I sobered up enough to be antsy and have thoughts, SO:

what does "anti-bullying" actually mean as an ethos? What does it mean to state that an entity, a platform, a group, whatever - is "anti-bullying"?

Well, the first thing to state is: it means nothing. Anybody can say anything and if they don't do the work to back it up, it's empty words. Plenty of places claim to be anti-racist and mysteriously only hire white people.

So that's our starting point. But what about the action? Because "anti-bullying", as an ethos, has another problem re: being meaningless. Bullying is an action, an accusation -devoid of context, it can mean anything.

Zero-tolerance policies in schools, for example, pin blame for bullying equally on the person being bullied and the actual bully - and that's "anti-bullying" because if it's not reported or seen, it doesn't exist!

And TERFs accuse trans people or allies of "bullying" them for things like, say, getting them fired from agencies for anti-trans tweets. (Earlier this year.) So bullying is a pretty all-purpose word.

But let's say we're assuming good faith on the behalf of whatever mod team is announcing that their platform is anti-bullying. They genuinely don't want harassment, bullying, etc. on their platform.

How are they defining it?

Is the exact same behaviour going to be pinned as "bullying" vs. "self-defense" or "a reasonable response" depending on who's doing it, or if the mods like the person? And this isn't always obvious, either. We like to believe that we'll be able to figure out Bigots:tm: from a-

-distance, but quite aside from the fact that card-carrying bigots are generally smart enough not to advertise it if they're in charge of something, not all bigots THINK they're bigots. It's not as simple as Jackie The Racist did a Racism.

A lot of moderators believe that they'll be as unbiased as possible, and don't consider what kinds of arguments they're already used to hearing, or what they're inclined to fall back on. They might not question what they already know!

As many problems as Zootopia has as a movie, this is GENUINELY a good example. Judy falls back on "science" and "fact" and what she was Taught to make her argument about predators, and she doesn't mean to be racist! But she IS.

(Frankly the biggest flaw of that movie is that it used accurate science. That's what's so terrible about that scene - it almost, /almost/ got it right. Race science is BUNK.) And the concept of accidental bigotry isn't new to most people, even if we're-

-repeatedly really bad about it within ourselves. But see, that's more relevant for a place that puts anti-racist, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, etc. in its rules and ethics and then fails to live up to it.

"Anti-bullying" just doesn't take a stance on it at all.

"Anti-bullying", as a stance, doesn't even promise that somebody ISN'T a card-carrying bigot, that they're making an attempt... and it *sounds* like it, at first. Because obviously, marginalized people put up with a lot of harassment.

But "anti-bullying" is completely and entirely non-partisan. They might mean "anti-bullying" to mean that trans people need to stop getting harassed, or they might mean that those Silly Sensitive SJWs are bullying people into Censoring Stories.

AND - because they haven't defined what bullying entails - they can define it as whatever they want.

Some places do try to define it! But this still has problems.

A lot of online places try to distinguish between "bullying" and "harassment" with the second being more severe, and that's not a distinction that works well. And there's also - how do you define an attempted brigading vs. "sir I genuinely just QRTed something!"

If you're using an actual human measure, sure, it should be easy to tell. But if you're trying to enforce that on a friend, sure, you're gonna let it slide. Why wouldn't you believe them?

So, to recap: anti-bullying is a completely non-partisan measure, that needs to be backed up with action and actual statements of support towards marginalized populations. "Bullying" is usually transphobic, & homophobic, & racist, & ableist, & fatphobic - it rarely /isn't/.

But even with all these in place... Do you actually know what bullying is? It's lovely to say that you're anti-bullying, but do you know what DARVO is? Do you know how smear campaigns work? Are you willing to challenge your own assumptions?

If you're ready and willing to kick bullies off a platform, if you've educated yourself on all the Isms, but you still end up kicking the victims instead because you didn't actually listen to people w/ experience with bullying and harassment, then that's no good.

Lots of people barred me from fandom events on vague stories from other people about how I was a "bully", because they were anti-bullying, but didn't have the faintest idea how to actually go about it. Others just banned "fandom drama" from their spaces.

And this is the hardest thing to hear, for people who have good intentions and think these statements are easy - it is intense, detailed, complicated work to be "anti-bullying", because what you're actually doing is working against /abuse/.

Bullies and abusers exist on two ends of a spectrum. Emotional abuse and playground bullying are the same thing in different environments and to different intensities, and if you're willing to take on bullies, but balk at actual abuse, then you don't understand what you've-

-signed up for. And - critically - anybody can be an abuser or a bully. Not in that everybody is a "potential monster". But everybody's capable of this kind of stuff. Nobody's above it intrinsically.

So if you want to truly take on the idea of being "anti-bullying" you have to have safeguards that anticipate that you, your friends, your coworkers, /aren't/ above it all. When there are harassment reports, have them be double and triple checked.

When there's a mediation call, have record-keeping be required. When somebody's close friends with someone involved, don't have them be the moderator to deal with it "because they know them".

And accept, RIGHT OFF THE BAT, that this is part of your job. It's not making your "job more difficult". This IS your job. Moderation that brushes away all moderation isn't moderation. That's like an IT guy who doesn't fix anything.

In summary, Carthago delenda est.

(And if you got that joke, you both know too much history and have been on fandom twitter too much over the last three days, go outside.)