The Failure Of Derpibooru

Before we begin, I should note that when I complained about this on Twitter my friend DinkleDash asked the following:

Define fascism.

Mind you, in a case where people are praising Hitler, drawing swastikas, and talking about blood purity I don’t think we need to consult the dictionary to determine these guys are fascists, but fair is fair and at some point we’ll run into more sneaky people, so here we go.

I define fascism as pure authoritarian, usually to the point where it will incorporate both right-wing ideas like nationalism and social conservatism with left-wing ideas like regulated economies. The reason for this is because a fascist does not care about the left or the right, they are instead only interested in their own power.

You might have seen this argument from a fandom animator named Tiarawhy:

Communism continues to kill, even today as evident in countries where it’s still got a foothold (and countries that were under it continue to suffer). In regards to Nazism, its a defeated ideology that is considered more or less a joke by everyone, outside of a few diehard skinheads and those drawing edgy stuff because they find it funny or like the outfits/style it had.

Again, this may sound fine until you remember fascism is pure authoritarianism. Saying fascism is gone but authoritarian communism is still an issue makes as much sense as saying — actually, it doesn’t make any sense.

Anyway, onto the article.

On 6/30/2020, the brony website Derpibooru — one of the largest MLP art websites on the entire internet — changed one of its rules to state the following:

Do not troll, attack, insult, name-call, or otherwise try to intentionally antagonize another person or group of people. This includes making racial, sexual, homophobic, or otherwise demeaning slurs, or posting similarly abusive content. Similarly, do not promote Nazism or other hateful ideologies.

The last sentence was added due to various articles pointing out that art praising fascism and Nazism were, while not common, quite present on Derpibooru.

I stand by the amount of hateful content on that website being highly exaggerated, mind you. As I wrote on 6/28/2020:

[Using the numbers provided by articles making the argument this is a problem] Racist images make up 0.05% (roughly one in every two thousand images on the website) of the images on Derpibooru.

However, even the most minor rules in place were “too political” for Derpibooru, so now that rule says, once again:

Do not troll, attack, insult, name-call, or otherwise try to intentionally antagonize another person or group of people. This includes making racial, sexual, homophobic, or otherwise demeaning slurs, or posting similarly abusive content.

Wait, where did the part condemning Nazis go? I mean, Nazis are a group basically everyone hates and the vast majority of the rest pretend to hate and be nothing like seriously stop laughing — could they really not condemn Nazis of all people?

Of course, Derpibooru has had this issue for years. This is the same website that allows Foalcon, basically the nice way of saying “MLP child pornography” because it’s not technically illegal and therefore it’s not an issue. As of writing, 16,934 images on Derpibooru are tagged “Foalcon” — and that’s not even counting images that are Foalcon but not tagged. That means roughly 1% of images on this website are child pornography, but it took the media telling them they fucked up in a much smaller area for them to consider looking into this — and then they double down on doing nothing because of course they do.

For years now, Derpibooru has been best described as a hugbox. In 2017, the website briefly banned downvotes, something they quickly reversed after everyone made fun of them, because anything even slightly negative is just too much for them.

Similar to the downvote removal, Derpibooru specifically banning Nazi content — and I do mean explicitly Nazi content by the way, they were very clear about this not applying to anything that could be seen as not Nazi content — was met with massive backlash from the community. In both cases, instead of doubling down to try and enforce the artificial nicety the website has pretended to have for years, Derpibooru realized that doing such might be just slightly difficult so they gave up.

The reason? Derpibooru is ran by people who either don’t care or have some sympathies for this ideology themselves.

Here’s another interesting part of this story, a few people who are part of the Derpibooru staff did speak up from the insider. The vast majority of them were fired and replaced with people who were complacent. Here’s the excuse from one moderator named Parasprite:

You don’t know how many times I’ve said “I don’t want us to end up like reddit did” or used phrases like “pull a tumblr” to emphasize how much this was hurting us.

Again, this is in reference to them taking a stand against one of the most unpopular ideologies known to man.

I end this post with part of another message written by another administration, Blossomforth, on 7/2/2020:

We want to be clear — hateful content is not welcome on Derpibooru. We will be tightening our rules and will not be allowing any form of harmful ideology. This includes not only content promoting Nazism, Stalinism, Communism, etc but also content promoting racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else involving hate speech.

So, how many days until they back down on this one?