I’m reminded of when I was especially interested in Friendship is Magic one dozen years ago, and for a few years I made the mistake of making a fansite called Ponychan my virtual home.

At first the community was amazingly accommodating, the last thing that you would expect from an image board inspired by 4chan. Nevertheless, white supremacists, though unwelcomed by the larger community, were tolerated, and they slowly trickled in. At one point a casual white supremacist made a thread about his grievances, which provoked many negative replies, but somebody disapproved when I explicitly asked why nobody was banning him.

In contrast, somebody banned me for about one or two dozen hours because I complained about difficulties that I was having masturbating, and when I shared images that merely bordered on being NSFW I was given suspensions for a comparable amount of time. To be fair, I know better now: I think that sexualizing otherwise nonsexual spaces is wrong, and there were a couple of questionable pictures that I really regret posting, but at least I wasn’t being hateful or willfully inconsiderate like the white supremacists frequenting there were… yet nobody banned them for their toxicity (as far as I can tell).