Streaming While Black
July 10, 2008
Today, the blogosphere got a taste of what a lot of us black live streamers experience all too often: anonymous cowards. These individuals choose to hide behind their anonymity, and flood corresponding chat rooms with all kinds of racial slurs. Unfortunately, Louis Gray had to witness such an event:
This afternoon, I caught a video broadcast with Wayne Sutton and Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net, where Corvida had the opportunity to share her story of asking Verizon to drop their relationship with Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, in light of his controversial video parodying African American bloggers. While both carried on a strong conversation around the issues of race, bigotry and getting ahead through hard work, their efforts were dwarfed by some of the most hateful, shameful, racist speech I’ve been exposed to in a very long time.
While I missed the discussion over on Yahoo Live, it is an issue that I’m all too familiar with. It highlights an existing problem of race in the world, but also another problem of, what I call, Internet Bold Stupidity (IBS). A lot of people are entertained by purposely stating the most extreme statements they can think of, and feed off the dark energy of your reaction. This seemingly happens without consequence since they are sitting in the comforts of their own home.
I deal with this issue by doing the following:
- Moderate the chat room. If you chose to stream live, you must employ mechanisms to silence those whose goal is to interrupt your show. I chose Ustream.TV for this purpose since I believe their chat backend (IRC) has some of the most powerful moderation tools on the net.
- Realize what they are, and move on. Don’t dwell on their statements. Stay focused on what you need to do, keep a positive energy going.
- Do not feed the trolls. By acknowledging their statements, you are only fueling the fire. Encourage others in your chat room to do the same. Trolls typically want attention. Don’t give them something to feed off and they will go away. If they don’t go away, see step 1.
- Don’t give up. If you let these individuals deter you from what you are trying to accomplish, then they have conquered you. Don’t let that happen! Keep at it, and stay positive.
You can sometimes find me streaming on my live stream at live.bwana.tv. Our tight knit community there knows what’s up. There is a low tolerance for this type of behavior. While I’m saddened a lot of people have been abruptly awakened the reality of online abuse (in this case, race), I believe there are workable solutions to deal with these trolls. Will it ultimately address the underlining cause? Of course not. I do believe in the old saying “If you ignore them, they will go away”, only I’ll add, “and if they don’t go away, kick and ban them.” Others chimed in on this topic as well:
I hope that all aspiring black live streamers out there don’t let this deter them from expressing themselves online.
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