Handling Offensive Language

Here's how we solved the "offensive language" issue on Chowhound, in terms of community management and moderation: We weighted Context.

Remember "context"? Consideration of intent? You know, the part completely ignored by the mechanism of detection and calling out of sinful utterance by packs of vigilant anti-racists patrolling social media and rotely pattern-matching terms on their frequently-updated kill lists? What you meant or who you are hold no place in it. Even if you're Albert Schweitzer, if you've used the term, you take the hit. Period.

We opted to handle human language issues humanely. So this is what we came up with: Any provocative language used with obvious anger or disparagement was deleted (our main problem was with the underlying nastiness, not the words themselves). So this was a no-go:

"The Jewy kitchen served me two lousy meatballs."

But provocative language that was not obviously angry or disparaging could stay. For example:

"The knishes were Jewy wonderment".

More sharply provocative terms received greater scrutiny, but still weren't rotely deleted. "Don't miss the stupendous kike kasha!" would have been permissible, because intent is unmistakably positive (though cloddish).

Kids, "kikes" was a naughty term for Jews. You haven't heard it because we made the word go away, which is why everyone just loves Jews now. See? It works!

The inevitably objection was: "But how can you know?" And our reasonable answer was "If you're unsure, it's clearly not 'obviously angry or disparaging.'"

"Benefit of the doubt", just like the olden days! We weren't morality police meting out punishment. Our job was to create an environment for different people to express themselves in different and colorful ways. And if you needed to be shielded from certain words you found upsetting, we suggested that you reconsider whether the Internet was really for you. It's not the Internet's job to shower you with only your most favorite words, opinions, and ideas. It wasn't Chowhound's role to foster an experience to your perfect specification. That's not community, that's a narcissist's reflecting pond.

It all came down to considerations many of those same people would claim to cherish: tolerance and diversity. Communities tend to enforce conformity of expression and opinion, and we fought that dynamic, recognizing Chowhound would be best if it drew the richest, broadest, and most varied cast of characters. We refused to buff our conversation into an NPR-friendly sheen to gratify a fragile contingent, even though I myself carried around a WNYC tote bag.

My favorite poster was FEDEX GUY - my actual FEDEX delivery guy, fwiw - who'd fling terse, misspelled, highly vulgar tips for obscurities no one else had on-radar. He did not fit in, which I recognized as a shortcoming on our part, but I loved seeing him trudge in amid the Batali acolytes (out-squealing each other over some to-die-for sweet corn crema) with his coarse language and brusque manner. My philosophy of community morality was Rodney Kingism. "Can't we all get along?"


Here's another thing I learned: once you allow people to start weighing in on what offends them, there is literally no end to it. People would much rather talk about that than tacos or har gow. Luckily, in those days, you could still tell a crowd to cut it out and have only a few of them stomp off in a tiff (one of our most veteran posters decided she couldn't remain part of a community where the term "White Trash" was permissible, though the term appeared in the title of a bestselling cookbook, and was never used pejoratively).