Sexism in conversation moderation, or, why wasn't I suspended?

Question

Earlier today I was involved in a conversation on Stack Overflow which resulted in one user, Julia Anne Jacobs, being suspended, and another receiving a warning from a moderator.

The timeline from my perspective is:

1. Julia posted an answer to this question about Angular.
2. Another user, who may remain nameless for the purposes of this conversation, posted a very similar answer to hers, a few moments later.
3. Julia believed that her answer was plagiarized, and told the other answerer so.
4. Another user, "Concerned Father" (note the gendered and quite literally patronizing name) posted an answer containing some obnoxious tone-policing comments about her frustration with this other answerer.
5. A moderator then deleted that answer.
6. Due to the fact that high-reputation users have different visibility into things like edit histories and deleted comments, a mutual friend asked me to have a look at the chat conversation.
7. I joined the chat, and asked the original answerer to delete their answer because, although it was perfectly usable as an answer, he was high-reputation and she was low-reputation and if he honestly did not care about points, then he should be OK with paying that small cost to avoid the appearance of plagiarism. He conceded to this point and did so, but not without a significant amount of patronizing comments.
8. Our mutual friend knows a stack exchange developer as well, and asked what to do about this, she was referred to a moderator, who she then asked to look at the conversation.

As a result of these events, Julia and our mutual friend both received warning messages from moderators, and Julia received a 7-day suspension. The message to Julia said "other users were merely trying to help", and that "no one is copying you", but it is not clear how Julia was supposed to know these things given SO's fairly opaque user interface when it comes to tracking provenance of edits for (relatively) low-reputation users.

This timeline raises a number of questions:

• Why were there warnings issued at all? Based on what rules?
• Why was our mutual friend given a warning about "bullying" when she got a moderator involved specifically to make sure things were being adjudicated by the rules of the site?
• Where are the rules that say that summoning allies and colleagues to a conversation is forbidden?
• Why was Julia given an immediate suspension rather than a warning and a reference to the relevant portions of the code of conduct?
• How did the moderators know that the other account was not a sock puppet, and more importantly,
• how was Julia supposed to know that without special moderator spectacles on?

Note please that in summoning me, Julia did not summon a horde of trolls to complain with a social-media cattle call, but rather a specific ally for a specific purpose (someone with high enough reputation to see what was going on in ways that she potentially couldn't). By blaming her for summoning help, the SO moderator in this case has denied that I have responsibility for my own actions.

Throughout the conversation, all of these interactions reeked of the kind of implicit sexism that pervades the tech industry. Then, two women participating were warned, apparently for accusing the other answerer of things, but my sternly-worded accusation of sexism apparently didn't even warrant a brief contact from a moderator. I am open to another explanation as to why, but the default "because I don't present as female in this conversation" is too obvious to ignore.

I feel like the rules here are poorly explained and inconsistently applied, so I don't think anyone deserves a suspension. Perhaps a moderator should have contacted Julia and explained how some of these site features worked, how to determine whether there was or was not plagiarism, and given other escalation channels to use in the future. However, if there is a good reason that she was suspended, I feel like I should have a similar length of suspension, or at the very least a warning from a moderator.

I want to be clear about this part - asking for a suspension for myself is not a rhetorical device. If I am given a 7-day suspension on SO as a result of posting this I will feel that SO is at least a little bit fairer; I won't complain. I will still be annoyed about an opaque and arbitrary moderation process apparently run by people with no knowledge of or sympathy for the average experience of women in the software industry, but at least there will be an appearance of fairness.

If Stack Overflow is not going to have a reputation for being the same sort of scummy, sexist and racist space as other internet forums, these sorts of problems need to be dealt with with far greater transparency and clarity. For example, another really necessary step here would be a clear explanation of what a low-reputation user should do in situations like this. If it's against the rules to call for allies, and "bullying" to summon a moderator, then what options remain?

Answer 1

To be completely fair, after my initial investigation into the matter, I was fully prepared to just leave everything be for the remainder of the weekend and finish looking into it the next day. I wasn't even planning to take any action at all, but just to followup and make sure the situation had died down and no one was still arguing. Then she started accusing the other user of sock-puppetry, for no other obvious reason than that user's answer was accepted and hers wasn't. At that point, it became very clear that the behavior wasn't because of a misunderstanding. She was actively throwing out accusations at users with absolutely no evidence whatsoever.

We get users who complain about other users "stealing their answers" more often than you might think, and I have to say that this particular case is probably the most dramatic that I have ever seen. Most cases end fairly quickly without much of an incident. Someone points something out, and the user realizes they were mistaken. That certainly didn't happen here.

