Reddit Cracks Down On Usage Of 'Groomer' As A Slur, Pressure Mounts On Twitter To Do The Same
It appears Reddit is cracking down on the use of the word groomer as a slur against the LGBTQ+ community, a trend that's been on the rise in recent months.
Last Wednesday, the subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes made an announcement alerting its userbase that Reddit admins had warned the subreddit about the usage of several terms and violations of Reddit's policies against hate speech. Among several points reminding subreddit users to not post racial slurs, tell others to kill themselves or deny genocides, two points stood out:
No portraying LGBT people as a whole as “groomers” or “pedophiles”, calling them a slur, or deadnaming them
No portraying being transgender as a mental illness, and no more saying that “trans men will never be real men” or “trans women will never be real women”, or intentionally misgendering them.
This was picked up by the subreddit /r/AgainstHateSubreddits, who interpreted the post to mean that Reddit has made it a policy that usage of "groomer" is a slur that violates Rule 1 of Reddit prohibiting hatred towards another based on their identity.
Reddit will now enforce their hate speech policy on content that utilizes the groomer libel. Content that equates LGBTQ people to groomers and pedophiles will violate the hate speech policy. Reddit is now more proactive than Twitter. Your move @TwitterSafety. pic.twitter.com/GhGuBF1KjK
— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) July 15, 2022
"Grooming" is a term used to describe a person who fosters a romantic but nonsexual relationship with a minor with the goal of making the relationship sexual when they come of legal age. It has become a weapon for some conservative supporters of Florida's "Don't Say Gay" Bill, who have attempted to argue that teachers educating students about the existence of queer people amounts to "grooming" them, painting the teachers as pedophiles.
As news of Reddit's enforcement spread on social media, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok confirmed with the Daily Dot that usage of "groomer" to debase LGBTQ people goes against company policy. Twitter, however, has so far allowed for the term to be used that way and faced increased pressure to update their policies against hate speech.
NEW: Reddit and TikTok, along with Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, have all confirmed that slandering LGBTQ people as groomers with no evidence violate those platform's rules against targeted harassment. @Twitter – what are you doing? pic.twitter.com/VrAUJkTGkp
— Ari Drennen 🏳️🌈 (@AriDrennen) July 20, 2022
Top tier move by Reddit.Twitter needs to follow suit. The “groomer” slur against lgbtq people has got to stop.Deplatform Libs of TikTok. https://t.co/74PlxQ4aN1
— Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) July 15, 2022
Teachers in Texas being shot at for handing out books with LGBTQ characters at Pride. Librarians in Iowa being threatened to the point where the entire staff quits, closing the library. What will it take for @TwitterSafety to stop "groomer" libel? https://t.co/7EJc0Gtu11
— Mary Emily O'Hara (@MaryEmilyOHara) July 20, 2022
The pressure enraged some conservatives on the app, many of whom continued to insist that teaching children about queer people amounted to "grooming" them.
The LGBTQ community has been the target of increased hatred and violence as of late. In June, coinciding with Pride Month, the FBI stopped a planned riot in Idaho from armed anti-Pride protestors. The same week, a book reading hosted by a drag queen in Alabama was interrupted by protestors, one of whom wore a shirt that said "kill your local pedophile."
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Bobby G
My understanding is that little kids are very monkey-see-monkey-do. Not just physical actions and reactions, but emotional actions and reactions. It's the parent's job to make sure the kid sources their everything from them. But aint nobody got time for that, and a few weird apples are imprinting weird behaviors on kids. Seriously, no 6 year old boy/girl should wish they were the opposite gender. Gender identity is very much nurture, not nature. It's the cultural identity surrounding what you were born with. It means their home life is seriously messed up. It's not hard to skew what a little kid perceives and the mental path that forges. It's also not their fault after that problem is made, done is done. They probably have no idea what did it, nor desire to look for a root problem, or even the ability to consider a core part of their identity as being abnormal. It's also important to consider that there is no solution to their "problem(s)", and digging for one is more hurtful than helpful. Persecuting these people and their group is not good, but neither is college book burnings. It's also not good to allow damaged people to perpetuate damaged people. All people try to form other people to be like they are, and the younger you start the more successful you are.
