Wednesday 11 February 2015

Wednesday

Well, after a depressing couple of days I decided to try and cheer myself up last night. I ended up watching an X Men film, I quiet like them, they have been getting increasingly sophisticated and I really appreciate the subtext - although I suspect it's lost on many people who might prefer American Sniper instead.

Additionally - I had the opportunity to take my frustration out online by telling someone to fuck off.

I used to be much more involved in dog rescue and greyhound welfare groups a few years ago, and I'd regularly use and work on message boards, acting as a moderator etc. A big part of my job was to weed out the the kind of people who infiltrate innocuous threads and try to steer them towards racist and intolerant views. Generally it's groups like the BNP ad Britain First - they seem to have legions of people who join a minority interest group, start of in a fairly benign way and they bring up some anti-Muslim rhetoric or other. The 'mission' usually being to take control or 'break' the board. It's almost always about something in the news or the NHS waiting lists / lack of council houses and often something about birth rates that gets them going. It's a tricky one because you have to navigate between who is being mischievous and who is just a bit of a Daily Mail reader, and define where free speech ends and hate speech begins. Someone like that popped up on Facebook on a friend's thread - the usual thing - starting of by trying to question and debate but generally just steering towards rampant islamophobia. If you remember - I had one on here once in the comments section. Anyway - they certainly know how I feel now. In the aftermath - someone I know told me that it's a major issue for her on online breastfeeding groups. To add a comedy aspect - this morning someone forwarded me a thread from Mumsnet about dinosaurs and why it's wrong to teach children about things that didn't exist according to the bible. If I ever end up housebound or in a wheelchair - I'll probably join Mumsnet under a raft of assumed names - just for the sheer entertainment value.


Anyway - Wednesday morning, in the studio - eating a pear (it's freezing cold from having been in a bowl on my dining room table ) and gearing up to do something very difficult, out of my comfort zone and experience, and financially pointless. I lay in bed at 6am trying to motivate myself - looking for reasons to get up and give it 100% - I finally settled on something along the lines of 'pretend you have to do it for a job interview'.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

V interesting insight into moderator work on sites like that from your example. Shows a lot of sites don't have any decent mods!

I've chanced upon useful info on mumsnet than it descends into strange stuff indeed on occasion! Great example!
DL

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