#the fact that I can't buy a physical english copy of this to have in my home is a fucking travesty

[grassbreads]

Everyone needs to read Hiraeth -The End of the Journey- right fucking now

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Fact Checks, Mediation, Curation, and Censorship from a Library Perspective

I have a lot of thoughts. This is a biggun. You might want a cup of tea.

As a librarian, I am a free speech enthusiast. Also as a librarian, I am accustomed to dealing with limitations on how much speech can actually be accommodated and thus having to try to find some standard for adjudicating merit that is as ideologically neutral as possible. Translated into plain English, I have limited shelf space and budgets so I can't buy a copy of everything in existence: I have to make judgments about how to allocate my scarce resources.

Perhaps the single part of that judgment process that makes me sympathetic to Meta is that I have to think about who uses my library and the overall quality of their experience versus as opposed to what I believe they should desire to see and how they should want to use my resources. If I rig the experience too far towards my own biases, I'm out of a job. People will show up, not find anything that suits them, leave, never come back, and maybe complain to one or more elected officials who have power over my budget and authority to impose limits and demands on how I do my job.

Librarianship attracts a lot of progressives. To pretend otherwise would be lying to ourselves and to the public. If there is anything at all that I think we as a profession and left of center highly educated people more generally should take away from the culture wars is that the loss of public confidence is profoundly damaging and digging out of that hole is not a trivial exercise. I like to think librarians more than almost any other lefty profession recognizes that we have to hold our truths loosely and see ourselves as facilitating a long conversation within the public. The alternative is allowing our reflexive "ick" when someone checks out the latest polemic or O'Reilly penned pop history to make us condescending, disengaged, and paternalistic. We can't assume the long conversation begins and ends with that patron checking out that book.

Hiding information we think is empirically incorrect or dangerous from the public or shaming them may or may not be an effective way to modify their beliefs and limit harm, but regardless of efficacy I think its a bad instinct to nurture. No single institution, agency, or platform in open societies is the only venue in which people encounter information and opaque decision making about what we emphasize or deemphasize can build suspicion. If we get caught following a zeitgeist that feels like empirical truth but later proves faulty, its hard to recover the public trust. Credibility is hard to build, easy to lose.

You cannot persuade or achieve mutual understanding if the feeling you nurture is contempt.

I firmly believe that mutual understanding is necessary for persuasion.

Having said that though, it goes both ways. If someone feels nothing but contempt for you and acts on this feeling, then you can't truly have productive dialogue of any sort. As a consequence, libraries have rules governing behavior in the physical spaces and violators may be asked to leave. Chronic violators may be barred from returning.

This sentiment as applied to books is a little more abstract and "eye of the beholder-ish" but when making decisions about what to spend money on, librarians look at various proxies for merit:

Reputation of the publisher for quality control when it comes to proofreading, formatting, and binding.(1)

Authors that are already established as having good name recognition. (2)

Requests from the public.

Book reviews from well regarded outlets. (3)

(1) Given that time is one of our scarce resources, we are biased towards publishers that provide good metadata for our systems to ingest which makes our books more easily discovered by patrons using catalog search tools. This bias definitely has unintended consequences: independently published authors are often locked out of library systems; as are smaller, less well established and resourced publishers that can't match Pearson et al. dollar for dollar when it comes to marketing. If there is a traditionally published book that comes from a smaller but reputable publisher, please request it for your library so its on our radar!

(2) Yes this does discriminate against authors just starting out who aren't hooked up with powerful publishing houses that will advertise the heck out of them. See (1).

(3) Awards lists from the American Library Association and affiliate orgs like YALSA reviews in Library Journal are the platinum standard, but we're not above using NYT best seller lists, Goodreads, and even Amazon reviews but most of us are very aware of how these things can be gamed and exclude all but the luckiest Indie writer. Again, we love suggestions that help us bring things into the collection that are exist inside the blindspots of our human frailties.

Aren't we talking about social media, not libraries?

How this applies to the realm of online conversation in my thinking is as follows:

When was the last time you had a good and meaningful conversation with a stranger in a setting that wasn't strictly moderated?

Have you ever managed to have a good and meaningful conversation with a stranger across a significant ideological divide in a setting that wasn't strictly moderated?

