Community Responses To Bad Behavior

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

[Content note: discussion of abuse, rape, child sexual abuse, and coverups of same.]

There are approximately five different ways that a community (as distinct from an individual) can react to bad behavior:

1. Nothing

2. Whisper network

3. Callout post

4. Action by leaders

5. Bringing in outside forces

Individuals, of course, have more options that I’m not talking about in this post.

Nothing. In any community, this is by far the most common response to bad behavior, because the vast majority of bad behavior is trivial, a one-off, or both. Someone didn’t chip in for their share of the pizza one time, or made an off-color joke that they misjudged the audience for, or never helps tidy up after parties, or sometimes interrupts when other people are talking.

Individuals may, of course, take actions even if the community isn’t doing anything. You might send someone an angry text about how they need to pay for the pizza, or complain to your friends about a joke, or stop hanging out with someone who interrupts people all the time, or only invite people to your parties if they help tidy up. But in general there’s not any sort of coordinated action, just individual people deciding for themselves the kinds of social interaction they’d like to have.

Whisper network. “Nothing” blends smoothly into “whisper network”, with a blurry gray area between complaining to your friends and spreading rumors. At its core, a whisper network is a project to give more people information that they can use to make individual decisions.¹ If I’m like “should I invite so-and-so to my party?” and you say “probably shouldn’t, they never clean up after themselves,” it’s the beginning of a whisper network.

The major advantage of a whisper network is how close it is to doing nothing. At their best, whisper networks are a flexible tool for low-drama, low-stress prevention of bad behavior. If so-and-so is a thoughtless and inconsiderate partner, I don’t want to post on the Effective Altruism Forum and create a four-hundred-comment thread litigating dating norms; I might want to go “headsup before you date so-and-so that their exes say they’re an unpleasant person to date.” And if you’re like “well, I too am thoughtless and inconsiderate so I’m glad about the low expectations here,” then I haven’t created an expectation that you have to avoid dating them. Whisper networks allow you to respond to problems that aren’t serious enough to pull out the big guns.

Whisper networks are also self-limiting. I can’t gossip with everyone in my communities; they’re too big. Even if I’ve told everyone I know about your messiness crimes, you can probably get an invite to a party hosted by someone I don’t know. If you’re tidy now, you can rebuild your reputation with much less trouble than if I made a callout post.

Whisper networks are often a necessary preparation for more serious action. For example, I’ve seen conversations like this:

Alice: Just a headsup that Eve made uncomfortably sexual comments to me in DMs. I don’t think it was malicious or anything, she probably just misread the situation, but…
Bob: …She did that to me too.
Carol: Me too!
David: Wait, is there anyone in this conversation Eve didn’t make uncomfortably sexual comments to?

And then Eve was banned from the meetup.

Many people don’t want to ban someone from a meetup for a single misjudged situation, but do want to ban someone who is constantly making people uncomfortable. If you want to know whether someone’s behavior is a pattern, it helps to talk to other people who know her.

What about more serious wrongdoing, such as sexual assault or fraud? All of the more big-deal responses are unpleasant for the victims; sometimes victims lose friends or careers, or even experience trauma. If we were all perfect utilitarians, everyone would make any sacrifice necessary for justice. In this world, I am reluctant to put an enormous new moral obligation on people who were just wronged. A whisper network can be the most pain that a victim is willing to suffer.

There are two major problems with a whisper network. First, whisper networks almost never provide accurate information once you get one or two degrees of separation away from the original complainant. I have witnessed a whisper network transform “so-and-so sexually harassed someone” into “so-and-so is a rapist” multiple times. People misremember details; people exaggerate for effect, and then other people assume that those exaggerations are precisely accurate; people hear rumors from multiple sources and assume that each rumor refers to a separate incident when it doesn’t. All too often, the correct inference to make from a whisper-network accusation is “there’s a bad vibe around that person.”

And that’s, of course, assuming the original allegation is true. Sometimes it isn’t! Sometimes angry people misrepresent other people’s behavior to make it look more wrong than it really is. Sometimes people have a unique definition of, say, “sexual harassment” or “inconsiderate partner” that doesn’t match the usual use of the term. All too often, people lie to get revenge on people they don’t like—and of course false accusations are often a tool of predators.

A particular problem with whisper networks is that, most of the time, you don’t get to find out the accused’s side of the story.² If the accused has a good explanation for their actions, the whisper network probably won’t find out.

Whenever you participate in a whisper network, it’s very important to maintain good epistemics. Check whether you could reasonably ask the accused about it. Be extremely careful to say exactly what you were told without exaggeration. Think about whether your sources are careful, reliable people and how close they are to the situation. If your information is thirdhand, consider either not mentioning it or saying “I’ve heard some bad things about that person” instead of more specific accusations that could give a sense of false precision.

