Don’t let fascists take over your community

Alternate title: so you’re a community moderator and you’re worried about fascists taking over your space.

Follow this guide to disinfect and sanitize your community! Prevent the sickness before it strikes!

Preface

Who am I? I was a moderator for an openly antifascist sub with more than 50,000 subscribers on Reddit.

Get acquainted with mod tools at your disposal and Reddit sitewide rules. Clarify your rules in the sidebar and rules widget. You are allowed to place a rule against reactionary speech or fascist viewpoints and you should do that. One gets the community one deserves, and your actions as mod will shape your community.

You will also need some tools to help you out. RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) is cool to enhance your experience as a user, but if you’re a mod you need Reddit Toolbox. Both of those can work together though, and you can download them for Firefox or Chrome. Reddit Toolbox adds tools to quickly ban someone (or unban them, if it was a mistake), as well as look into their comment history (subs they participate in the most) as well as search for specific subreddits or terms on someone’s profile. You can, for example, look up if someone uses the n-word frequently or uses fascist terminology often. You’ll need at least Toolbox to moderate, it’s impossible otherwise.

While you can check someone’s history at a glance (illustration below) with Toolbox, you also need to check their profile afterwards as sometimes, people commented a lot in a reactionary sub to argue against the people there. It happens.

As far as I’m aware Toolbox only works well with the Old Reddit design and you can’t have it on the smartphone app.

Toolbox shows this screen if you click on the H button next to someone’s name. This user posted 44 comments in r/Drama (under “count”), totalling 21% of their comments. If you saw another reactionary sub, such as T_D, high up there, there’s close to 100% chance this user is a reactionary. (In this case we banned him as he was from an r/drama brigade).

Rule 1: You have to take a hardline stance.

You can’t allow fascists to start spreading on your subreddit. Even if they’re not saying anything unusual (things a fascist would say), you can’t let them in, because the problem isn’t if they’ll start saying fascist things, it’s when. If you allow fascists in your community, this will signal to others that this is a good place to spread their propaganda, and so more fascists will come in to reel in normies. At some point, the more reasonable people in your community will be put off by all the fascist presence and will leave. After which your subreddit will become yet another alt-right sub.

If you see a fascist, ban them straight up. No discussion, no explanation. They want to come back? They can stop being a fascist.

And yes, you should take post history into account when banning someone. This is kind of an unspoken rule on Reddit that your history doesn’t follow you, but why would it matter that someone is on their best behaviour when they browse your sub if they shout racist slurs the rest of the time? Would you be friends with a racist if they said “I usually don’t like black people, but you’re one of the good ones”? Would you introduce your black friends to this person?

About deleting their presence

Whether you want to delete their comments as well is up to you. I personally would recommend that you do, remove their whole presence on your subreddit, as it sends a clear message: fascists are not welcome here. It also prevents people from listening to what they have to say (we’ll come back to this in rule 2). But if the people in the comments have piled on the fascist, or if someone has written an excellent rebuttal, you can leave the original comment up in order to teach something to people.

When banning someone, you can include a short message that will only be visible to the mods. I recommend using this option every time you ban someone to remember why you banned them down the line (read “about unbanning” just below to know why). You can also include a reason for the ban that will be sent out to the user, and I recommend not using that one. Don’t give ammunitions to the fascists you ban, you don’t owe them any minute of your time.

About ironic fascism

Let’s also point out right now that there is no ironic fascism. This is an excuse people like to use when they’re not confident in taking responsibility for their beliefs. A joke doesn’t excuse what was said. The people targeted by the joke will not see it ironically, and they shouldn’t have to. Case in point: you, the reader, were probably the target of a joke once that hurt you from someone you did not expect (a parent, a teacher, an acquaintance you didn’t really know…). Did you laugh with them after they explained it was a joke? Or did you wonder why they would hurt you out of nowhere?

However, you will sometimes have very progressive or antifascist users who also use dogwhistles ironically. The triple brackets for example are being reclaimed and you’ll sometimes find antifascists use it to make a joke at the expense of fascists. This is what separates irony, or sarcasm from bullying. Making jokes at the expense of fascists using their own arguments ought to be fine (it’s up to you to decide that for your subreddit specifically).

The golden rule I use is: how will this be interpreted by the people targeted? People also like making self-deprecating humor, and you have to decide beforehand how you will treat this kind of humour, which may be upsetting to many users who did not expect to see it on your subreddit.

So if someone makes a pro-fascist argument, and then tries to weasel their way out saying it’s a joke, chances are you’re up against a fascist signalling to other fascists. At this point you should remove the comment, and check the user’s profile for their general political leaning — sometimes, it happens that people who are otherwise not reactionaries clumsily make their point and say something entirely different than what they were trying to say. If they’re a fascist, sanitize like you learned: delete all comments, ban the user.

About unbanning

Do you have an appeal process on your subreddit? Is it clarified to the community, or is it up to each mod? Whatever your stance on appeals, you will sooner or later get fascists trying to get their ban appealed.