If you have a compelling answer, I'd actually love to hear it. Because this seems profoundly rare and I have to wonder if you were simply unaware of the moderation because of the way moderation set expectations for conduct that ensured good faith participation instead of acting like a smug jerk out to trigger and farm likes.

Now of course you might also say that this is tone policing and that not everyone is owed civility.

Yes and yes!

It is tone policing and not everyone is owed civility. Tone policing has long been a tool to ensure that grief, rage, and unpopular ideas are seen as invalid. Rules of etiquette that are too tight bleed out the humanity of a discussion and tend to prioritize those who have learned the affect of the highly educated and privileged. This is a real risk to moderation of discussion on large platforms and it does warrant scrutiny.

Yet I would still argue that some tone policing is necessary to have real communication about real ideas instead of a competition to yell the loudest or to wield harassment to try to make a platform unusable by people with objectionable ideas.

Much as tone policing can be weaponized against people on the basis of class or culture, another consequence might be bad ideas being laundered through the language of sensibility. This might result in ugly phenomenon like racists veiling their rhetoric, "sane washing" it to sound more reasonable ala Hernstein & Murray's "The Bell Curve." If you're from the conservative or class first left side, you might say it "smartens up" empirically senseless grifts from people selling struggle sessions to guilty liberals who want to feel like they're making the world a better, fairer place without actually volunteering their time or money to worthwhile causes.

Bad ideas being laundered through erudite language because of tone policing (moderation) and the inability of other people to just drop the pretense and call Murray a bigot does present a risk of those ideas being sane washed and people falling for them. To that I say the downsides of not setting a minimum expectation for conduct are felt disproportionately by the people who most need to be heard.

The act of calling Murray a bigot inoculates some of the audience from being taken in from his work, but others see it as a thought terminating cliché that is designed to shut down any consideration of any of Murray's ideas. Thus some people will inevitably get lured into Murray's trap that much more easily, their critical thinking disarmed by their disdain for anyone who throws out the word bigot.

Just being willing to be exposed to the counter argument is a small victory for information literacy

Meanwhile, there is a far riskier proposition, one that librarians wrestle with when we suppress our gag reflexes and buy the latest polemic: what if we trust people to make up their own minds?

Knowing full well that some people will "fall for" the misinformation and yes, that does have dangerous consequences in a world with hate crimes and pandemics. Yet the alternative to trusting people is attempting to control their access to information, to only permit them access to the good information. In a world where people can consume information ala carte, this just ensures that we quickly lose all of the people who feel excluded and attacked and they migrate to somewhere that caters to them exclusively, if not more aggressively. A place where they won't necessarily have access to ideas that challenge them because that place might not follow the professional ethics of librarians.

We can't stop the skeptic from walking out the door when they encounter books from people of faith nor the liberal from leaving when they see Anne Coulter's new collection of rants nor the religious conservative when they encounter queer dialogues. The library is a two part bargain: it is opt in and by opting in you agree to be at least tempted by the presence of narratives contrary to your own and in being in the presence of these "bad" books you will at least be consenting to tolerating their existence. And that's a start. That's a foundation you can attempt to build a society on.

The second part of the bargain is that you don't have to be too hyper vigilant because care has been taken in the selection. Not to guarantee fidelity to reality, but rather that a bare minimum of effort has been made by the author, publisher etc. to be coherent so that the reader can at least make sense of what they're looking at.

This is the role that fair and effective moderation can play in online spaces. It does not allow everyone to speak freely, but it does allow people who are willing to agree to a minimum standard of conduct the opportunity to participate. Moderation is also a tool of equity. Establishing guardrails around decorum, the dreaded "tone policing", favors the people who are most likely to get abused and dog piled. Which again in some situations might be the Nazi who is "hiding his power level" but in other situations, probably more often even, it favors the cultural, religious, political, or sexual minority! It protects them from the sort of harassment and bad faith interactions they'd get in other settings.

So as a free speech enthusiast, I am less offended by Meta backing away from fact checking than I am by allegations it is quietly relaxing standards around speech that is abusive or hateful. It is now permissible to say that LGBTQ people are mentally ill. It is also now, even more bizarrely, permissible to say women are household objects. For the sake of clarity, here is Meta's own words on the subject as I cannot find the specific quotes used in the NBC and CNN articles I linked, which I find deeply problematic from a journalistic ethics standpoint.

