In a move that every other website should be paying close attention to, knitting and crochet-based social media platform Ravelry has announced an across-the-board ban for all posts in favor of Donald Trump and his administration. Apparently that’s a thing you can do if you don’t want extremely dangerous or toxic or hate-filled opinions to be spread on the platform you own! Has anyone told Twitter and YouTube and Reddit and Facebook about this? Because they should. It seems like a great idea.
Anyway, Ravelry has put up a statement explaining the decision, noting that the ban “includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content,” which is bad news for however many people were posting pro-Trump bullshit on a site about knitting. The statement also sumps up Ravelry’s position by saying, “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.” Again: Did you know about this, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Reddit?
In more specific terms: Ravelry is not specifically banning one political party in favor of another or saying that nobody is allowed to support Trump anywhere, it’s just not going to allow it on the platform that it controls. It’s also not going to go back through anyone’s posts and ban them for things they’ve said in the past or allow anyone to try and force others into declaring where they stand on Trump, all of which should theoretically help avoid any of the negative consequences that a policy like this may otherwise cause. You can do whatever you want somewhere else, you just can’t talk about how much you like Donald Trump or his racist policies on Ravelry.
The statement posted on Ravelry points out that it was adopted from a similar stance taken by RPG.net, which actually goes to the trouble of citing evidence for its stance that Trump is racist and that supporting his policies is also racist. It’s very good, as is Ravelry’s extremely cute login page. That doesn’t really have anything to do with Trump, but we’ve said his name a lot here and we could use the restorative power of some cute animals playing in yarn.