HardcoreHunter
Dog and Cat groomers have it hard enough they don't need this shit.
Zigzagoon
Is it just the word itself, or only to refer to LGBT people? 'Cause I can think of instances where the word would refer to actual pedophiles.
Revic
The latter. The word isn't banned. Calling out people who are actual child molesters exactly what they are isn't banned. Here's the wording verbatim: "No portraying LGBT people as a whole as “groomers” or “pedophiles”."
Revolvenant
A website known for being filled with kiddie diddlers goes and ban the word Groomer/Grooming, how unsurprising.
I'm sure this will totally not cause victims of grooming and legitimate cases of grooming, sexual in nature or not, to get ignored and thrown under the bus. Got to protect the feelings of manchildren over the safety of victims.
It's ok tho, people already came up with a very suiting word : Predittor.
Revic
"goes and ban the word Groomer/Grooming"
Except they didn't. You can still call a pedophile a pedophile for being a pedophile. You just can't call an LGBT person a pedophile for being an LGBT person. If you're actually concerned about abuse victims, it's strange to be upset over an attempt (however ultimately naïve and ill-fated) to stop the erosion of that term into a meaningless slur for something else entirely.
If.
Revolvenant
1. Grooming isn't only sexual in nature, the only people only equating it with that is the offended. THEY are erroding the meaning, and the fact that they'll go as far as to ban the word as a "slur" shows they don't care about victims.
2. If the LGBT+ doesn't want to be associated with them, maybe they should stop defending degenerate behaviors as long as the ones committing them are LGBT, How many more drag queen story hours in a strip tease bar do you need to realise there is a problem?
3. Reddit, the website that abuses the words racism, white supremacy, alt-right and other on people won't don't fit that description, has nothing to say regarding abusing words for emotional responses. They only don't like it when the pendulum swings the other way.
Revic
"Grooming isn't only sexual in nature"
I can't believe I missed that implication in the first post and didn't pick up on it until it was made explicit. Okay. You are one of those people who wants to see the term grooming/grooomer redefined to be nebulous and vague and divorced from what it actually means and how it is understood by default. I hope to god it's simply because you want to have a disingenuous way to call LGBT people pedophiles but with plausible deniability ("No guys it totally means some other, unspecified thing – that you inferred I meant 'making preparations to molest kids' is totally a coincidence and not on me! And when I make puns on 'predator' I'm just talking about some other kind of unspecified predator!"), because the only other motivations for actively supporting that are too blood-chillingly, skin-crawlingly unsettling to contemplate for more than an instant. Not continuing this conversation. Intentional equivocation and doublespeak is dishonesty, while efforts to deliberately erode, water down, and confuse terminology around child sexual abuse is a topic way too fucking creepy for me to deal with.
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Dolan
Funny how at the same time memes about threatening pedophiles with wood chipper also got banned.
Revic
Pretty sure posts about killing/maiming people (even in a clearly hyperbolic manner and/or aimed at entirely deserving targets) have been against the ToS for quite a long time as they tend to be on most large social media sites.
Kenetic Kups
Banning a word will never fix anything
Revic
Yeah, it won't change anything. The inevitable next step is less-clever-than-their-creators-think plausibly deniable euphemisms.
Kenetic Kups
Precisley
lecorbak
"No portraying being transgender as a mental illness"
Gender Dysphoria is on the list of mental illnesses though.
IfYaDVote-ReplyToWhy
Well I mean,
1. That is not universally agreed by mental health professionals. NHS even outright says "Gender Dysphoria is not a mental illness"
2. Being gay was also historically classified as a mental illness. Scientific terminology evolves as time progresses
A Concerned Rifleman
It's a mental illness is that it's a mental anomaly that negatively affects the body in very strong ways. There's a world of difference between someone going through HRT because Twitter made it trendy to do so and someone going though HRT because they literally can't function without it.
Kenetic Kups
So what is it then?
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