Second, you have to be well-connected to take advantage of a whisper network. New people, shy people, people that no one likes that much: they’re unlikely to be up on the latest gossip. Many bad actors prey on isolated people. A whisper network protects insiders, but at the cost of sacrificing those who are most vulnerable. If a bad actor seems to be preying on relatively isolated people,³ this is a strong case for escalating on the scale.

The flip side of that problem is that many bad actors are well-connected. A strategic bad actor will recognize the power of the whisper network to get away with their wrongdoing. It’s easy for a socially powerful person to quash all rumors of their misbehavior—and because you can’t usually get the other side of the story, it’s hard to find out what’s true.

Callout post. A callout post is a public explanation of wrongdoing that most or all of the community has access to.⁴

Callout posts’ major advantages are the flipside of whisper networks’ disadvantages. Everyone gets to know about what the accused did wrong—even if they’re new or disconnected from the gossipy parts of the community. If the callout post is well-written, everyone can evaluate the evidence for themselves without having to rely on other people’s bad memories of what a third person said. The accused is able to present a defense of their actions.

Callout posts also allow a community to put pressure on leaders who are letting wrongdoing slide. A surprising number of leaders will say “Eve might be a serial rapist, but she’s my friend and she’s really very sorry, so I don’t think we should do anything about this fact.” If someone has written an article about the stories of Eve’s victims, community members can express their outrage and get new policies, new leaders, or a new community.

The major disadvantage of callout posts is that they’re awful for everyone involved.

Whether you’re the accuser or the accused, a callout post means that dozens or hundreds or sometimes even thousands of people are picking through every detail of your life and evaluating it. Do your unpopular political opinions mean you’re more likely to be a rapist? Is your consensual sex life a red flag of your rapist tendencies? Is the rape your fault for giving mixed messages? Are your mental health issues evidence you’d falsely accuse someone of rape? Is this all, on some deep level, evidence that everyone should implement my favorite policy about my pet issue?

People on the other side will send you nasty messages, perhaps even death threats. You could lose friendships and alienate family members. You could lose your job or miss out on promotions or jobs you’d otherwise get. In some cases, you might legitimately fear violence. The callout post may well be the first result when someone googles your name for the rest of your life.

It’s awful for the author, too.⁵ A well-written callout post always takes more time than you set aside for it, and can easily expand to take all the time you used to spend on your friends, your children, your hobbies, even your job. Doing a callout post well means facing dilemmas with no good answer: as one example, you could always dig in more to be more sure that you’re telling the truth, but that means the bad actor has more time to hurt more people.⁶ You face all the nasty messages, death threats, lost friendships, career consequences, and fear of violence that the accused and accuser do.

Very few thoughtful, responsible people other than journalists write more than one callout post, and it’s clear to me why.

Communities that a lot of people hate tend to be flinchy about callout posts: religions, political movements, marginalized communities, even the kink community. If I’m an evangelical Christian and I write up a callout post explaining that my pastor covers up child sexual abuse, a lot of atheists will read the post and take it as evidence that God doesn’t exist and Christanity is a religion full of evil pedophiles. Victims don’t like having the worst experiences of their lives picked over to provide evidence that their cherished beliefs or identities are evil. Victims are often concerned that coming forward will drive people away from the movement, which means that police would keep violating civil liberties or innocent animals would suffer or people would go to Hell. In some cases, there is a real concern that, say, an article about a child sexual abuse coverup in the queer community would lead to anti-queer laws or hate crimes.

Another problem with callout posts is that they’re subject to the unilateralist’s curse: if 99 people think a callout post isn’t worth writing, and one person does, the callout post gets written. In healthy communities, people have a high threshold for writing callout posts, such that the unilateralist’s curse normally doesn’t come into play. But the bad reputation of the callout post comes from communities in which people have a relatively low threshold. People in those communities write callout posts about issues like “writes fiction that has arguably sexist tropes” or “made a tasteless joke” or “has opinions about the definition of ‘lesbian’ that I don’t like.”

It’s easy to be dismissive of these concerns, especially if you’re a woke person rounding these dynamics off to complaints about cancel culture. I want to emphasize that callout posts can be a tool used by bad actors to hurt innocent people. And, for many people, not being the subject of a callout post is a survival issue. Hot Allostatic Load is the classic essay about this sort of dynamic, and I recommend everyone read it.

Action by leaders. The average person has a limited ability to expel someone from a community: they can stop spending time with Eve, but they don’t (and shouldn’t) have the ability to stop everyone else from spending time with Eve. “Leaders” are people who have the capacity to expel someone from a community—whether they’re Discord mods or the Pope.⁷

Many leaders have options other than outright expulsion. For example, they might be able to remove a special status, such as by revoking a license or defrocking a religious leader. They might limit people’s ability to engage in some activities but not others: for example, they can take away a person’s right to teach classes at the yoga studio (but still let them take classes), remove them from the board (but still let them attend meetings), or not let them handle money (but still let them participate fully in other ways). Sometimes leaders write callout posts of their own: often, these callout posts are lower-drama because they’re more final. They might even just stop actively raising the person’s status: for example, maybe they stop writing articles about the bad actor, inviting them to be on the podcast, or putting the bad actor’s events on the community bulletin board.