In the “new” modmail (on mod.reddit.com), you can see a user’s last comments on your subreddit. With toolbox, you can also open up their profile and search for all their comments in your subreddit. Sometimes, you’ll get someone appealing their ban but you don’t see any of their comments.

This can happen for two reasons.

1. Their comments were made so long ago that Reddit is unable to fetch them. They still exist if you look for them on Google (type: site:reddit.com/r/yoursub “username”).
2. They deleted their comments manually.

You’ll sometimes get fascists doing the latter. Without evidence, how can you remember why you banned them?

So whatever your stance, you need to include this use-case in your process: sometimes people will appeal and you won’t even remember why you banned them. On our subreddit, we’ve taken the decision that if we banned someone, it was for a good reason. If someone has deleted their comment, then it means they didn’t want us, the mods, to read them and it doesn’t help their case.

Rule 1 was the longest rule and was densely packed. We’ll now start looking at how to recognize fascist users.

Rule 2: Get acquainted with fascist tactics

This can’t be exhaustive because tactics change over time, although we find that since fascism has existed, the root of the tactics fascists use to legitimize their ideology haven’t changed. The only thing that changes is how they spin it. For example, fascists of today have an infatuation with calling people cucks (cuckolds) — digging into this new insult shows very old roots of power at work, that goes back to the first fascist theorists, Mussolini to name just one, who found violence for the sake of violence beautiful. In other words, when a fascist calls you a cuck, they’re saying “I’m better than you, I’m above you, I have the power of life or death over you”, and so they might as well call you a serf, a slave, or any other term that implies a power dynamic (and indeed they have, like when the Nazis called others “untermenschen”, subhumans).

Fascists like to make themselves look like poor victims of the overzealous left (because the left is an acceptable political enemy; in reality they see themselves as victims of “the Jews”, whom they believe control the left, but they know they can’t say that in polite society). They will pretend to care about free speech because then they can attack you for silencing free speech (and try to earn sympathy points in the process) — but in reality they don’t care about free speech and will not allow it in their society.

Don’t debate with fascists. You don’t need to prove the merit of not genociding minorities. The people that are targeted for genocide should not have to prove their humanity. When you debate a fascist, they’re not debating with you, they’re trying to convert the apolitical reading their comments. You’ll only end up frustrated because they don’t want to be convinced, and anything you can say against their arguments has been said before. Fascists don’t operate reasonably, so using reasonable arguments (e.g. pointing out one of their source doesn’t say what they think it says) is not going to work. Case in point: Chamberlain’s Appeasement strategy didn’t work, WW2 was inevitable and it wasn’t solved in debate club.

For more info on fascist tactics, I recommend starting with The Alt-right Playbook.

Rule 3: Get acquainted with fascist spaces

You don’t need to get intimate, but you need to know the current fascist and alt-right subreddits. You need to know their dogwhistles (words and sentences they use to signal to other fascists, such as “13/50” or “despite being 13% of the population…”), and the subs they frequent. If you’re using Toolbox, these are things you can look for in their post history.

Though you probably don’t have to visit them yourself, this is the type of info that usually gets passed around in leftist and antifascist subs, so if you browse those instead, you’ll usually be up to date soon enough.

But there is a certain deal of personal judgment when it comes to determining if a user on your subreddit is a fascist. Sometimes, it’s hard to understand what someone means in one comment, and nothing in their history indicates clearly where they lean. There are a few ways to solve this: leave the comment up but monitor it, eventually someone may reply, to which OP will reply and may expose themselves. Or you yourself can ask leading questions to try and get an answer. Otherwise, as mod, feel free to ask them outright and distinguish your comment: “I’m not sure what you meant by that, you need to explain your comment”. With RES you can use a custom tag on anyone, so you can mark someone as “under watch” or whatever you want, and remember that the next time you find one of their comment.

Fascists can’t help themselves but spread their propaganda, so they’ll slip up eventually. If you can’t catch someone the first time, usually by the second or third time you’ll find them out. As I wrote above, it takes personal judgment and you’ll get better at it with time. It gets far easier after a couple months.

