09:47 AM

Eh, I suppose that's a fair point.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

This appears to be the fundamental position of the people arguing for the page to be cut. I think it is a bad argument because it can be extended to every creator/work page we have. If we do make that claim, then where do we draw the line on what works are acceptable and what works aren't? Right now we have the P5 for determining that. Shall we rename them to the P6 and add "Propaganda" to the list of banned topics? Propaganda is a tricky subject most of the time.

This website is dedicated to finding tropes and analyzing works. Descriptions are supposed to be purged of editorializing and opinions. Mein Kampf is the basis for one of history's most-referenced atrocity, yet we don't have the same movement for banning. Literary critique is not endorsement.

---

That's an argument to lock the page and prevent drive-by editors from adding whatever they feel like adding, not forbidding its existence.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Hitler is dead. Mein Kampf, as I've argued, at least has historical value in discussion to explain an evil, but pivotal historical figure.

Where's the line? I'd draw it close to "active modern Nazi propaganda" myself. We can't pretend this is a tricky line; Stonetoss has an active web presence and what he believes is completely unambiguous.

Edited by Lightysnake on Aug 17th 2020 at 7:51:06 AM

I agree with Lighty , and I'm personally fine with going "this crosses enough of our lines at once to remove, but it's the only thing that does so"

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

It's okay to take things on a case-by-case basis in this and analyze it uniquely, I feel

Crazy Samaritan: Agreed. I've heard that he along with his webcomic, is notorious for being pro-Nazi content, along with the fact that some of the alt-right propaganda is blatantly obvious. Just take one look of his webcomics that don't focus on humor.

MB Pending | MB Drafts | MB Dates

Should we get a crowner up, so maybe we can get some consensus on what to do?

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

I agree with Lightysnake. We gain nothing from having the page other than attention from people that like reading Nazi comics.

If we weren't comfortable with these comics being tweeted from the official TV Tropes Twitter account, why are we okay with them being on the wiki at all?

I've said before, but things like Racial Holy War? It' impossible to take seriously. It's internally contradictory, it's a shitty game, most of the trope page is all but clandestinely mocking it for broken mechanics and how its internal logic can't even hold up. Men Kampf and Turner Diaries, terrible as they are, run on a more limited sort of internal logic, are already proliferated. Everyone knows how bad they are.

Stone Toss is active now. It's also more obscure so we're giving free publicity to a neo-nazi work. I know wikis are collaborative efforts, but this says anyone can make a work of alt-right propaganda, get almost immediately suspended, but we'll keep the page just because it technically exists.

Stonetoss is all but entirely an alt-right thing. There's no 'literary critique' to be had. We're just putting a Nazi site on added in bad faith

Edited by Lightysnake on Aug 17th 2020 at 9:05:43 AM

I've got a crowner. Will this work?

Thanks...never done a Crowner before so tried to vote. I'll in favor of cutting with prejudice.

I'm going to side with those saying "cut the page."

I've had enough experience with this kind of shit to know that no matter how benignly or disdainfully you're presenting material like this, in the end you're still giving it a platform and spreading it around. And if you're spreading it around, a certain percentage of readers are going to allow themselves to be influenced by it. It may not be a large percentage, but it will happen nonetheless.

It's incredibly naive to assume that just adding a disclaimer saying "hey, we don't condone this, it's shitty Nazi propaganda" is going to change that. The only purpose disclaimers like that serve is to make the people saying that feel better about themselves. It does nothing to deter the spread of influence.

There is an argument to include things like Mein Kampf, Turner Diaries, or The Protocols because they do have some historical significance, abhorrent as they may be. Things like Racial Holy War (as stupid as it is) or this, however, the justification is far shakier.

If we cut the page, do we also cut all the on-page examples that have been crosswicked? Or is it okay as long as it doesn't link to his website and isn't obviously phrased in an inflammatory manner? (A single example among a bunch of other webcomics doesn't feel as prone to platforming him as dedicating a whole page to his comic.)

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

Considering the issues from the page itself stem from the work’s ideas, and how we can end up unintentionally promoting said ideas by giving the work a platform for people to discover the work through, we should remove all the crosswicked trope examples as well.

back lol

Siding with cut here. It's made clear that it is impossible to maintain the page. We keep it without supervision, and things get messy on both sides real fast. With supervision, we'll be accused of either censorship or giving Stonetoss a platform. It's probably best to make sure his whitewashed hate speech doesn't go through some users of the site.

