Foundation’s Reply
On Friday, we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community. We unequivocally condemn this abuse. The volume of negative engagement overwhelmed our moderation efforts. While attempting to protect the Godot community we mistakenly blocked individuals who were not participating in the harassment. The Godot Foundation Board takes full responsibility for these moderation actions. If you believe you were blocked in error and have not violated our Code of Conduct, please contact us with the form linked below. We are committed to swiftly rectifying any mistakes. We firmly stand by our mission to keep our community spaces free from hate, discrimination, and other toxic behaviors. - The Godot Foundation Board
On community moderator Xananax
We strongly condemn the harmful language used by Xananax, moderator of an unofficial Godot-related Discord server. We want to clarify that Xananax is not hired by nor a spokesperson for the Godot Foundation. As an organization, we have our own official Discord server, moderated together with new volunteers vetted by our team.
Context
- Link to the tweet that was the nexus for this event
- What the tweet above was referencing:
I think the Twitter manager is lgbt or something and wanted to promote lgbt representation. They used the term “woke” in an official tweet where they intended to achieve this.
My understanding is that “woke” is a poorly defined political term.
People apparently asked for the engine to not get political and a lot of people got banned simply for criticising the tweet. I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the tweet, nor with a lot of the criticism that apparently happened. Banning people for criticism seems very unprofessional though.
Perhaps the Twitter manager took it as people calling the existence of lgbt political? Perhaps there was a large number of troublemakers who had to get banned and some innocent people criticising the tweet got caught in the crossfire? Perhaps the Twitter manager really was acting maliciously? I don’t know what happened.
Edit: It seems it was the second one.
Apparently sponsors got banned and stopped their support, and developers got banned from the GitHub.
I don’t care about twitter drama as I don’t use twitter, I just hope that this doesn’t affect the codebase.
I’ve seen a lot of drama channels on YouTube talk about this, but I haven’t seen anything from the YouTubers who I trust to talk about FOSS yet. From what I gather, there doesn’t seem to have been any major problems yet. It just seems to be things getting blown out of proportion. People make money from clicks and engagement. Fear and rage generates clicks.