Locking this for right now, this thread has gotten out of hand. Edit: unlocked. Please behave.

A blanket 'bigoted artists' rule is ripe for banning based on someone's entire history, like firing James Gunn for bad jokes in old tweets.

Instead I would prefer to ban individual artists based on their art. So I fully support banning Jago comics because all the ones I remember are based on anti LGBTQ+ or sexist stereotypes. Not because they are bigoted, but because their content is. No idea who stonetoss is, but if their content is similar then I would also favor banning them.

No purity tests though.

The argument of censorship is bullshit. If a comic is made to discriminate, it is basic decency to get rid of it. If an author makes themselves known by being discriminatory, no platform that cares about user safety and having a non-toxic community needs to get rid of them. It's as simple as that.

When you refuse that kind of "censorship", you are only making it clear that you like making this place unsafe for the people being attacked. Which makes you a piece of shit in my book.

So yeah, let's just ban these things that have no reason to exist, let alone on lemmy.

I was going to point out that comics like that should already be covered by the rules against discrimination... But reading the sidebar it doesn't look like we have rules like that. We have a full paragraph detailing how an exposed nipple should be tagged, but nothing saying "hey, don't be a homophobic sexist bigot". Probably worth adding something to the rules like:

Discrimination such as homophobia, transphobia, sexism and racism are not welcome here. This applies both in comments and posted comics. Likewise, artists who have a large history of posting discriminatory content such as Stonetoss and Jago are similarly not allowed here.

Nazi bars form by exploiting moderators who are too afraid to say no and actively kick out a culture of hate.

Hate should never be tolerated.

I woke up this morning and there's three Stonetosses back to back in my feed.

If we could go ahead and throw them on the ban list, that would be pretty groovy

I have no comment currently for what will happen regarding bigot artists, I'm not the top mod.

However, please stop making META posts when you made one about the same topic just a few days ago. If the comments on this get out of hand I will lock the thread for civilities sake. Please wait for us to make an announcement about such things, it may take some time.

I preferred the simpler times where it was a simple downvote and move on. Those artists will probably get ratioed anyways and the posts will be sunk.

Witch-Hunt mentality is kinda a lame way to go about things.

The people who really want racist/sexist/etc comics are free to make their own instance or community. This is the fediverse. There's no government with guns or CEO to lock it down.

If that stuff makes for a better community, it will do just fine. I expect it won't.

One of the things right-wingers push for is the idea that they're normal and healthy, and everyone else is deficient. Like everything else from the right, it's projection.

So would we ban posting Dilbert comics because Adams went wacko when he got older? Do we ban artists from the 50s because some of them were racist, even if we're not posting those ones?

I think it makes sense to not allow hateful and bigoted comics, for sure. And that rule would get rid of jago.

Nazis don't get a platform. Not sure why this is even a debate unless it looks like a debate because a bunch of nazis are whining about it and get told to fuck off. In which case, good, gtfo.

Either way the community goes on this, I'd really like it if there were a rule that each post needs to include the artist's name in the title. That way, we could have a basis for filtering out artists we don't personally care for. Not saying this should happen instead of any kind of ban on specific artists or content, but rather in addition to.

any rule should be voted on to ban specific artists, and additions to the list should require their own vote. "no hate content" is a simple enough rule to enforce with minimal context but "no history of hate content" is way too broad.

For me it's blanket artist ban I don't like. Banned bigoted posts is 100% deserved, but not artist wide. The recent jago comic is totally fine, and that content shouldn't be restricted.

Also artists shouldn't be restricted willy-nilly. I feel artists like cyanide and happiness could 100% get on some people's nerves, considering that some other comics like it gets absolutely ratioed. Although they aren't bigoted, that's just dark humour

For reference, I'm trans and bi, so I ain't policing minorities. I have all interest in banning stonetoss here

I would also vote in that direction.

I get the concept, it's basically the same issues in like Harry Potter or Five nights at freddies. IE a lot of LGBT people like these works, but it's also unquestionable that the profits that the works make, are used to bolster hate against these groups, even if the works themselves are not harmful to them.

So yes I also go with this camp, platforming non-hateful work made by hateful people still supports hateful creators and allows them to amplify the hateful message.

That said this is lemmy. We have the means here. If lemmy world comic strips want an open door "as long as the comics posted themselves aren't hateful it's allowed". Perhaps someone should make a Comic Strips on a different instance, and lemmy users can vote with their feet.

There can't even be that many amazing "nice" comics by these bigoted artists that we'd be making a huge sacrifice by banning them. Not accidentally driving traffic to them seems worth it.

I guess there's a case around censorship to some degree, but there's already plenty of censorship-driven rules in place. It comes down to trusting the mods to not abuse their power.

promoting hate is suppose to be against TOS, unless you make a nazi platform, they can make thier own instances for it. but then right wing propaganda cant flourish in thier own echo chambers , since they need engagement, cant have that if everyone agrees with you.

I saw these Comics and I don't like them. Medium joke on juicy pictures. But I was like: "A free internet has to be able to handle things like this"

I'm not sure we need to keep adding rules just for one artist. if the consensus is to ban Jago comics for their content, then that seems like a good decision.

however "bigoted" seems to mean a wide variety of different things now. and it seems that some people are ok with some darker forms of humor than others.

jago is well known for making comics specifically to try and piss people off. but I feel that dark humor should not be banned.

edit: No Jago is not dark humor. Yes Jago comics should be banned from the instance. please stop likening me to a bigot just because my brain is spicy and I have difficulty explaining shit sometimes. thank you.

It appears that the mods have actual 0 issues with hosting Nazi content, do we have an alternative community? I'm going to block this one soon.