On February 20 2017, hundreds of thousands of comments were permanently removed from film fan site the Internet Movie Database, more commonly known as IMDb.
For over 16 years, IMDb’s message boards had chronicled the thoughts of ordinary people as they watched hit blockbusters (“Where are the sharks?” – user Corinaam on Titanic), beloved classics (“Can you find a wife like Mary today?” – MajDutch on It’s a Wonderful Life), and Shrek (“Shrek is a metaphor for racism in America!?” – TMC-4 (3838)). But two years ago, IMDb decided to remove the boards.
The reason the company, which is a subsidiary of Amazon, gave for the purge was that the message boards were “no longer providing a positive, useful experience” for their users – in short, there were a lot of bigots.
Like many spaces on the internet, the IMDb message boards were plagued by racism, sexism and trolls. Yet despite the bad actors on some forums, the loss of the boards was perceived as a tragic moment in internet history. Hundreds of thousands of people had posted hundreds of thousands of thoughts over almost two decades, and it was all going to be lost. That is, until Jim Smith had an idea.
“My heart dropped. Literally. I remember the exact moment I read the news,” says Smith, who is in his mid-30s and from New York City. After hearing the news, he set up MovieChat.org, a website to archive all of the existing IMDb boards and allow users to continue discussing films to this day. “Half the fun of seeing a movie is all the questions, analysis, debates, theories and enlivened discussion that follow it,” he says.
Smith has a background in web development so was able to archive the posts on IMDb’s top 10,000 movies and shows two days before the boards shut down. After chatting informally with some Amazon contacts, he was unofficially given permission to launch his boards. Smith believes MovieChat’s boards are now cleaner than IMDb’s, although he admits that it “hasn’t been easy”.
“Movies, TV shows, celebrities and entertainment in general are notoriously difficult topics to moderate,” he says. “These mediums touch upon so many divisive issues in our society and spur contentious debate. That’s what movies are designed to do: make us think, make us question, make us emotional.”
Smith says the most difficult boards to manage are ones that inspire political and religious discussions. For the foreseeable future, moderators are having particular trouble with Donald Trump’s board, which has a place on the site because of the president’s numerous reality TV roles and movie cameos. There are currently 239 pages of posts. One of the most recent, at the time of writing, is entitled, “15 Things that send Libs/Dems into hysterical convulsions”. Number 14 is “Biblical Christianity”, number 8 is “Hard Work”, and number 2 is “The American Flag”.
“It’s very difficult to moderate,” says Smith. “We want to allow open dialogue and free speech, but it’s very common for people to resort to abuse, hatred and violence when discussing hot-button issues like these. If we take enforcement action against a clear violation of our standards against one party, they accuse us of being biased.”
MovieChat.org has five rules and 11 types of prohibited content, although Smith says its mods are dedicated to “open dialogue and free speech”. Users are banned from trolling, flaming, spamming, unsolicited advertising, hacking and impersonation, and are prohibited from sharing porn, threats, hate speech, malware and excessive profanity. An offending user first receives a warning and later may be temporarily or permanently banned from the site.
Smith won’t disclose how many moderators his now two-year-old website has “for security purposes” (in the early days of the site, when there were only two moderators, trolls figured out when the mods would be offline in order to take advantage of their blind spots). Yet he says the team is small and dedicated, and that it is deliberately diverse, comprising a range of ethnicities, ages, and genders. Smith personally vets every moderator, and says one candidate likened the selection process to “interviewing for the CIA”. “We’re very selective about who we empower with moderation privileges because it’s such a big responsibility,” he says.
A 51-year-old female moderator of the site who asked to be identified only as Mod4 says she believes “civil discussion on the internet as a whole has gone way downhill in recent years,” and she is unsure whether MovieChat is necessarily superior to IMDb in this regard. “It is incredibly sad for those of us who just want to talk media, movies and shows without the madness that is seemingly prevalsent everywhere you go now, to have those discussions ruined by those that can’t respect that,” she says.
Mod4 has moderated MovieChat for two years; like all the moderators, she does so unpaid and in her own time. She says it is “a labour of love”.
“I do think we do a better job [than IMDb] of keeping the tone reasonably civil without being overbearing,” says Scott, a 47-year-old from New Jersey who moderates MovieChat for an hour or two each day. He says his time moderating isn’t “burdensome” because most of the time he is simply reading the site as an ordinary user – he has been a lurker on IMDb since the late 90s. “I do it because I think maintaining some reasonable standards of conduct is important for creating the conditions that encourage interesting conversations among a large and diverse group of people,” he says.
When asked about the worst offender in the site’s history, Smith recalls a troll from the forum’s early days. “We had an abusive user that continually harassed other users and spammed the site for a period of several months,” he says. “This user went through popular movies with female leads and left sexist remarks about the actresses. They went through movies that championed LGBT rights and made explicit homophobic and transphobic comments. They personally attacked known female members and called for violence against others. We’d ban that person, and they’d come back under a new account.”
Smith says this cycle continued for a few months and made other users fearful to post. He says moderators were engaged in a game of “cat and mouse”, where the troll would continue to pop up under new usernames. “That’s the thing with these bad actors, hackers, trolls – whatever you want to call them – they’re always able to stay one step ahead,” Smith says. “Even if you have the resources of large corporations like Facebook or Twitter, these types of people will always find a way to evade security measures and perpetrate bad behaviour.” In the end, Smith brought on more moderators and “developed more sophisticated security technology” that he believes made it too cumbersome for the troll to continue.
Still, it would be unusual for MovieChat.org to be free of sexism when both the internet and world at large continue to be plagued by misogynists. Earlier this year, Captain Marvel inspired the ire of the internet’s lost boys, who attempted to sabotage the film for portraying a female superhero, played by Brie Larson, whom they felt was not smiley enough/strong enough/male enough. “BOYCOTT CAPTAIN MARVEL!!!” reads a four-month-old post on MovieChat. “I went to check on this actress and all I’ve been seeing is her as an egotistical feminist talentless hack… I for one am sick of all this feminist trash being shoved down everyone’s throats.”
Like many online communities, however, MovieChat can be self-policing. “Virgin,” came the first retort. “Lol get a life,” was the second.
“Since our inception, we've dealt with racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, violence, abuse, jingoism, and more,” says Smith. Yet he believes his website is an important online space, and one that harks back to the communal experience of watching a film together. “I noticed an emerging dichotomy… With the rise of streaming services like Netflix, it’s now easier than ever to consume content at an unprecedented pace,” he says. “However, the flip side is that movie viewing has become an increasingly less social experience.”
Mod4, however, worries that the younger generation aren’t necessarily used to using the internet for long discussions. “People have become used to saying very little in a post because attention spans aren't that long, compared to people who grew up having conversations that could last well into the night,” she says.
In this environment, Smith feels his website – which is not run for profit – is invaluable for the entertainment industry. “We’re much more than a simple message board or social media site,” he says. “We’re a global community that facilitates discussion and transparency in one of the largest industries in the world.”
The Moderators is a semi-regular series in which we speak to the gatekeepers of different online communities to find out how they approach being the arbiter of what is and isn't allowed on the internet. Read how the Reddit Bureau of Investigation solves mysteries while avoiding witch hunts.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