"We recognize that people sometimes share content that includes slurs or someone else’s speech in order to condemn the speech or report on it. In other cases, speech, including slurs, that might otherwise violate our standards is used self-referentially or in an empowering way. We allow this type of speech where the speaker’s intention is clear. Where intention is unclear, we may remove content.

People sometimes use sex- or gender-exclusive language when discussing access to spaces often limited by sex or gender, such as access to bathrooms, specific schools, specific military, law enforcement, or teaching roles, and health or support groups. Other times, they call for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality. Finally, sometimes people curse at a gender in the context of a romantic break-up. Our policies are designed to allow room for these types of speech." Meta Transparency Center, Hateful Conduct Policy Rationale as of January 7, 2025

Notably the examples of forbidden post types do still include threats, encouragement of self harm, openly wishing for all [category] to be killed, die, commit suicide etc.

Given that I saw examples of forbidden speech all of the time under the old rules, under the newly relaxed standards a much greater burden is going to be placed on moderators to make judgment calls about what is beyond the pale. Somehow I doubt that discourse is going to become more jovial, civil, or thoughtful and that low effort trolling and sniping will be discouraged. Nor that people in categories that are protected outside of a political or religious context will enjoy a lot of freedom to post openly about their lives seeing as virtually everything about their existence can be argued to be a political or religious freedom issue for someone else who wants to engage in harassment.

Notably a trans-owned shop that I have happily purchased numerous items of Renaissance Faire gear from and only became aware of because of advertising on Facebook, is pulling back from using Meta platforms as a community engagement tool because of rampant harassment and bad faith reports. Reports that camouflage the anti-LGBTQ motive and exploit Meta's lack of interest or allocated resources to do more than superficial investigation of reports.

Unfair and inadequate moderation are one of the swiftest routes to losing credibility and I do expect there will be long term negative consequences to relaxing standards in order to be more consistent overall rather than devoting more resources to adjudicating reports accurately and fairly. But of course, I would expect negative consequences wouldn't I?

"Can't you just block the trolls?"

This is a popular response to complaints about lax moderation by free speech enthusiasts. I have probably made some variation of this argument before. On some level, this is true.

BlueSky has one of the most robust suite of tools for managing rude behavior of the major platforms, at least that I am aware of. The features include:

The traditional "block" feature where you will never see a person again and they won't see you.

The option to hide a reply to one of your posts from everyone else.

The ability to "disconnect" your post from a quoted reply so that an offensive or annoying quote is not obviously associated with your original post.

These tools reportedly work very well for even fairly high profile people like famous authors to manage unpleasant people harassing them or other people in their comments, but as BlueSky has become labeled "the left Twitter" and risen in prominence, there are alleged campaigns being organized on other platforms to brigade BlueSky and conduct mass harassment of LGBTQ users and perhaps other people regularly in the crosshairs of conservative troll armies. This is a strategy I'm very familiar with from my own experiences in 1990s forum culture where users of rival boards would register en masse to try to distract and harass their enemies in a sort of office chair version of enemy gangs making incursions into each other's territory. For a few days until a critical mass of people had been IP banned, a site could be unusable for its loyal posters.

Given the scale at which modern social media platforms operate and the vast numbers of followers prominent rabblerousers can rouse, for their victims the self service moderation tools would not be adequate. If you've ever read/listened to someone who has become the main character of the internet for a few days, a targeted individual might receive hundreds, even thousands of unwanted and abusive messages all at once. Shout out to Jamie Loftus and her podcast "Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)."

I'm very, very pro-human labor when it comes to tasks that require understanding context and nuance but realistically, recognizing when someone is being bombarded with hateful content and addressing it is a task that at least to some degree is best suited for a robot. This is also where features present in other social medias like word filters can help but the tools are often hidden behind layers of menus. To beat the dead horse and acknowledge the steelman: overly punitive and credulous automated moderation is part of how Meta dug itself into a hole with its users in the first place. This is one part of Zuckerberg's self assessment about Meta's moderation tools that rang true in his interview with Joe Rogan, although he breezed past the alternatives like just hiring more people, training them better etc.

