My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem – The Atlantic

In an email, the owners told me that the presence of white nationalists in the My Little Pony fandom is unfortunate. They insisted that they have always tried to act against content [that] displays genuine racist intent on behalf of the poster, adding we have not always been as strict as we would have liked to be. They also clarified that the removed images would be gone only temporarily, because of the moderation headache the images have been causing. They will later be restored to the site, the owners said, as an artifact of the moment.

Moderation is always complicated, but never more so than when a community is unsure of what it wants to be or what its willing to play host to. Derpiboorus tiny policy change has led to an uproar in the sites forums, and disgruntled users insist that it will lead to a purity spiral, or a slippery slope to censorship and authoritarianism (the standard set of arguments that come up in every major moderation dispute, which tend to conflate site rules and deplatforming with government crackdowns on free speech). Meanwhile, supporters of a stricter content policy point out that the update is toothless, and will do almost nothing to curb racism on the site.

Whats clearest from talking with those on either side of the argument is that the My Little Pony fandom has developed a totally nonsensical hodgepodge of values. Many fans who specifically support Black Lives Matter, for example, are also fans of Aryanne, a fan-invented Nazi pony with a pink swastika on her hip. They do not acknowledge a contradiction. I love Aryanne, a 25-year-old My Little Pony fan named Sam told me. Its just cute, funny, sexy art. Then he added, Black Lives Matter art is great. I welcome it. (Sam asked to go only by his first name to avoid harassment.)

When Acesential posted a drawing of a pony holding an I Cant Breathe flag, and when Henry posted art containing the initialism ACAB, for All Cops Are Bastards, commenters spat back that ponies shouldnt be used as a mouthpiece for politics, even though some of those same commenters have loved it when ponies wear Make America Great Again hats. This idea of what counts as political and what doesnt is another thing the fandom took from 4chanwhere racial slurs are just jokes but anti-racism makes you a social justice warrior.

Read: The misogynistic joke that became a goth-meme fairy tale

This is a fan community that has prided itself on a permissiveness and pushing boundaries and cloaking themselves in irony and the idea that they can make the mainstream uncomfortable, Anne Gilbert, an assistant media-studies professor at the University of Georgia who has studied the My Little Pony fandom, told me. That has been a source of pride.

That pride makes the My Little Pony fandoms problem twofold. Members who want to tear the fan community away from the active racists will also have to disentangle themselves from a long-held commitment to anything-goes uploading and a willful ignorance of the significance of political imagery. The concept of complicity has become clearer to a greater percentage of white Americans in the past several weeks, Gilbert said. A fandom that used to ignore politics is now being asked to acknowledge that it actually has made political choicesby valuing the free speech of some over the comfort and safety of many others.

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My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem - The Atlantic