BBC starts experimenting with the Fediverse, running its own Mastodon instance

Reclipse@lemdro.id to Technology@lemmy.world – 1810 points –
BBC Mastodon
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...and already blocked by at least one instance, mastodon.art.

https://mastodon.art/@Curator/110809888584495290

While I don't think it's necessarily sufficient to justify defederating their whole instance, it's worth noting that the reason they gave is definitely accurate. The BBC is incredibly transphobic. Here's a Wikipedia article about one of their worst, most prominent instances. It's no more so than is pretty standard in Britain these days, sadly, but that's not a good bar to measure yourself against.

There was a big campaign of utilising the BBC's complaints process to complain about the many flaws in that article. Here's a YouTube video by one person involved in that campaign. That's part 1 of 4 as the different stages of the process played out. The TL;DW is that the BBC ended up ignoring the complaints and ended up picking up on small flaws in the way the complaint was phrased (or just making up flaws where they didn't really exist) to use as an excuse to "respond" saying there was no problem with their journalistic standards.

Obviously I would not want to defend that article. But it is worth pointing out that the BBC lets all sorts publish. So it's not that the institution is necessarily transphobic, it's just that individual who wrote the article is.

So it’s not that the institution is necessarily transphobic, it’s just that individual who wrote the article is.

This would be a reasonable response, were it not for the way that they repeatedly defended the article and did some crazy mental gymnastics to avoid responding to the critiques levied at it. Because the people responding to complaints going through the formal complaints process have to be ones who truly represent what the BBC as an institution is about. If they don't, what's the point of that process existing?

When I see this shit I lose all hope in the Fediverse's success

I think it's just the one server run by a mentalcase tbh. Not the first time I've seen them mentioned. The other thing was them freaking out because of GIMP.

We really need a way to block entire instances at the user level.