When the Banned Become Martyrs & Platforms Acting in Bad Faith

I feel very little pity for the troll who intentionally breaks terms of service as an act of protest against what they perceive as unjust moderation policies. In the quest to keep abreast of how people I find deeply unpleasant think and feel, a friend subjected me to an hour of conversation between Bari Weiss and Seth Dillon of Babylon Bee.

The steelman version of this conversation would read as follows: Weiss and Dillon make accurate observations about the perverse incentives and risks of overly centralized, too reactive, and too risk averse social media. They also make these observations in the most infuriating way possible. The amount of whining about not being able to call being trans a mental illness or being issued punishments for misgendering people is definitely content not fit to be consumed without a mouth guard, for allies are sure to grind their teeth. A lot. I sure did.

This is where I do have to separate out my disgust for the content of their speech and address where I do think there is a there there.

Because as a librarian, I am genuinely torn. As I have just spent an inordinate amount of time laying out, I am not against minimum standards of conduct in spaces, online or off, if the intent is to ensure that the broadest number of people, acting in good faith, may make use of the space as its intended and be heard. Even if I don't necessarily approve of the ideas, I think its good and healthy to be exposed to the intellectualized versions of ideas I don't care for. There is a risk that intellectual "pathogens" may spread but for me at least, I listened to what Weiss and Dillon had to say and I liked them less as human beings when the credits rolled and their arguments for free speech made me think long and hard about the trade offs involved in content moderation. Mostly in a way that made me less persuaded by free speech absolutism.

Yet, their commentary on power and incentives rang true. Meta has no commitment to core principles. It has a fiduciary duty. Any pretense that it has principles is at best an ex post facto rationalization by people who are trying to justify working for Meta and at worst, its simply a lie. Meta's pretense that it has ever intentionally, as a first principle acted in the public good is a marketing tool intended to make us, the users, feel better about being on a platform associated with genocides, the spreading of lethally incorrect information about pathogens, conspiracy theories about election fraud, and the more banal everyday irritation of comment section feuds and clickbait drivel being shoved at us from accounts we are not following but appear more frequently in our timelines than those of our own friends.

Back at the dawn of the panic over "fake news" Meta's introduction of tighter standards for moderation and fact checking appeared to be in part due to a moral reaction to the use of Facebook to help fan the flames of a genocide in Myanmar among other events. It seemed to be part of a sense that unlike individual to individual communication like phones, social media had a moral duty to limit its use for obscene and destructive purposes.

Ethically, it was becoming viewed more as a newspaper or TV station in the public consciousness or at least among the specific parts of the commentariat that concerned themselves with expanding the scope of human rights and was focused on limiting harms like violence, hate, dangerously inaccurate information etc. The downsides of a for profit entity granting itself editorial authority were seen as less likely to produce harm than true neutrality, and after all, the steps Meta was taking were aligned with that of the Intelligentsia.

Now with Meta walking these things back, I think its clear that what Meta was doing was limiting its exposure to consequences for how it was used. For a while, it seemed like real action might be taken on holding major platforms accountable for allowing users to do things that might contribute to some sort of tangible, real world harm or crime. Anti-trust was on the lips of the Intelligentsia and some users were having conversations about the ethics of using services that had contributed to genocides at the extreme and were just generally becoming more and more unpleasant as they became more of a venue for people to lock horns over politics. Which again, locking horns over politics may just be a sport to some, for others it presents the real risk of real harms like doxxing, SWATTING, stalking, defamation, harassment campaigns etc.

So Meta took action to limit its legal risks and to calm the moral outrage of its loudest users.

Now the tables have turned and the legal risks come from a Federal government whose regulatory tools are in the hands of Republicans who are very outspoken about desiring to punish Meta for punishing people who were chronic terms of service violators under the old rules regimen. People who ran afoul of Meta's more strident definitions of hate speech, incitement, disinformation etc. because those people were the ones who expose Meta to legal and financial risks when Democrats are in control.

Unintended Consequences

I have never had a romantic view of Meta. There is no big tech founder I have ever idealized. I will not pretend that I am in mourning over some lost era of civility and empiricism. That never existed. I also am not going to overperform outrage over Meta relaxing its standards for moderation and abandoning fact checking because while I have made a case for why they can be good, from my vantage point I have never seen it be the case where Meta ever applied legible standards consistently or fairly. Which just winds up damaging the credibility of the third party fact checkers who seemed to mostly be trying to act in good faith but had no control over how their fact checks were deployed as a dispassionate, automated tool when handed off to Meta.

