I’m only returning briefly to post this.
I struggled with whether I should respond, and if so, how. I had hoped that the other Moderators would have taken some action, even if only in private, or at the very least acknowledged that there was a problem. I was curious to see what response, if any, there had been, so eventually I came back to look at this thread. And found that the other Moderators who were in that Message thread are defending Chronos and accusing me of being “unfair” to him, because he was “just asking questions.”
I don’t think I fully realized it at the time, but the material I flagged was triggering for me. And the Mods’ “best practices” have conveniently removed my access to the Message thread in question. I invite the Mods to post that Message thread in its entirety. But I’m not going to try to reconstruct my interaction with Chronos or rehash it here in detail.
I will say this, though.
I flagged a post that linked to a video, with a screencap preview visible here on the SDMB. The video was uploaded to a social media app and was being circulated on social media without source or attribution. It purported to be a close-up of a Prisoner of War in a humiliating situation. If authentic, and to all appearances it was, it was clearly taken by his captors. And no, I’m not going to go into any more detail on the video than that.
Videos like that violate the Geneva Convention. That’s the “legal issue” that apparently confounded the Mods. I actually didn’t expect the Mods to be familiar with that area of international law, so in my initial flag comment I included a link to the relevant text along with expert commentary from the International Committee of the Red Cross directly and specifically addressing circulating images and recordings of PoWs on social media. Not that it apparently made any difference to Chronos.
Treatment of PoWs is a very sensitive and personal subject to me. And no, I’m not going to go into any more detail on that, either. I did react strongly to Chronos’ “questions”. But I hardly think I was being “unfair”.
I thought Chronos’ “questions” were snide, dismissive, and functionally indistinguishable from sealioning. But even if I over-reacted to his questions, the simple fact is that he went far beyond merely asking questions. He made a positive defense of the video, and glorified those responsible as “heroes”. His initial, repeated, and exclusive response was that the video was presumptively the work of unspecified “reporters” and not objectionable. He point-blank refused to even consider that the video had been circulated by the PoW’s captors because I hadn’t given him unspecified “evidence” on the identity and intentions of those responsible. He pointedly ignored any concerns about the ethics of circulating that video, either on the part of his imaginary “reporters” or this board, as well as any concerns about the harm to the video’s subject.
I want to emphasize this. Chronos is a moderator on an internet message board. In that capacity he was presented with a complaint about the posting of a link to an anonymously produced video circulating on social media that exploited the humiliation of a frightened and defenseless human being under duress who had no meaningful capacity for consent. And his official response as a moderator was that since the person making the complaint didn’t provide “evidence” on who uploaded it and why, it was presumptively the work of reporters, and not only would no action be taken, his official position was that those responsible were heroes, and any harm to the video’s subject was literally not even worth discussing.
The fact that the video was in and of itself a war crime is practically incidental.
(Also practically incidental were his strawmanning and sealioning responses to me; those were just the personal icing on the shitcake for me.)