The Enablement of Hate Speech on Amino

Amino is an online application developed by Narvii, Inc and created by Yin Wang and Ben Anderson in 2014. A very unique feature of this app is that it is broken down into communities created by users themselves. One such community is Politics. Politics Amino is the single largest political community on the app, with over 10,000 members. Various internal polls have identified that the main age demographic is young teenagers, some as young as twelve or thirteen.

So the past year or two we have had issues with hate speech on Amino. What I am defining by that is dehumanizing language and normalization of violence against minorities.

So I thought I would join the Politics Amino staff to combat that. It didn’t really work out because any time I would do anything about it, the rest of the moderation team would get angry with me. I eventually realized the reason why it has gotten so bad was because the staff just enabled this kind of abusive behavior the entire time.

So I quit my position in late February of this year, and that’s when me and a group of a few others, a collection of leftists, a liberal, and a conservative, started this document. Once we started collecting screenshots of different instances of hate, it was so much worse than I would have imagined it could be. By and large, it is a well-organized document. Each screenshot is in chronological order, marked with a date and link to the post or chat it could be found in. Many have descriptions of the post.

In about two months, we thought we would bring our findings and our suggestions to the PA moderation team one last time for them to understand how bad it was. So on April 26, 2020, that is what we did. Without much of a discussion about it, they immediately rejected it.

So a lot of prominent people in the community were upset with what we were doing. And so some things that they would do were to lie about us or fabricate completely fake screenshots showing us saying things we didn’t even say. We got some death threats. And this was in part to turn the community against us. The staff in many ways enabled this kind of behavior and would not allow me to make a post in return to defend myself.

And then on May 10, 2020, the PA moderation team banned us because we had these concerns. So we went to Team Amino to report the staff. They did nothing. We contacted the CEO and co-founder of Amino about this situation. He didn’t do anything either. At every single level the system that was supposed to be put in place to keep the community safe for everyone just failed. We feel like this is an issue because time and time again online radicalization has manifested itself in real world violence.

PA Stochastic Terrorism

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