Facebook and Instagram are only usable to me because I keep a very narrow and carefully selected range of people who are allowed to see and comment on my posts and I'm extremely selective with how I interact with public posts from pages and groups. When I use the default timeline view, it is a minefield of engagement bait. It is as of this writing only indirectly political: recommended posts primarily debate social issues in the context of fandoms and higher education.

The fandom posts are irritatingly toxic but carefully worded to avoid being too toxic and mostly written by trolls who I have serious doubts actually watched or read the things they're commenting on and primarily seem interested in using fandom to get around the algorithm "shadow banning" political topics. It almost all devolves back to whether Marvel, Star Wars, or Star Trek have gone woke and the comments are overwhelmingly skew stupid, vulgar, and histrionic.

From Meta's perspective, this must be a win. Its generating engagement and apparently what the engagement actually is is irrelevant so long as the number goes up. Where circa 2021-2024 Meta was de-emphasizing overt politics and trying to prioritize cordiality and fun, now it evidently feels that it is more lucrative and less dangerous from a regulatory perspective to go back to being a troll free for all. This will probably be good for Meta financially in the short term since the verbal blood sport that is online discussion of politics and cultural issues generates traffic galore.

Presumably this will also please the GOP unless the same relaxed moderation allows a new wave of "Resistance" or Black Lives Matter style organizing.

In the long term? I suspect it will accelerate Meta's decline as people who simply want to keep in touch with distant family find it more and more difficult to see one another's posts without a tech savvy relative to show them where Meta hides the legacy feeds that only show people and pages you are actually following in chronological order.

What will Meta do when the "anti-woke" controlled regulatory committees and agencies notice "anti-fascist" organizing on Meta's platforms? Will Mark Zuckerberg tell presumptive FBI director Kash Patel that freedom of speech means freedom of speech for everyone or will he clamp down on people, pages, and groups critical of the Trump administration, GOP, or other "right" coded groups and causes? I think he'll prioritize his empire because I believe he was prioritizing his empire when he made changes to tamp down on incivility and misinformation.

Who Moderates the Mods?

So that leaves me in an interesting place as someone who thinks a little censorship is good to promote better conversation overall because for moderation to be truly effective at shaping discourse and thought, moderators need the consent of the moderated. I've seen across many types of forums from old school VBoards, various social media platforms, Reddits, chat rooms but also physical spaces like the workplace: when the authority isn't viewed as being consistent, fair, and serving interests that aren't purely selfish then it becomes a hug box for authority's sycophants and an oppressive hellscape for the out crowd.

The robot in the room is that Meta has automated quite a bit of this and with that automation comes built in erosion of any sort of moral authority. When a person makes a mistake and you appeal that mistake, you're entering into a form of conversation about the problem. That conversation may be contentious but it is a conversation. Information is being exchanged between two human beings and the end result may not result in the satisfaction of the appealer but at least there's the tiny comfort that you've been heard. Any sense that you're dealing with an algorithm is a reminder that you're essentially cattle being managed by a rancher who is more interested in ruthlessly performing the appearance of justice for an audience as cheaply and efficiently as possible rather than relating to individual users as people.

When you're just cattle to be milked for your data to resell to advertisers, then moderation is about order not justice. Long term users of Facebook and Instagram can attest to the sense that when confrontation and misery were what seemed to make the number go up, the algorithm served up inflammatory content thus rewarding misanthropes and the fearful for their rage/doomposting with lots and lots of attention and sometimes financial rewards. This also keeps other users in a perpetual state of hypervigilance because each flick of the thumb could reveal new horrors they don't want you to know.

In case anyone forgot, the algorithm was not neutral in this era, it was not simply giving users more of what they wanted in an impartial fashion, there was a period of three years where the "Angry" reaction made similar posts FIVE TIMES more likely to appear in the user's feed.

Quoting The Week quoting Washington Post (cause paywall):

"Facebook data scientists by 2019 determined posts that earn angry emojis were more likely to include misinformation, toxicity, and low quality news, meaning "Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform, making it more prominent in users' feeds and spreading it to a much wider audience."

