Sorry for the revival, but I felt I could provide something of value here. Not sure if there’s communities dealing with this, since the toxic political discourse has gone nowhere, so perhaps this can be of help.
Over at my forum, with a very active userbase, we made the decision two years ago to prohibit any political discussion. And ya know what? After a brief, awkward adjustment, everyone is on board. And thankful for it.
After literal years of hosting an “Off-Topic Tavern,” where anything went, we realized two primary things …
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You cannot sequester emotion: whatever conversations occurred in the OTT would degrade the quality of community and discussion elsewhere on the site. With a substantial sample size, users—who otherwise are a tight-knit community around a specific topic (football team)—were unable to disentangle their thoughts/emotions of other users who they had sparred with politically. This was backed up by a drop in Active Users, users requesting their accounts to be deleted, and anecdotal comments from dozens of long-time users.
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It devoured moderator time: It is simply impossible to have volunteer moderators–hell, even paid moderators—when you have an active community discussing politics. I had two moderators forego their mod duties specifically because of how toxic the politics got on the forum. Go ahead and visit the subreddits out there. It’s either an echo chamber or a complete shitshow. Since moderators are also responsible for maintaining the peace, and furthering the appeal of the community itself, this put them in an impossible spot. Again, forum degradation as a result.
Finally, we’re in a weird territory with politics. And if you have private messaging accessible to your forum, people can use that feature to send any type of abuse—including threats. And when that happens, you as a forum owner now have legal exposure/responsibility to act.
My user base is endlessly opinionated—about everything. And when we made the decision, I made it clear that it was my call. Several long-time users departed in protest. Most returned. And at least two have reached out to me personally since to thank me for the decision, stating that the forum could be “an escape from vitriol of today.” It became a community again.
And after all, isn’t that the point in all of this?