Some communities are more centralized than other communities, and thus the leader has more power. The Pope can, in fact, just excommunicate arbitrary people from Catholicism. Conversely, no one has the ability to fully expel anyone from the Harry Potter fandom. Many communities are in an intermediate state. For example, there might be three or four organizations that could coordinate to expel someone from a community. Or an organization might be able to blacklist you from all networking events in your field, even if they can’t stop you from calling yourself whatever label you want.

In centralized communities, I think action by leaders is a much better strategy than whisper networks or callout posts for dealing with bad actors. Leaders have the ability to speak to the accused, the accuser, and witnesses in private, and thus get accurate information without exposing anyone to the harsh gaze of the Internet. The penalty can be more easily customized to the crime. Where callout posts all too often result in a “ignore”/“complete expulsion” binary, a leader can say “you’re great in general, but since you stole money from the hot cocoa fund to fund your gambling addiction, we’re not giving you access to the bank account again.”

In relatively decentralized communities, of course, action by leaders can’t do very much. Even if I ban you from my Harry Potter fansite, nothing is stopping you from starting a Tumblr. So in combating Andy Thanfiction we have to rely on whisper networks and callout posts.

Action by leaders also has a single point of failure. Whisper networks and callout posts both run on community consensus, so people wind up punished for behavior the community thinks is bad.⁸ Leaders, however, can have different opinions about what’s bad than the community does—and, more importantly, than common sense suggests. As a community’s age, size, and commitment level increases, the chance that someone in it is covering up child sexual abuse approaches 1, and that person is usually in a leadership position. On the other hand, many leaders will expel people from the community for misdeeds like “refusing to have sex with me”, “doing something I don’t like”, “annoying me”, “questioning me”, “disagreeing with me”, or “daring to suggest that I made a mistake.” The latter dynamic often results in ideologically abusive or simply unhealthy communities.

Outside forces. People will sometimes stare at you like a dead fish when you say “you can call the cops.”

If someone rapes you, or your boyfriend beats you up, or your religious leader is coercing you into smuggling drugs, or your boss is embezzling money that’s supposed to be going to the tragic Dickensian orphans, you can in fact just call the cops? You don’t have to look for a community solution to the problem. You can call the police!

To be clear, there are numerous downsides to calling the police. People of color, neurodivergent people, and Oakland residents all sometimes have a well-justified belief that calling the police is more likely to hurt than to help. You know your situation best. But surprisingly often this hasn’t even occurred to anyone as a solution?

Not all outside forces are cops. You can, for example, sue someone for libel or breach of contract or wrongful eviction. You can report them to the licensing board for their profession. Arguably, even telling the proprietors of the business that hosts your board game meetup counts as bringing in an outside force.

There are many reasons not to bring in outside forces. The process can be expensive, time-consuming, and stressful to the point of being traumatizing. Even a frivolous (say) lawsuit can be immensely costly to the person sued, so bad actors often use them to punish people. Your community may reject you, either for good reasons (they’re worried you’re strategically punishing someone with a lawsuit) or bad ones (surely all community problems should be resolved in-house). There’s no guarantee that the outcome will be just, and in many cases it’s close to guaranteed that the outcome won’t be.

But outside forces also have power your community doesn’t. I’m very critical of the American criminal justice system, but some people do need to be in prison so that it’s harder for them to hurt people. Similarly, some people need to not be running group homes or practicing medicine or social work. And civil-court damages can sometimes give victims enough money that they can start to rebuild their lives.

And sometimes a community is just fucked up. Sometimes everyone in a community thinks it’s fine if Pastor So-and-so molests children, or if husbands beat their wives, or if teenagers that cause problems go off to a camp that breaks their will no matter what it takes. In that case, bringing in an outside force may be your only chance at an outcome that approximates justice.

1. This is complicated by the fact that “how you respond to a particular piece of information” is itself a behavior which some people might think is bad. If you invite a known rapist to your sex party, I will probably start a whisper network about your party invitation choices. But let’s talk about the pure case.

2. Sometimes you do! You can say “I heard that you don’t help clean up after parties” and they can say “oh, yeah, I have chronic fatigue syndrome, sorry about that.”

3. Bear in mind that you won’t know about people who, say, stop coming to your meetup because Eve sexually harassed them.

4. Yes, this means I’m classifying investigative journalism as a kind of callout post.

5. Whether or not the author is the same person as the accuser.

6. Not to mention that you’d like your life back at some point.

7. Note that while I’m talking about leaderly action by itself here, many cases of leaderly action are combined with a callout post where the leaders explain why they did what they did.

8. If the community is mistaken about what’s bad, there’s only so much you can do.