After the 2020 election, January 6th, and Donald Trump becoming the first sitting President to be banned from all of the major social media platforms, Meta decided people wanted a break from politics. Thus the nature of the engagement bait shifted away from politics to...other stuff. This is I think a moment where reality became more fragmented because my feed and as a consequence a disproportionate amount of my mental energy was devoted to a lot of incredibly irritating and clickbaity fandom content that was acting as a proxy for the social controversies Meta was discouraging talking about directly.

If you're not a huge nerd, I don't know what your reality has looked like in the era of Meta suppressing overt politics. I assume that you may have been subjected to the culture wars playing out in other contexts but I won't hazard a guess as to what form this takes.

I suspect that this was a mix of Meta trying to read tea leaves about upcoming regulatory battles and deciding it had peaked in its ability to elicit fear and anger based engagement and was thus getting experimental. Throw in a dash of trying to look docile to Democrats who were looking for someone to blame and punish for the Jan 6 riot, and you've got yourself a recipe for Meta once more trying to adapt to a changing regulatory environment.

This is all very antithetical to my librarian ethos.

Curation & moderation are about fostering an environment where the most people can feel safe and be heard, not to keep them docile to generate metrics for the sake of generating metrics or worse: use a steady torrent of outrage to keep them addicted to rage, terror, and disgust.

As someone very passionate about critical thinking, goodfaith and constructive exchange between real humans with sincerely and deeply felt beliefs, and the free flow of reliable information because its reliable not just because its useful to political campaigns or affirms biases; Meta's manipulation of users and discourse to avoid regulation and maximize revenue really pisses me off.

I'm willing to take the word of Meta's fact checking partners that they saw themselves as good faith actors and working within the confines of their own restrictive ethical guidelines as researchers and journalists. Yet the way in which their work was utilized was never adequate nor was it wielded sincerely by Meta. I'm of the opinion it was only ever to safeguard against liability when there were real threats of regulation and monopoly busting and perhaps also to virtue signal to users who might have otherwise quit over Meta's various ethics scandals and the overall unpleasant user experience.

Sometimes companies will do the right thing for the wrong reasons. I'm not against creating financial incentives to behave virtuously. It works quite well if imperfectly in more empirical industries where user safety is a thing that can be easily tested, quantified, and brazen incompetency / malevolence detected and punished by consumers and regulators.

Social media on the other hand too often works by making people dependent on a product and then making the overall experience worse once it runs out of opportunities to grow by expanding its user base. At that point social media contrives ways to make people spend more time using ad supported products by making the experience confusing or pay walling features that used to be free. Want to protect your account from impersonators who might try to scam your family and friends? Be prepared to spend.

Cory Doctorow refers to this as enshittification. Ed Zitron has coined the term "the rot economy." Both center the idea that if there is an opportunity to destroy the quality of the user experience in such a way that it creates the appearance of more engagement which can in turn be used to make bold claims about the value of the product, then companies will simply break their products rather than do true innovation.

Declining engagement and regulatory threats are the only stimuli that social media companies ultimately respond to. Because they are the only true threats to the bottom line.

Librarians are directly accountable to their patrons and to the political entities that fund them. A loss of trust can be felt very swiftly and very concretely. Whether the basis of that loss of trust is truly real or not is a separate matter, but the loss of trust is felt. The mod is moderated by those they moderate.

Reddit and traditional forum moderators are usually unpaid volunteers who do it for the love of community.

The mods of Facebook groups that are actually functional are much the same.

There are times and places where norms breaking is called for. I think the narrative that civil rights victories have only truly been achieved by discomforting the comfortable until the complacent agree to a new status quo is correct. From my vantage point as a librarian though, when the unheard resort to rioting it is precisely because circumstances were permitted where the loudest and the meanest could shout down and terrorize those who were trying to use civil discourse to be recognized as full and complete human beings and citizens. Although I'm not ignorant of my own profession's history of curating away disruptive ideas and the way publishing can invisibly silence people who are following the rules to introduce unpopular ideas in a civil manner.

