Transphobia in Neopets: Moderation Issues on The Neoboards
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Unfortunately, harassment and targeting of trans users on the boards is nothing new and has become a deep-rooted problem within the website. Neopets moderation has a history of being inconsistent, unfair, and failing to provide clear motives behind the silencing and freezing of player's accounts, but things have gotten progressively worse over the past few years.
Users who have attempted to warn other players about interacting with transphobic people, or those who have spoken out against harassment, whether directed at themselves or others, have had their accounts silenced, or permanently silenced.
Some users have even been unfairly silenced for taking a stand and posting criticism about the state of moderation on neoboards, pointing out how moderation has left threads that show contempt for trans and queer users alone for up to 8 hours:
In one specific case, a player had all their accounts frozen. Minutes before this happened, they started building a petpage with a plea for better moderation, they were describing and tracking this issue and backing it up with screenshots of abusive messages and selective moderation.
The original motive behind the freeze was because it was found that the user had "one of multiple same-owner accounts being used to vote in the beauty contest", this motive was later disputed by the owner since they didn't remember doing this; After apologizing, Alice explained that the reason had been updated to "frozen for incorrect posts." Virha's accounts remain frozen/silenced.
TNT was confronted on the site's boards and social media platforms regarding the lack of moderation and accountability when it comes to handling transphobia. In response, TNT changed the name of the "General Discussion" board to "General Neopets Discussion":
This change bans any mention of "real life issues" or discussion not related to Neopets. Because of this, users have been getting silenced and threads getting deleted over mentioning harmless things, such as asking others what they are having for dinner, or mentioning that they are bisexual; Even when TNT had previously stated that users can maintain discussion of LGBTQIA+ topics:
This question was submitted and published back on July 30, 2021. The neoboard chat rules have yet to be updated:
Despite the change made to the Gendisc board, both the "General Neopets Discussion" and "Site Events" boards are currently being bombarded with harmful rhetoric, and many users who have displayed transphobic behavior have not faced consequences such as silencing or freezing of their accounts.
