Why Did We Delete the "Coronavirus COVID-19 is an act of war?" Openblog Post?

Few days ago a member of our Memefest social network has on our web site published an Openblog post titled "Coronavirus COVID-19 is an act of war?"

While we trust the good intentions of the author of the post, after discussing it in the Memefest collective, as well as after receiving feedback from our broader network members- we decided to delete the post.

The post did not meet our community standards as described in our user guidelines here: http://www.memefest.org/media/Memefest_Web_User_Guidelines.docx

What alerted us is the fact that the post dealt with highly sensitive material in a highly sensitive time when the whole world is struggling to find a solution for the devastating effects of COVID-19 and the tragedies related to it. The problem with the post was that because of the sensitive content is was not based on research and journalistic standards of presenting balanced diverse views on the topic. It was also problematic as it has used opinions of a medium known to have direct connections with far right social groups and was promoting a "documentary film" by this media outlet.

As much as we strongly advocate for open dialogue, such propaganda has no space on memefest.org. And while we encourage our members to publish diverse opinions and are definitely not expecting all posts to match standards of academic research or journalistic investigation, we do want to make sure that this remains a respectful space fostering dialogic culture.

While we do think everyone needs to be responsible for the actions we take, we would like to be explicit that we do not want to blame directly and personaly the author of the post! Far right propaganda is well designed to manipulate and is many times not easy to decipher. It uses our short attention spans and our imposed need to post and share things based on specific affects and emotional states. Such propaganda also uses the fact that the dominant social media culture is not dialogic, that people do not spend time to really deeply consider contents which are being circulated and the fact that likes and shares present the main currency of what should be read and seen. Such viral propaganda memes are designed to provoke quick, short, ill informed reactions.

We have deep trust in our community and it has to be said that since the launch of this website and the possibility for people to freely post Openblogs, this is the very first time that we are intervening and deleting a post.

This space remains an open space. We continue to trust our community but we will also react in the future if needed as we will make sure the community standards as described in our User Guidelines are being respected. This is a civilized place for public discussion. We would like to encourage everyone to continue to join the discussion and contribute to our dialogue on radical design + communication, including the author of the initial post.

Stay cool, stay safe and healthy. In solidarity, Memefest.