The Mastodon site fandom.ink came to my attention because it hosts the account for Pemmi-Con, the 2023 North American Science Fiction Convention. I looked at it a bit to see what other interesting accounts it might have and examined its terms of service. Most of the points are the usual attempts to maintain civil discussion, but one item is disturbing, and it’s part of a trend toward speech policing which I’ve mentioned in other connections.

Item #2 under “Inappropriate Behaviour” is: “expressing or defending derogatory, harmful, and/or contemptuous views of marginalized persons or groups, including in the context of playing ‘devil’s advocate’ (‘it’s not really racist because…’).” (Boldface added, italics as in the original.) This constitutes a prohibition on defending people against some types of accusations. Letting accused people have their say and letting others speak in their defense is a bedrock principle of a liberal society, but it’s one which some people on the political left dislike. In an especially notorious example, Harvard booted professor Ron Sullivan from a position as faculty dean of an undergraduate house because he’d provided legal defense services for Harvey Weinstein. Users on fandom.ink can make groundless accusations without worrying that someone will challenge them. If they get accused in return, then I suppose both are presumed guilty.

Someone could get an account on another Mastodon server and reply from there, but they’ve got that covered: “To this end, we do not federate with servers that have moderation policies antithetical to ours. These include unmoderated (‘free speech’) instances, and any instance that tolerates content that is forbidden under the fandom.ink Terms of Service or Code of Conduct.” “Not federating” means that posts from the offending server won’t appear on fandom.ink. I’m not sure what restrictions apply in the other direction, but I’m not able to follow Pemmi-Con from my account on Liberdon, which is one of those hated free-speech sites that lets its users post in defense of accused people.

Fandom.ink is a small site, not very important in itself. It’s just one more little example of the illiberalism which shows up in many parts of SF fandom and sometimes turns into outright bullying. I can’t do much besides calling attention to these cases and staying clear of the people responsible.