I spent three decades of Sundays studying white supremacists and Holocaust deniers (but I repeat myself)

My reading room had three walls of bookshelves filled with pamphlets, brochures, flyers, handouts, meeting minutes, law enforcement records liberated under FOIA, small-press books, videocassettes, CD's, audio cassettes, and hardbacks, put out by everyone from the KKK to Richard Spencer. I've written software to trace the evolution of their shitty anti-culture from post-Weimar Lutheranism in Western Europe and the propaganda forgeries of post-Czarist Russia to the discussion boards of Stormfront and Reddit.

The criteria I use for running a ban-bot against a subreddit is that the subreddit has to be clearly organised around a principle of violating one or more of the Reddit Content Policies.

Reddit has begun taking much more swift action against such subreddits when they're reported, and has overhauled their enforcement policies so that subreddits that are created or repurposed to re-create the purpose of a banned subreddit that violated the Content Policies, is itself classed as Ban Evasion, and those subreddits are shuttered promptly as well.

Other subreddits run a banbot because they reasonably believe that i.e. neoNazis aren't going to be able to treat African-American people with humanity and dignity.

I do use a tool that scrapes the activity in a variety of large hatred-oriented subreddits, and tags the user accounts (down to linking to the comment or post) --

So that I have a way to gauge the Ethos of someone's engagement in a subreddit thread.

According to Aristotle, there are three categories of ethos:

phronesis – useful skills & wisdom
arete – virtue, goodwill
eunoia – goodwill towards the audience

In a sense, ethos does not belong to the speaker but to the audience. Thus, it is the audience that determines whether a speaker is a high- or a low-ethos speaker.

Violations of ethos include:

The speaker has a direct interest in the outcome of the debate (e.g. a person pleading innocence of a crime);
The speaker has a vested interest or ulterior motive in the outcome of the debate;
The speaker has no expertise (e.g. a lawyer giving a speech on space flight is less convincing than an astronaut giving the same speech).

Tier 0 of the diagramme I linked earlier? That's all stuff that can be easily handled by AutoModerator -- it's all cliche's and tropes and stock phrases and slurs.

Tier 1? That's a little harder for AutoModerator to pick up; There are certain shibboleths that betray certain stock fallacies -- because many times, someone using the fallacy is just repeating some media personality who is selling them a pseudosalve for their psychic dysfunction, and they just blindly reuse it.

But a lot of times, fallacies are deeply integrated into someone's worldview, and they'll platform them in their own words.

That requires an assessment of their Ethos to do it.

Criticism of tone - Tier 2 - is also something that AutoModerator excels at, because a huge swath of the corpus of the Criticism of Tone is also Thought-Terminating Cliche's -- idioms used to label and dismiss. But, again -- people will integrate them and put them into their own words, and knowing that they come from a particular culture that exists specifically for the purpose of systematically reducing other human beings into labels and boxes to dismiss their concerns -- that's important.

(And yes, some of the audience is right now reflexively twitching towards "But YOU have a list of labels that YOU use to reflexively dismiss ..." -- I have a list of behaviours that typify the forms taken by a culture of belittling and disenfranchisement and violation of boundaries and consent.)

Tier 3, the Flat Contradiction or Assertion, is a time-waster -- it's just a slapping of the bell on the counter, demanding "One Argument, Please" -- and understanding whether someone will be going up if provided good-faith engagement, or descending down if given attention, is an important part of moderating a discussion. If someone is heavily involved in a culture that emphasises "Ignore their consent and rules, and offend them as much as possible until you're kicked out" -- then we go straight to the "you're kicked out" part.

/r/conspiracy is a deeply racist subreddit -- but also attracts a lot of people who want to argue with the racists and kooks therein, or who get sucked in by actual real concerns that are labelled "conspiracy theories" by one "authority" or another.

Earlier I mentioned Ethos -- so you should understand mine:

I'm a retired Computer Scientist; I have a Master's in English. I worked for a PR firm for a decade before I retired.

This? How people communicate and carry out community on the Internet? is literally my field of expertise.

I'm also a transgender woman.

So I'm seen by a significant section of the bad-faith users - the bigots - as some kind of "traitor" - because they believe that the things I know, the skills I have, the body I inhabit ... that these somehow belong, in some way, to them.

And they believe that of every other transgender person - that their bodies, and minds, and loyalties, and reproductive capabilities -- that these bigots have some authority to make a claim on them.

And they behave in a way that says that, if they can't control a thing, they destroy that thing.

And assuredly, they see us transgender people as "things" -- as tokens and objects and subhuman.

That attitude is endemic to the culture of /r/MGTOW, and of /r/KotakuInAction, and many other longstanding subreddits.

It's unconscionable to ask someone to just put up with the torrent of abuse, for the sake of the occasional pure-hearted soul who just was participating in a misguided fashion.

It's not my burden to fix people who believe they own me.