That’s all well and good, but every one of these I have ever seen on the site (I’m not claiming every one on the site, but every one I have seen) has been posted from the US.
It’s not a coincidence that
they suddenly started being posted on the site about a year ago
it almost exclusively seems to be done by white teenage males.
Does it suck that a group of a-holes have co-opted the sign ? Yes. Are they going to do it again ? Yes.
But there is absolutely no doubt that the sign is now commonly viewed as offensive. As was stated above, it is being posted either by people who are clueless, who are looking for lulz, or what we used to call ‘poops and giggles’ (to avoid getting banned, I wont use the real term) or as a basis to offend and hurt people.
If someone wants to post this kind of stuff on the web, go ahead, knock yourself out. There are hundreds of thousands of places on the web where it is permitted. There are even places it is encouraged. Go do it there.
If you are determined to demonstrate to the world how much of a flaming moron you are go ahead, but iNat is under no obligation to offer you a platform to do it. And nor should it.
Amazon certainly rejects the posting of any reviews that don’t meet standards of civility.
Why can’t we impose a screen able to recognize the human hand, that would automatically delete the post, notify the poster of the transgression, as well as put the observer on a “watch list” (probation)?
Unfortunately, unless you accept some collateral damage, it is not as simple as just trying to auto delete photos of hands. If you go through my observations you’ll find dozens of closeup pics of my hands. In none of them am I displaying an offensive gesture, I’m holding a dragonfly to be photographed.
If AI was able to reliably identify human hands making certain gestures with perfect accuracy, it would be able to correctly identify every observation to species level too! Automatic moderation like that simply doesn’t (currently) have a good enough success rate to be usable.
Mere offence should not be sufficient cause for censorship. Offence is taken, not given. There are people who take as much offence from the theory of evolution being taught in schools as anyone takes from a hand gesture.
that’s a really common strategy of these unsavory groups though. The swastika itself is co-opted from a totally unrelated religious symbol. Unfortunately once it happens, you do kind of nee dto stop using it unless you’re very careful and clear about it, which isn’t what is happening with the people doing this in the US now on inat.
I meant something the young knew what it meant, as opposed to an old fogey like me. The young scientists apparently know to shake their heads at the gesture.
When the terms of use of a site explicitly list posting offensive material as cause for action, then absolutely it does.
Private entities have the right to enforce whatever behaviour standards including speech that they want.
As I wrote, if you feel compelled to post this kind of stuff, knock yourself out, just do it on a place where it is permitted, which is not this site. I don’t give a rodent’s rectum if you want to do it there, but not here.
This issue is still alive and well, albeit now in the context of an observation that would be at research grade but for the flag. https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/489786#activity_comment_4611165
Could we - pretty please with a cake on it - see some action taken on this front, whether it be a new flagging option that will actually hide content, or a statement of policy that will allow suspension of accounts so this can be dealt with by PAID staff.
Curators shouldn’t have to feel defensive and re-debate the issue every damn time we do anything about it ourselves, no matter how mild or reasonable our response is.
Well, it’s the weekend so I can’t get a quorum of staff together to discuss any official policy. But in my opinion it’s possible for reasonable people to have differing views on this, as evidenced by the excellent viewpoints made above. It’s also possible for a reasonable person to genuinely find something offensive about nearly anything, including things normally seen on iNat, such as roadkill, a hooked fish, etc., so the question is where does iNat draw the line. (sorry, sort of thinking out loud)
Because these symbols can be interpreted as hate speech and they don’t create any value for iNaturalist, I come down on the side of flagging them. Too bad the observation in question contains a sweet insect and is otherwise a genuine iNat observation, but I imagine that won’t happen often. We currently don’t have functionality for hiding photos due to offensive content, although that’s in the works, some details have to be ironed out. So I say flag the observation for now and, if you want to or can, reach out to the user about it.
I’m curious if there’s been a similar discussion and/or consensus about prominent displays of the middle finger. I flagged one and it was resolved as something like ‘offensive but appropriate’. Then there was a good laugh about the flag and resolution in the comments of the observation.
