Sheer nerve

There are more and more reports of unwanted online behaviour at the university. EM staff are also receiving miserable comments online or remarks while they are doing their work on campus. Editor-in-chief Wieneke Gunneweg has had enough.

It turns out there are people who have the sheer nerve to post hateful reactions under Erasmus Magazine productions. And I particularly want to give a dressing down to those who spread hate towards fellow students who appear on screen or work for EM.

EM has been working with students for a long time, and gladly. And it is fantastic to welcome a new, richly diverse group of students every year. Working for EM is not just anything: you have to master the craft of journalism in a matter of weeks, learn how to deal with resistance or discussions with the people you are making a story about. And your face and name appear on our website, while the video reporters also appear in motion on all our socials. That is quite vulnerable.

I was reminded of this when I read in the university’s Social report this week (the annual report from the departments dealing with social safety on campus) that there are more and more reports of unwanted online behaviour, such as the circulation of manipulated images of lecturers or fellow students and tensions in student app groups about racism or political unrest.

EM staff also receive miserable comments online and remarks while they are working on campus. Working for EM and appearing with your face in public means that you are – in principle for ever – visible online to others. And that takes quite a bit of nerve from our student staff and requires growing a slightly thicker skin. People who stick their necks out are simply more easily cut down than people who stay below ground and type nasty things about others from behind their keyboards.

In the Social report I also read that ‘the boundaries around online behaviour are often experienced by students as unclear’. So that could be improved, and it is first and foremost the responsibility of everyone who sees this happening in such an online environment: you can say something about it too, it is free. And it is up to the university not to stop at words alone, but to actually do something about this.

For us at EM it is not so difficult to sketch a clear framework against discriminatory, racist and homophobic comments. We do not tolerate them. We remove these comments, we address the person posting them about this behaviour, and from now on we will always report this within the university.

There is no place at Erasmus Magazine for homophobia, queerphobia, racism, sexism and all other forms of hate that are intended to discriminate, insult and hurt people on the basis of who they ARE. Hopefully this is clear enough.