These things are not easy. The tension between curation and censorship requires constant vigilance and introspection. Where I land is that freedom of speech is best understood like other rights: people's rights can and do conflict and "more speech" to combat bad speech ensures the person trying to be recognized as fully human or just pointing out hypocrisy is always at a disadvantage. But boy is curation or moderation a tough sell when you're pretty sure you can't trust the mods.

[elhoimleafar]

So, this should be kinda private conversation about the money struggles in the metaphysical community, but anyway I think it is something interesting to share with all of you.

I just received today my latest check from my past publisher WRRB. When you receive a check for your books this comes with your lifetime copies sold for every copy in every format of your books.

My book 'The Magical Art of Crafting Charm Bags' published in 2017 has sold almost 6k copies at May of 2024 (7 years), while my book 'Manifestation Magic' published in 2021 has sold over 6k copies at May 2024 (3 years).

This tells you a lot about where the interest is, but also the focus on the metaphysical community, for bad and for good.

Take into account that I didn't have those years a large community support, zero publisher's support on promotion, they don't even post my books on their Instagram or Facebook, and I didn't make any interviews before 2022 cuz my English sucks - even worse than now 😂 - so practically all the marketing strategy was myself posting on socials everyday and setting up signing book for myself in each local store I knew.

I find really curious how the topic of Money Magic still been such a taboo in the metaphysical community, in 2024, to the point that people rather buy these books and remain silent about it, cuz people feels judged by everyone when they use publicly the words Money or Abundance, which tell you also a Loooot about the damaged mindset in a community that should not be judging others by their struggles.

Which is literally the reason why I wrote that book on Money Magick for Witches and energy workers, cuz in 2024 still a taboo talking about it, to the point that when you just barely get close to the topic of conversation, every white person in the room gaslight you associating your beliefs on Abundance & Prosperity with 'Toxic Positivity', entirely ignoring the fact that bipoc creators and witches still been who have more financial struggles in this same community.

You'll never find, or at least in eight years I had not find, a simple bipoc creator trashing the topic on Abundance or Money Magic and calling it 'Toxic Positivity', white men are the ones always saying that, obviously from a place of privilege and entitlement, and this is not racism, I don't even know now the right term for this, but obviously is a ton of privilege in going around saying to bipoc practitioners 'you can't do or talk about money cause this is toxic' while ignoring the reason.

Anyway, my point is, the fact that one book on Charm Bags which still a favorite of the bookstores everywhere, had sold 'almost' what a A book on Money Magic has sold in half of the time - seven years vs three years - tell you about how much this community is still struggling with accepting the fact that we are living a physical experience in physical bodies and money (independently of your social or financial position) should not be a taboo of conversation in the spiritual community.

Anyway here below I leave for you the links for both of my books if you want to know more about what I do and what I teach, and want to continue supporting my work and content;

1. The Magical Art of Crafting Charm Bags: 100 Mystical Formulas for Success, Love, Wealth, and Wellbeing. (Weiser Books, 2017).

🔗 : https://www.amazon.com/dp/1578636191

2. Manifestation Magic: 21 Rituals, Spells, and Amulets for Abundance, Prosperity, and Wealth.

Weiser Books, 2021

🔗 : https://amzn.to/3MCD87l

3. Dream Witchery: Folk Magic, Recipes & Spells from South America for Witches & Brujas.

Llewellyn Worldwide, 2023.

🔗 : https://amzn.to/47rStS4

I mean, how many white male podcasters and white male event organizers and white male bloggers and writers we have saying to bipoc practitioners things like 'believing in the law of attraction and talking about abundance is just spreading toxic positivity'?.

Cuz I just counted 14 the last week, so supposedly brown & black witches can't do money spells?, cause white people with a bigger following dislike it?

Is a lot of privilege on doing that, and some inner colonialism attitude also 🙄

Xxo, Elo.