Calling in other friends to side with you is definitely not the best approach to resolve a situation. All that does is create a one-sided argument and make the other user feel uncomfortable. Much better approaches would have been to:

• simply flag the content for a moderator. Moderators can very easily see timelines of everything that happened and come to very speedy conclusions about what happened on a post.
• come to Meta so everyone can give their input and explain why the person is or is not wrong.

But a three-versus-one conversation in a chat room hidden away in the depths of the site? Not all that constructive.

Now, why weren't you contacted? While your comments about sexism were pretty baseless and I didn't understand why you even brought that up, there was one fact that stood above everything: you were actively trying to defuse the situation. You came up with a logical solution to end the drama - great, that's our favorite thing for users to do. End it and move on.

Why was Julia suspended? Because suspensions are a quick and efficient way to put an immediate stop to certain behavior. Warnings can be ignored, or behavior can continue before the warning even gets read. The behavior being targeted here needed to end right away. I sincerely hope she will calm down and realize that she went off the rails here, because the conversation in chat actually did start off very pleasant and civil before evolving into a train-wreck.

Answer 2

2018 Update to this, from a personal level:

I'm not going to get overly specific, but there were some things going on at the time that prevented me from seeing something that was pretty painfully right in front of us:

We (or at least I) assumed everyone involved was a man, except in the case that the user visibly identified as not being a man. Had we not done that, we would have understood why folks involved continued to get increasingly upset as we continued to apologize for the wrong things.

While this is unfortunately quite late, I take responsibility for this personally, and can only offer the apology I should have offered some time ago.

I know there's an apology right under this, but I essentially stepped on someone's foot and then apologized for setting their couch on fire. Or the reverse of that. In any event, I didn't handle this as well as I could have, and I own that.

I'm sorry.

---

As I noted as an edit to my previous answer, some mistakes that I can only describe as bone-headed were made on our part in the course of handling a recent situation.

tl;dr; - we failed to realize what was right in front of us, and we mistakenly accused someone that was actively helping the situation cool down of being combative and ill-intended as we floundered in helping a very confused inexperienced user understand what was happening by blaming instead of teaching.

While everything surrounding this chain of events is a bit bizarre, it's our job as the overseers to get stuff like this right. We didn't, which let some people down and hurt them, which means we've got some apologies to make. Let's start there.

1. satyrwilder was issued a very stern, and completely inappropriate warning for 'ganging up' - this user did nothing more than try their best to defuse the situation while mentioning our code of conduct, and kept reminding people to be nice. She was also not heard when she was trying to tell us that we had / did everything wrong.
2. Julia Anne Jacobs was issued a suspension that was excessive in the context of being used to temporarily freeze the situation so that we could make sense of it. She needed our help as a very confused inexperienced user, and we didn't listen. Moreover, we told her she was doing bad things while she was just repeating what other seasoned users had suggested, which we should have seen.
3. I'm pretty sure Glyph pulled out some hair as I remained dense in light of him trying his best to say I think you've got this completely wrong.

What bothers me the most is that several of us read the chat transcript and we still managed to get it wrong. We looked at every single letter, we just didn't get it.

To the three of you, we owe you an apology, and we hope that you'll accept it. You trusted us to do a much better job than we did, and we let you down this time. You have also been extremely gracious as we worked through this, and we very much appreciate that.

How in the heck did this happen?

Look back at Glyph's original question. Do you see the mention of a post by "Concerned Father"? Yes, a troll happened upon the confrontation as it was progressing, and took it upon themselves to 'get involved' by typing complete rubbish into a text box. Once we ascertained that it had no connection to either party in the argument, we set it aside as we continued to try and figure out what was going on. In doing that we completely negated the fact that people get harassed on the Internet far too regularly, and how the heightened state of anxiety folks could could have been feeling contributed to things.

We then looked at chat which was getting a little hotter near the end, looked at comments, and issued one suspension to stop things from escalating even more while we worked. That's not an uncommon thing for us to do when people are arguing quite heatedly, but what was really needed was a 'side bar' to explain some things about the system in a much nicer way.

To top that off, instead of thanking someone that worked really hard to keep things sane, we sent a very stern and cold warning, because reactions on our part started happening as the chat was being read.

I then took notice, looked into the situation, and only really understood half of it. 'Snow blindness' is the only term I can think of to describe it. 'Dense' equally applies.

What about going forward?

