Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Awhile back, a graduate student at a top university told me about a Second Life-based education history project she was working on with one of her students, that had unexpectedly fallen apart. The idea was to create a 3D simulation that depicted the rise of fascism in Europe, a very important topic to be sure, except for one hitch:

The simulation included historically accurate Nazi swastikas, which some SL user came across, saw, and reported — and which Linden Lab subsequently took down. (The swastika is in violation of the company's Community Standards, forbidding "derogatory or demeaning language or images based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion or sexual orientation".) So the educational project on the rise of fascism, if continued, could not include the symbols of fascism — even though those symbols are crucial to understanding it. Imagine Schindler's List with all the swastikas edited out, or replaced.

But I understood Linden Lab's perspective in this case: Were the company required to judge the context of every usage of hateful symbols, they'd be constantly mired in controversy. What happens, for example, when actual Nazi sympathizers show up at the history of fascism simulation in SL, and pervert it for their own ends?

The challenge is made even more complex since a virtual world (almost by definition), exists on the Internet, and is generally accessible to people from all over world, all of whom have their own moral standards or even laws of what constitutes hate.

What's more, the most successful virtual worlds exist for over a decade or even two, and must adjust to evolving real world standards. When Second Life launched in 2003, the company had not decided whether the Confederate flag constituted hate speech, and so allowed it to exist in the virtual world. (Where it was openly used as a symbol of provocation in user-to-user conflicts like the War of the Jessie Wall.) Over the years however, collective opinion has largely shifted to see the Confederate flag as hateful. And so in 2015, Linden Lab quietly removed all copies of the flag from its marketplace.

I was thinking about all this when writing about the news that Linden Lab recently banned the use of racial/sexual/gendered/etc. slurs as keywords and product tags in the SL Marketplace. In doing so, they are not just prohibiting their use by people who want to be hateful, but by those who are victims of those slurs, and co-opt those words for their own non-hateful purposes.

And once again, I don't see how there's an alternative. As reader "Pulsar" puts it, first noting the swastika's origins as a non-Nazi symbol:

While it's true that swastika is an ancient, beautiful and positive symbol, it has been covered with repugnant sewer mud by Nazis. In Germany it's banned under criminal code to use swastikas in that way and they are totally right to do so, not only to outlaw Nazi symbols (as well as insignia, slogans, and everything about that), but it's also right because to keep associating the swastika to Nazis or making it a Nazi symbol is abhorrent.

What's outlawed is not the original culture, but Nazism, and indirectly, its cultural appropriation and abuse of those symbols and the offensive use – both offensive to the victims of Nazism and the original culture – in fact Germany doesn't ban the swastika in it's original [Eurasian] use and in temples.

The words banned from the marketplace are in English. If these English words in the current English language have a derogatory meaning and they are racial slurs, then they are racial slurs.

Racial slurs are hate and offensive content. It makes no sense to call different cultures into question or languages, arts and religious symbols… I want to give the benefit of doubt and think maybe it's just a fallacy, rather than a manipulative grasping at straws hoping to condone racial slurs (and at the same time adding whataboutism to point fingers at Afro-Americans).

And even if one of those words is used in a positive way *within* an ethnic group, that's a whole different story, a story that has nothing to do with slurs as keywords as they were used in the SL Marketplace.