re: #87 Charles Johnson

Recently, a prominent member of the BlueSky community was exposed as having many sexual assault allegations, including a violent non-consensual strangulation incident which resulted in the victim falling unconscious. Chunks of the community knew small/vague details about the allegations, but neither the number of accusers, nor the severity of some of the incidents, nor the sheer extent of the accused’s longstanding campaign (largely done on Twitter) to discredit their accusers who had already gone public was known to any of the Aegis moderators prior to the allegations catching the entire site’s attention on the weekend of 6/14. After spending most of the weekend offline to deal with personal matters, Kairi personally reviewed the evidence at length and ultimately decided there was enough clear misconduct (both onsite and offsite) to apply a “Boundary Violator” label to the accused’s account.

In the aftermath of the accusations, many users came forward to criticize Aegis/Kairi (and other past community moderators) for not digging deeper into the allegations and acting sooner. Furthermore, other users came forward to criticize the methods used to draw attention to the allegations (including claims that the allegations were boosted to distract from another large-scale conflict around asexuality that had already been set into motion several days prior). A small set of users in the former camp had been reported by members of the latter camp for Anti-Social/Trolling behavior over the prior week, and on 6/20 one moderator chose to act unilaterally against these users by applying account-level labels without considering the optics of the situation (or consulting/informing any of the other moderators either before or after the decision was made).

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Notice of Labeler Termination (Goes to Aegis Blue)