We, the community managers that oversee the workings of community moderation on our sites, must catch things like this, 'perfect storm' or not. We're going to be extending our training for employees on the community team based on what transpired, and look at existing guidance to fill in ambiguities.

We will also be sharing quite a bit of this with our community moderators, through our existing monthly email to them that goes over important things to know.

Is it possible to keep mistakes from happening in a network of our size? No. Is it our job to catch those mistakes with near-perfect accuracy? Yes, and we need to get better at that, which we're going to do - starting right now.

Answer 3

Note

It's very important to see this chat transcript (all of it) for context. I'm going to be posting a follow up answer shortly, we got a few things very wrong when handling this.

Please see this updated answer

---

Some things here. Just things everyone can take away so this unfortunate chain of events can bear some moderately useful fruit.

although it was perfectly usable as an answer, he was high-reputation and she was low-reputation and if he honestly did not care about points, then he should be OK with paying that small cost to avoid the appearance of plagiarism.

Quick compromise is a great way to resolve a conflict that's escalating rapidly, another approach is to beat on a monotone drum. It's always a source of contention when two nearly-identical answers are posted in quick succession, but there are many, many cases where appropriate and useful answers will be very close to one another; similarity to another answer is no reason to abandon your composition or composure.

Deleting your answer, or 'yielding' is not the right thing to do if you feel that doing so is a tacit acknowledgement of the claims being made. There's essentially one good answer to this, I wrote mine at the same time you were writing your answer, I don't see a reason to abandon the work. Just beat that drum and ignore the rest. If you think retribution is afoot, involve a moderator.

Don't offer to pay for the chewing gum the security guard thinks you stole if you know you didn't steal it.

Throughout the conversation, all of these interactions reeked of the kind of implicit sexism that pervades the tech industry.

Reading additional malice in the apparent presence of an 'ism' into the actions others have taken can really make the problem at hand seem much bigger than it actually is, because that's what happens when you get really angry.

When diffusing situations like this, focus on the what before you focus on the why, or you give the what a significant advantage as it balloons. I am not negating the importance of the why, but that's something to analyze after the situation stops moving.

If the root of pathologically inappropriate behavior seems to be some kind of hate that is in no way relevant to the merits of the contributions that provoke it, we will happily let someone know that the site appears to bring out the worst in them, and that they need to find another place to participate.

I feel like the rules here are poorly explained and inconsistently applied, so I don't think anyone deserves a suspension.

Animuson did a good job of explaining his decisions and I don't think I would have done things any differently. Conflict implies a degree of chaos and there's no practical way of spelling out what gets a warning, what gets a suspension and what isn't found actionable in the context of moderation - it's all about the context and these 'spats' are famous for coming out of nowhere.

We intervene as minimally as possible, and only to the degree that is necessary to curtail disruption. You don't know ahead of time just how much intervention is required, because these conflicts have a nasty habit of never having existed before they become an urgent problem :) It's up to moderators (and employees) to use their training and experience to do the least amount that is needed. If we tried to make that into a flow chart, there would be a giant "... and a human being looks at everything and makes a decision ..." box.

As long as you try to be nice and try not to assume the worst in people, you'll probably never hear from a moderator.

Answer 4

If anyone needs to know how the other half experiences SO / SE / ME, etc. do the following as an exercise:

Create a new profile (low rep points) that can be recognized as female and participate. Take notice of how you feel with this profile and if your experience is different. Don't try to act like you think a woman would act, just do your thing and see if you get a different response.

I've done that on tech IRC channels and it's been an eye opening experience. In general I've felt much more confident and safer under a male sounding nick, was addressed less critically, more supported (as an equal, not condescended to) and my opinions seemed to have more weight (more influence over the conversation).

Having the actual experience is more evidence than screenshots, chat transcripts, interviews, data mining, user IP tracking, etc.

That should probably be part of the training Tim Post mentions in his answer.

Answer 5

sigh I have felt this way at least once on SO, but didn't want to say anything to anyone (other than discussing at home) because I don't want to be "that girl" who's saying "Boohoo, they were snarky and treated me badly because I'm a giiirl" but at the same time...that's what it felt like...

It was as if I had asked a question and then was being encircled by sharks within a few moments of daring to ask anything while wearing makeup in the Hallowed Hall of Nerds. I am also a nerd, regardless of what my picture looks like, albeit I am FAR less skilled than many of the whizkids who post here - which is why I show up - to learn from people who are smarter and more experienced than me. I'm a noob. Sorry, weren't you once? No? That's pretty magical.