MB Pending | MB Drafts | MB Dates

The policy has been for works banned under the content policy that any non policy violating examples from the works banned under the policy can stay. This isn't getting tossed (pun intended) from the wiki for that reason, but the basic principle should still apply.

Edited by Kappaclystica on Aug 17th 2020 at 11:00:24 AM

That's not relevant. I didn't say that Stonetoss was tricky to categorize, I said that in general this is a tricky line to determine and linked to an article where they commented on how it was easy to read both satire and endorsement into The Wolf of Wall Street. The point being made was that randomly banning works from this website is a bad precedent and we currently have no policy reason to cut the page.

We can make a policy reason, and we don't even have to wait for advertisers to pull funding before it happens, but that's the job of Content Violation Discussions, which would need to be updated with a new rule. Cutting Stonetoss without a policy to enforce it isn't better because it was democratic and everyone agreed.

If you really think "active modern Nazi propaganda" is a line we should establish, then you should be advocating for a change to The Content Policy and the 5P Circuit in order to cut Stonetoss based on policy reasons, not on "I don't like this work" reasons.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I'd say we use a similar policy for hateful content that we use to determine whether a NSFW work has a place on the site. From what I gather, if a work primarily exists to be porn and cannot be troped without that context, it gets cut. Likewise, if a work primarily exists to be hateful propaganda to a modern audience and cannot be troped without discussing that propaganda, then it gets cut. Stonetoss has no narrative and is primarily political, so it's impossible to trope without referencing a comic rooted in conspiracy or antisemitism or bigotry or some other inflammatory or just plain bigoted belief.

The difference is propaganda can be less controversial to our userbase as time passes, because the audience it was written for no longer exists in the same way. Because Mein Kampf was written to appeal to the antisemites of the 1930's, and everybody nowadays knows it's Nazi propaganda, it's unlikely to cause disagreement over its content. However, Stonetoss caters to modern antisemites (or at least edgelords) who are more willing to defend its content due to being part of an ongoing alt-right memelord culture.

Edited by mightymewtron on Aug 17th 2020 at 2:25:25 PM

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

Cutting a tropable work because we can't trope it without crossing a ROCEJ minefield, though very unusual, isn't totally unprecedented; This Troper was cut because it talked about drama related to us, and it was determined we couldn't trope that.

Edited by Kappaclystica on Aug 17th 2020 at 11:30:11 AM

Honestly you've got a point. While I've been saying that we can just be fully objective with the page, it's still primarily discussing politics we aren't actually allowed to take a stance on. There's nothing else to talk about.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I was originally for keeping the work, but after thinking about it more, I think cutting the page is the way to go. Even if we successfully curated it, it'd only be a matter of time before Stonetoss's fanbase finds it and starts using it to spread shit across the wiki.

Also, is it just me, or does the failed wikiword in the title look an awful lot like Triple Parentheses? It's ironic, but I think we could use a title fix, mods.

Edited by Kappaclystica on Aug 17th 2020 at 11:36:48 AM

I've changed the thread title per request.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I oppose deletion. While I don't personally think the Stonetoss page in itself would be a great loss if it disappeared, that's not the real issue at stake. If we establish a precedent for political censorship of which works may be covered on the wiki, surely no one believes it's going to stop here? Given how people are already talking openly about deplatforming, this will lead on to a purge of other works and authors who offend in one way or another.

Should we ban Holy Terror because of its unfortunate implications? V for Vendetta, which is extremist political propaganda if anything is (and just so happens to also be a good story)? Everything by John C. Wright because he is a Traditional Catholic ultra-conservative? Everything by Marion Zimmer Bradley, because she turned out to be a pedophile? And so on, and so forth. There are people on the Internet who seriously want to deplatform Harry Potter over the author's tweets. While I don't think that will happen here (it has too many fans who would protest), smaller authors who don't have Rowling's clout would be very vulnerable to this kind of outrage mobs. We can see this already on far too many other sites.

Bottom line, there are going to be people who will insist that far more valuable works than Stonetoss are "Nazi" or "Communist" or "TERF" or whatever and don't deserve to be noticed. And once we agree to political censorship in principle, we'll have a much harder time telling them off.

My preferred policy for Stonetoss is to do what Septimus Heap suggested in the original thread: Treat the page just like any other. Leave it alone as long as it doesn't cause trouble, and lock it if and when it starts causing major trouble. If we can have troll magnet pages like Sonichu and survive, this one isn't going to break us.