Vote Brigading is the practice of mobilizing a campaign within an online community to promote or undermine a targeted page, user or belief en masse through the user-voting system. On Reddit, brigading is often employed as a silencing tactic by those who wish to undermine the presence of competing political agendas or opinions.
Brigading IS a worse term than bullying because it functionally gets used to prevent the action.
If the libs had to say “we feel bullied because the mean fempire criticises us for being virulent misogynists” they eventually have moments of clarity among themselves where they can’t help but realise they’re the fucking ones with a problem. But instead they do “brigading is bad and not allowed” which has no requirement to assess what the brigaders are actually saying, doing or criticising. This in turn results in a reduced amount of self reflection.
There’s a reason it caught on in the first place. Because it is USEFUL to the people that recognise it benefitted them. It is useful because it hides the purpose of the moderation behind layers of linguistic bullshit.
If we destroy the term through a campaign of calling it bullshit we functionally force both users and moderators to return to actually analysing what the “bullies” are saying and whether what they’re saying actually breaks any rules. If it does break rules they can be moderated (the fascists) and if it doesn’t break rules other than being an act of rightfully criticising racist, chauvinist, sexist, capitalist bullshit, then they will have to dance with that fact. If they moderate it anyway it outs the mods who are fans of all of those things and helps to cause agitation.
It is completely to our benefit to destroy this concept. Think strategically. If you game this out with enough things you’ll see that there’s very little to no downside for the left (or whatever you want to call those of us that aren’t anarchists) while it is actually very difficult for the right.
Brigading IS a worse term than bullying because it functionally gets used to prevent the action.
If the libs had to say “we feel bullied because the mean fempire criticises us for being virulent misogynists” they eventually have moments of clarity among themselves where they can’t help but realise they’re the fucking ones with a problem. But instead they do “brigading is bad and not allowed” which has no requirement to assess what the brigaders are actually saying, doing or criticising. This in turn results in a reduced amount of self reflection.
There’s a reason it caught on in the first place. Because it is USEFUL to the people that recognise it benefitted them. It is useful because it hides the purpose of the moderation behind layers of linguistic bullshit.
If we destroy the term through a campaign of calling it bullshit we functionally force both users and moderators to return to actually analysing what the “bullies” are saying and whether what they’re saying actually breaks any rules. If it does break rules they can be moderated (the fascists) and if it doesn’t break rules other than being an act of rightfully criticising racist, chauvinist, sexist, capitalist bullshit, then they will have to dance with that fact. If they moderate it anyway it outs the mods who are fans of all of those things and helps to cause agitation.
It is completely to our benefit to destroy this concept. Think strategically. If you game this out with enough things you’ll see that there’s very little to no downside for the left (or whatever you want to call those of us that aren’t anarchists) while it is actually very difficult for the right.