It wasn't just the question I'd asked that got picked apart, there were other, unnecessary comments and a lot of snark - BUT not from everyone. There were a few helpful souls who did their best to provide useful, evidentiary and legitimate answers to my question before it was closed, with no concern for some of the other impolitenesses occurring by a couple of other users.

I had actually wondered if I should change my profile picture (I have my account linked with facebook, so it's currently pulling that pic) to something more manly, maybe a big, hairy pair of....beards. Or something. It crossed my mind that then I wouldn't have to worry about (real or perceived) rudeness due to being a female, or looking like I don't have the right to be working in the tech industry.

I hate even playing this game, gender/identity/whatever shouldn't be a factor, and if the answers and reprimands I was given had been solely based on my content's lack of merit, I wouldn't feel so badly.

Don't get me wrong, getting told "Your question isn't cool"...never feels good, but hey - I'm not above trying harder to improve the quality of my postings, as some of the commentary in that thread will illustrate.

I felt like I'd asked a relevant question, followed the "no opinions" guideline by asking for all answers to be backed up with evidence, in hopes that I could learn from some real-world experiences that others have had...and I got put up for "Close This Question - Off-Topic", within five minutes or so.

The person who flagged it was full of veiled insults and snark, and two others came out of the woodwork (in the same five or ten minutes) to start criticizing my sentence structure and other irrelevancies. It's definitely not like I pulled a "Wut does my compuuterz do when I push teh butten?" or anything - I have decent writing skills. Good grief. The worst you can call me is long-winded, and that's just...true. :D

One of those users who stepped in to correct me and pick at the structure of my question did so politely - no problem there. That person provided valuable feedback on utilizing more paragraph spacing to make my question more reader-friendly, and I appreciated that.

The other...while I eventually pried some useful information out of him, was a jerk. And the high-rep user who flagged me as if he was sitting, circling, waiting, was a third.

I DID eventually get a better answer from another user later as to why my question may have been closed (he/she gave me some good insight as to the "off-topic" portion of the closure), but they still were not able to explain why or how asking for a fact-based answer with evidence...is considered "soliciting opinions".

I don't come to tech forums to ask legitimate questions and get answers from people acting like snot-nosed brats, and I was more than a little taken aback. I am glad you posted this question thread, as even though it's an old question...it's still relevant, and it still affects the Stack family of users. Now to go find a picture of something manly. Maybe a lumberjack.

Answer 6

This whole thing was an anomaly. And it is so because evidence was able to be gathered and employees actually showed up. I have seen this happen many times but never before with clear documentation of it happening. The man acted in a very threatening manner and was able to create a burner account that could do things with just one point of reputation and acted in a way that was clearly against all common decency and kindness yet the ones punished for this where women. The only people making threats where men. The whole thing was so disturbing that it actually set off my post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For a while there I was so freaked out that I tried to contact several moderators including animuson because I genuinely felt that Julia was in real and imminent danger. However all but one of my cries for help fell on deaf ears. Here is the reply I got:

Chango,

I went through the user's history, including all comments made in the last week, and I see no evidence of anyone coming unhinged. I saw a bit of a debate which (in the grand scheme of things) was probably one of the more polite discussions that flare up in comments from time to time. I served as one of your elected moderators for years prior to ultimately becoming one of the senior community managers, and I'm frankly not seeing what you're seeing.

It could be that three of us now have just missed something painfully obvious, that can happen in the enormous swath of information one can dig out of a profile; a link to a specific comment or incident or even a place to start would be really helpful if you think someone is coming unglued.

What I'm not seeing is the trolling, which is why I'm not getting the vibes that you're getting.

Was the actual trolling itself present in chat, not really comments? I took a cursory glance at the transcripts and nothing jumped out at me.

In short, links help, this user is extremely active - there are many haystacks here, which one is most likely to contain the needle? :)

I am a United States Air Force vet I was stationed in Turkey. This whole incident has left me severly affected and it has proven 3 things with out a shadow of a doubt

1. Systemic sexism is clearly happening in Stack Overflow
2. The men in charge of Stack Overflow clearly do not care that this is the case
3. When forced to deal with it they will mercilessly attack women

If you do not see this, there is something very wrong with you. I beg you to open your eyes, have at the very least a molecule of human decency and compassion. What good can there be of alienating women and minorities from the tech? A woman birthed you, cared for you, loved you and you thank that kindness with cruelty and spite. You are destroying your very humanity and you do it with such glee!

I would write more but I need to curl up into a ball from how sick this whole torture session has left me. And may something have mercy on your souls.