It was the main thumbnail for a species I had been investigating and, although I don’t consider myself prudish, I found it jarring and, in my opinion, out of place in the type of community I was hoping to find on iNat. (and, hoping to suggest to others… I can’t suggest this for parents of school children if that’s allowed)
Is raising one’s middle finger ever considered a hate symbol or explicitly meant to belittle a marginalized group in any culture or country? If not, I’m not sure it’s the equivalent to the OK symbol as used in the US.
Given the potential of such hand gestures to cause offense, I think it would be appropriate to ask users to crop them out, or flag/remove an observation, however the suggestion that accounts be suspended for a symbol as ambiguous as this one is a bad idea, there has been a trend of racists trying to co-opt common symbols, they seem to want to create a situation where peopel get accused of racism for nothing, I think the racists think they can gain support from peopel who are unfairly accused of racism
The bottom line is that if we ban peopel for any symbol racists try to co-opt we will ban innocent peopel, which is what the racists want and will only encourage them, but at the same time we must not tolerate anything posted with the intent of causing offense
It is not meant to target any particular group of people. It is often not even meant to target anyone- as a symbol, it is often associated with people (let’s face it, mostly teenage males of a certain socioeconomic status) who want to look tough or show their affiliation with a certain culture. It is therefore very far from being a “hate symbol”. Some consider it an obscene gesture, but I don’t think anyone really considers it a “hate symbol”.
Of course, sticking out the middle finger is often not symbolic at all, but merely practical. Many people have a tendency to use their middle finger as a convenient way to point to things, particularly when their hands are occupied. In my job, for example, I sometimes find myself inadvertently using my middle finger to point to things that I am showing to others. I also can’t tell you the number of times I have seen others (sometimes very blatantly) doing the same. Most of the time others don’t even notice, but sometimes we do and we just have a laugh about it and move on.
Honestly, as a freshman in college who maybe understands the mindset of a current High Schooler better than most, I highly doubt there was any malicious intent in the Luna Moth post. I’d say that everyone my age that I know is well aware of how some 4chan trolls tried to turn this into a hate symbol, and nobody cares. We played that stupid hand game all throughout HS where you’d hold the OK symbol down like in the photo, and if you got your friend to look at it, you could punch them (though I never did actually punch anyone, it was more fun just to try and get them to accidentally look). Should iNat’s policy on this symbol and symbols like it change? Maybe. Should this person be put in a position where they’re viewed as trying to spread hate? Absolutely not.
Think about it like this; a high schooler has just discovered iNaturalist. Maybe they think it’s cool, and they start up an account with some friends. They know their friends will see their photos, so they do this little “got 'em” hand game thing as a quick joke. All of the sudden, people are framing them as spreading hate and purposefully trying to be rude. Do you think this person would want to keep using this site? In their shoes, would you?
I can’t tell you their true intent, but I can make a pretty good guess that it was not to be rude or hateful.
I also don’t see the cause for defensiveness here. As the person who replied to your comment, you started by saying the sign was offensive and I simply offered up the possibility that it was not meant to be offensive. The way you’ve phrased your comment here makes it unreasonably seem like I’ve attacked you for what you said when all I really did was suggested that offensiveness was not the intent. Nobody said you were doing anything wrong by doing your job, so I see no reason to be defensive.
It should be banned, and I’m not talking about pointing habit, and it doesn’'t really matter how it is called in English, uploading such photo on iNat shouldn’t be allowed and left as that.
As far as I can personally tell the usage of the OK symbol as a hate symbol died out about as quickly as it was perpetuated as one. Personally until the flagging of this post I had legitimately forgotten that some 4chan trolls tried to even do that. For the most part I think most other people did the same because culturally no one uses the symbol that way. It is used variously throughout different cultures in different ways. For example it is used to give an affirmative in diver lingo. What if a group of inatters were diving and in the background of a photo someone was giving the symbol to one of the other divers? Would this have to be flagged as a hate symbol? Logically no it should not because that isn’t how it is being used. Culturally I think most people have gone back to accepting the symbol as an okay symbol, a symbol for “asshole”, or both (some people I met in Peru used it for both).