Barq is a social media website for furries.
Then in an incident, furries got angry when a Barq admin banned the term ‘ACAB’. ‘ACAB’ means All Cops Are Bastards.
This made some furries feel like Barq chose sides in US politics.
Warning chit sparks outrage
A furry on Twitter showed a picture of a warning from Barq. The warning said Barq does not like ‘ACAB’.
This made furries mad. Some furries left Barq and deleted the app.
One furry said Barq was not letting furries say bad things about bad people.
Furries said Barq was like Truth Social, a website made by former US President Donald Trump. Furries think Truth Social is not very nice; they thus think Barq is not very nice too.
Barq’s founder responds
Furries got so angry that they said they wanted to hurt Barq’s leader, Woutske. Woutske said ‘ACAB’ was not bad; they made a mistake.
They also said: they vote for left-wing politics, BLM and they don’t like nazis or fascists on Barq.
We don’t know if Barq fired the admin who gave the warning. Furries want Barq to fire them.
What are BLM and ACAB?
BLM means Black Lives Matter. They say the police are unfairly mean to black people.
This started in the US in 2013. Before that, a court said George Zimmerman was not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, a black boy. The police shot him.
ACAB means All Cops Are Bastards. People who don’t like the police say this. Some workers in England said this first in the 1940s.
In 2020, a police officer killed a black man named George Floyd in 2020. People in the US got very mad and thus supported BLM and ACAB more.
Furries think Barq is right-wing because they flagged ACAB
People in the US care a lot about police hurting people.
After George Floyd died, people said “defund the police” to prevent the police from hurting people. People since started to not trust the police.
People in the US think politics is only two sides.
Democrats are left-wing; Republicans are right-wing. They don’t agree on many things. People who are in the middle – became less.
Eventually, Americans now commonly say: “you have to be left or right”. People gave names to others based on what they liked or disliked.
Here, it was about the police.
A Pew survey in 2016 said Republicans looked at the police more positively than Democrats. With this, people think ‘all’ Republicans were ‘pro-police’.
Furries felt this too. Most furries like left-wing ideas.
So under America’s politically black and white perspective, they ‘are’ Democrats and ‘anti-police’. This makes furries feel anyone opposing ACAB is thus right-wing.
That’s why furries said Barq was right-wing for flagging the term ACAB.
Furries slammed for applying local politics overseas
Some furries got mad at Barq’s founder Woutske also because they wanted to join the Amsterdam police’s LGBTQ department.
Many furries are LGBTQ, and they now don’t like Barq and Woutske because of this incident.
For context: Woutske lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands’ capital city.
And because people have put ACAB and BLM together, the resulting perspective was politcally American. Remember, BLM is an American social movement.
The furries’ fierce reaction in this controversy thus did not make sense to furries overseas.
While furries insist ACAB is true for all police everywhere, people criticized them for using their country’s politics to judge other places.
Some people in the US also said furries were too quick to get mad. One person said many Barq workers supports ACAB and BLM.
- Tweet made private. Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220716111616/https://twitter.com/StrideNoah/status/1548264385264508934
One person said ACAB does not prevent the police from being unfairly mean at all. They said people of color do not agree on ACAB and how to deal with the police.
This is true. A 2020 Yahoo survey found black people do not all agree on, for a few examples, how to change the system (p. 110), whether to spend less on the police (p. 114), or what they think about race in the US (p. 122).
Conclusion
A moderator from furry social platform Barq flagged ACAB, and gave warnings.
Furries are very unhappy. In protest, furries deleted their Barq profiles. Death threats were sent to Barq’s founder.
Barq’s founder clarified the warning was a ‘mistake’.
Given the political sensitivities of ACAB and BLM, furries assumed Barq and its founder as pro-police and bonded them to right-wing politics.
But furries’ actions here were slammed by many overseas and locally. That is since many personally attacked Barq’s founder, plus applied the US’ political reasoning overseas.
Global Furry Television 