[astridofraftel]

reading challenge update #8

In January I owned 30 books that I had not read yet, some of them I had been procrastinating for 7 years and counting, and I decided to change that! 2023 shall be the year I eradicate my To-Read-Pile for good. And I just finished half of my goal! Even better, if we look at the total number of words, I'm actually ahead of schedule, because the longest books are already done. If I keep this pace, I could even complete my reading challenge in November, and then I'll be totally free to BUY NEW BOOKS!! :DDD

Just finished: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse + Il était une fois dans le Nord (Once Upon A Time In The North) by Philip Pullman + Le Roi Lear (King Lear) by William Shakespeare

Currently reading: And I Darken by Kiersten White

Next on schedule: L'Ultime Expérience by Bruce Benamran + Boudicca by Jean-Laurent Del Socorro + Le Flambeau + Témoin à charge by Agatha Christie

They're technically not on my challenge schedule because I don't own them (yet) but I'll probably want to read Now I Rise and Bright We Burn by Kiersten White in priority since the book I'm reading right now is part of a trilogy. I'm only about a third in but I enjoy it a lot so far, so I'm pretty positive I'll want to read the rest.

It's based on east-European history, which I'm not very knowledgeable about, but I don't want to fact-check a lot until I've completed the series, just in case real history spoils me. The vibe and the characters are really interesting and alluring, I'm very curious to see where it'll get me!

It's not my first time reading a K. White book, in 2021 I read The Guinevere Deception and I really liked it! It was part of a trilogy, too, which is now complete, and was a rewrite of the Arthurian legend from the POV of "Guinevere"... I still remember clearly what I liked about the characters, which is a good sign that they were endearing (Lancelot my beloved), and I loved how the magic worked.

The other books I just finished were rather short and I haven't a lot of thoughts about them. An advice just in case, don't read the one by Philip Pullman before reading the trilogy it's supposed to follow, His Dark Materials (my favorite books btw)

The next books I own that I have to read are all in French. First, a thriller written by a French YouTuber who did popular science videos that helped me a lot when I was in high-school. I don't really know what to expect from this one. I'll also have to read Boudicca, which I think I'll like, and two short story collections by Agatha Christie, which don't have English equivalents and I can't bother to list the story titles.

I have a 22-hours-round plane trip ahead of me this summer so I hope the lightest of my physical copies and the ebooks on my phone will keep me from loosing my mind :')

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[pixie-unger]

Libraries?

TL;DR at the end

I know I'm basically never here anymore. Life got a bit crazy. It still isn't sorted out. And now I'm asking for favours. But first a bit of a story.

I get my ISBNs from Library and Archives Canada. They don't charge me for the ISBNs but they do as that I donate copies of my books to their collection. I'm sure I knew that when I signed up for that service, but then things happened.

There was that car accident, then the plague and what with one thing and another, I completely forgot that I needed to send them copies. I think they were busy too because the timeline was supposed to be a year (I think?) and it was almost three before they sent me a reminder.

Now, I could just upload a eBook to their web portal, but - honestly? It looks sketchy as shit. I know politicians don't fund libraries, but Oh My Word! It's bad. Except I need to send them copies of my books.

So I'm getting the books printed. (It has involved SO much swearing! I have a whole new appreciation for why publishers have an entire team of highly trained people to do this.)

Since I am getting them printed (through Amazon), I might as well offer them for sale. But also, because I KNOW libraries are underfunded -

I'm giving away a limited number of free copies to small public libraries.

Now, this is where I could ask you to go buy a paper copy of my book, and it would be great if you did. That's not why I'm here. What would be super helpful is if you could ask your library to stock any of my books. Yes, I'm jumping the gun here a little bit. I'm not expecting all three to be available in hard copy until July or August.

My home life wasn't great growing up and I basically hid at my local branch all the hours they were open when I wasn't at school, until I could move out. I'm not exactly raking in the big bucks as an author, in fact - I can't even make a living at it yet. But I want to ... I don't know ... help pay off the karmic debt.

Aside from me asking you to ask your library to stock my book, I'm also offering this: if your small public library requests free copies, I send out one free set a month. This is my first ever posting about this offer, so my current wait list is nonexistent. I'm also not sending out books until all three are available in paper copies. I have no idea if anyone will take me up on this. There are some guidelines. I (sadly) only speak English, so this offer is only available to libraries who can email me in English so that I can understand the ask. It has to be someplace I can easily ship to from an English language Amazon site. Other things like offer void where prohibited, etc. Offer can be cancelled at any time. Offer dependant on my whim, etc.

Ready for the TL;DR?

TL;DR: Paper copies of my books are coming out. Please ask your library to stock them when they do. Some free library copies available here:

https://www.pixieunger.com/2022/06/09/physical-copies/

Thank you for reading!