Some tactics fascists use

1. They like making sockpuppet accounts. This is an account that is several months old, sometimes even years, but it has very little content — a few or no comments, but they have say 100 karma, which means they deleted most of their comments. Most subreddits require some karma and a certain account age to post, sockpuppet accounts allow them to bypass those filters. Deleting their comments also allows them plausible deniability: if you can’t find anything in their history, then how do you know they’re a fascist? In my experience as a moderator there were maybe two times when I found an empty account that wasn’t a fascist.
2. In the same vein, look at usernames. While they usually don’t indicate anything special about the user behind them, sometimes fascists go all-out and include dogwhistles in their name. This can include 1488 or just 88, something with Heil, etc.
3. When you ban them, they usually ask “what did I do?” or “which rule did I break” in modmail, in these exact words. The rest of the time they’ll send hate mail. You don’t owe them anything and if you reply, they’ll use that against you: either they’ll post it to one of their subs to complain (thereby inviting a brigade), or they’ll use your reply as a starting point to look for weaknesses in your arguments. Feel free to report hate mail to the admins, they take this seriously now. By the way — the rule they broke was that you’re the mod and they’re not and you don’t owe them anything. (You may think good faith appeals also ask what they did wrong, but they actually don’t in my experience! Rather they’re apologetic, try to understand which rules they broke, and start their appeal this way).
4. Fascists usually come in pack. Your subreddit is posted somewhere on mainstream Reddit or one of their subs, and you’ll get a small brigade for several hours, usually less than a day. Which means you need to be more vigilant in those times, but you also can’t start seeing everyone as a threat, you need to keep to a clear process when banning people. You can always undo wrong bans, so don’t worry too much. Usually people are understanding when you explain.
5. Dogwhistles are a big one. Usually they can’t help but expose themselves, so if you know the dogwhistles, it’s easier to find someone out.
6. Comment history helps a lot. Those that don’t care to use sockpuppets will use their main account, and when you see that they comment a lot in reactionary subs, you don’t even have to think about banning them, just do it.
7. You can try to bait them by posting something aimed at them. Post something that you know will get them riled up, that targets them directly. It’s like a fly trap, and while they will take the bait and you can ban them, I’m not sure about the overall effectiveness in reducing the brigade. But it’s good fun, your community will like it.
8. Fascists will mass-report content in your subreddit to the admins in order to get you banned. We get it all the time during a brigade. So make sure to remind your community that sitewide rules apply, and you need to enforce them: admins may check your subreddit out. Especially now in 2021, reddit admins have foregone any critical thinking when checking out content. If reported content can be considered to be breaking the rules, no matter how remotely, then assume it will be deleted. You may, and it has happened, be suspended for a few days for telling someone you hope they stub their toe for example.

Rule 4: Nobody is too good for your rules

This is something many mods struggle with. You may eventually find out that a member of your community is a fascist, or highly reactionary. Maybe they never really showed it before, and it just kinda came out of the blue for you. It will likely happen down the line. If that happens, you need to do what you would do for anyone else and remove them from your community.

In the same line, make sure to properly assess your moderators before you add them. If you’re serious about banning fascist influences from your subreddit, you need to take time before adding moderators to your team. You can always remove them if you’re higher up than them on the list (I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s how Reddit works), but what if your account gets suspended? You need people you can trust to handle an eventual succession.

Typically in heavily moderated subreddits, you’d need one mod for every 5000 subscribers, provided those mods are active. In less moderated subreddits, you’re closer to one mod for every 10000 users.

Conversely, feel free to ask for help from your community. You can’t monitor everything, and it’s important that people know to report fascists if they see them in the comments. What happens more often is that people will reply to them, tell them off, and go back to whatever they were doing and you don’t catch any of that happening. You now have a fascist who is not banned and openly posting on your sub.

Some dogwhistles to know and watch out for

So far this guide purposely didn’t give out specific dogwhistles because they change often, with new ones appearing. But there are several timeless ones which we’ll look into below, with image examples from actual cases.

1. Triple brackets (((around a name))). Started being used to indicate a person is Jewish, and it’s become a meme. Sometimes people use it on themselves as a way of reclamation or to mock it, because it’s become so blatant it’s not even a dogwhistle at this point. Caution should be exercised before moderating a user that uses those, rely on context and look at their profile.
2. 88, 1488, HH are the same dogwhistle: Heil Hitler (14 is technically his 14 words). While not everyone with 88 in their name is a fascist (it can also be the year of their birth), at this point you should look at their comment history.
3. Calling people cucks is usually something only the alt-right does. Also reclaimed ironically because “cuck” is neither a slur nor a word fascists invented.
4. Using the word “degenerate” is often a dogwhistle. Sometimes reclaimed by the targets of that word.
5. anti-immigrant rhetoric, dehumanizing them (such as calling them “invaders”) is also a dogwhistle. Something you’ll find more often is talking about “incompatible cultures” or “Africa for Africans” (etc, meaning Europe left for white people).
6. Talking about Israel is a can of worms. There are criticisms against Israel as a country, especially regarding their treatment of the Palestinian community, and therefore talking about Israel is not a fascist dogwhistle by itself. However, alt-righters know this and they will clean up their language to just barely let you hear what you want to hear, for example sometimes they’ll say “why is the USA spending so much money on Israel?” — a fascist will interpret this to mean “Why are we financing the Jews so much??”. I’m including this to show that fascists try to appropriate political language to propagandize.
7. Anything to do with White Genocide and the Great Replacement. Look up that one if you’re not familiar with it. In the same vein, the myth that white South African farmers are being killed massively is exactly that, a myth (murder in SA impacts all farmers disproportionately). While fascists propagate this myth, non-reactionaries have also started believing it without really researching it.
8. Defending Nazi Germany or other fascist states. Sometimes done by ignorant or edgy people who like to play devil’s advocate (which means not a dogwhistle, just a historically illiterate person), but if they start going on and on about it and praising all their “successes”, you can be sure they’re a nazi. A very blatant example: “Actually Nazi Germany had some good ideas that we can inspiration from, like their anti-smoking campaign”.
9. You can find more dogwhistles on the ADL website: https://www.adl.org/hate-symbols