Digital Ethics & AI
Pushback and hard cases after Digital Ethics — who has access when someone raises a concern, whether to handle it in the channel or in a ticket, the roles that quietly limit what someone can do, and why harm today is treated differently from harm six months ago.
Let's talk. If you have any questions, if you have any pushback on any other things, or if you have any other things, if we have time to discuss them, I know we're pretty much at time. But if you have any, I'm happy to answer them. Happy to always plug in in all the various spaces that I have. Checkpoint Church is the church that I pastor, like I said, Discord server, YouTube. You can check out my writing on nerdy and digital ministry over on Substack at Pixel and Pulpit. And God in the Machine is the book.
There we go. All right. Appreciate that. That was really, really good stuff. Yeah, I knew you had written the book, and that really led me to, hey, would you be able to come and talk about ethics? And I did know a lot of the things that you, as a church, develop and refresh those things. Can I, okay, you want to slide back up?
Let me get that back up. I'll put that back up and show everybody real quick. I can also drop my link tree in the chat. I'm not sure if that was actually the one that you wanted. Let me know, Vernet, if that's the right one or if it was the one before that. And it looks like the audio worked once I got all those settings turned. It did seem, just here at the end, all of a sudden, that your mouth and voice did not match up.
So the sound was good, but you got off of your lips are moving when you weren't talking and they're, you know, those kinds of things. But at least we could hear you. So, yeah, there's the link. And, again, what I'll probably do, there was some questions there about slides and those things, because it's kind of hard to go back into the keynote and then go back into the stage and find all of the comments. They don't disappear, but it's not the easiest. So, yeah, under the digital gaming workshop in the general chat or somewhere, I will put these later on so that you can go look at them. If you did not get anything from today, those will get put there in the next week.
So I'm not telling you when I'll get them, but I will say within the next week, we'll have links up. We'll have VODs up. That'll be the plan to have all of those things out. So I did have a couple of questions. So while other people are coming up with questions, particular to Nate, and then we can expand this after we talk with Nate for a while, just to anything. And we had some questions at the beginning to come back to. The tickets versus DM aspect of that, how and where, like, is there only one place that you have tickets?
So I can't go to, let's just say, because you had different groups in there. I can't go to Guardians and get Guardian tickets, or I can't go to level two people and get level two tickets. What do you have? Is it just a singular ticket system, or is there multiple levels to that? So we utilize Me6. That's our bot that we have that's managing that. And it is purely based off of your username.
And so whenever you open up a ticket, that's your ticket. The only people that have access to that ticket are myself and our Guardians. So everybody else cannot see it. It's down at the bottom of the Discord server. You can't see other people's tickets. You only get access to yours. Often what will have happen is we'll go in manually.
If they need to bring in a second party, we can add that person in. But, like, for the most part, by and large, one ticket per person. And we try to practice pretty healthy ticket hygiene of purging those whenever they're done. Yeah, thanks. I was just trying to, you know, to get through. And I knew that it would be, like, a one that nobody else in the server would see it. I just didn't know if you had, like, different levels.
Like, for instance, just thinking through when things would be shared with me as a pastor, that might be one level of being able to have it. Elders would be another level. Deacons would be another level. Prayer team might be another level. So that's why I was just wondering if you've done multi-levels or it was just singular level. It's the Guardian team that oversees that. Yeah, if there's anything that ever is, like, just a pastoral concern, I typically encourage them to be, like, let's set up a call.
And we can record that. And it can be stored on the cloud rather than accessed, like, because everybody can see the tickets. The Guardians can all see that regardless. But for the most part, also, people are typically not too sheepish. They would like, actually, their concern to be shared with other, like, prayerful leaders. They just don't want it aired out to the whole church. Kind of in the same veins a little bit, you were talking about you've had people come in and you're not, you know, bringing the band hammer down and you're talking about hearing them out.
Are you hearing them out in the channel where something is brought up or are you recommending that they go to the ticket to hear them out? Very much depends on the circumstance. In extreme situations, we will lock them to a ticket. So they can only comment in a ticket. If it really gets to the point of, you know, you know how the Internet gets. You know, if there's a situation around, like, slurs or harmful language, like, yeah, you're going to be ostracized into a ticket until we work this out. And often those don't work out.
But at least we tried. At least we weren't just reactionary. Wow, that I did not know that that was a thing that you could do that. I think that's a fascinating approach there of another level of stuff of like because I've helped work with situations that get out of hand. And you're trying to deal with people, but then they're blowing up the chat with what their side of things and disrespecting and disregarding the other side of things. And so it's like, I don't want that in the main chat. I want that somewhere else.
So I did not know you could only let them in the ticket and have them there so that you can oversee restoration of relationship and guidelines to the communities being safe before you. That's cool. I knew you could time people out from Discord for whatever length of time you want, and you could then DM them with a group chat to deal with things. But that's a cool way. I had not known that was possible. Yeah. It's not ideal, but you can create a timeout role.
And so you essentially assign them that role that makes them incapable of sending messages in any channel except for one or except for whatever channel you make available to them. I think that's a fantastic idea. I'm going to explore that a little bit. Okay, let me see. Do we have any questions here? Make sure you have great mods on your Discord. We had some people come in and showed a ton of images.
Yeah, we don't want people doing that. And that goes back to the vetting system that Nate was talking about, the training, the vetting, those things before you give people. And I loved your language of guardian. And you said that, and I'm like, oh, what a great way to talk about your mods in there and have it be a little bit more of, we're here to guard things. It's built into the role. And I know moderator, you know, has that built in, but it's new language that just frames it a little bit different. Yeah, and I'm typing in the chat there, me6 again is our bot, but there are tons of other bots that can catch that.
So, like, if somebody just joins your server and posts pictures, it can automatically catch that. If they spam Discord links, it can automatically catch that. The more ways that I keep seeing people sneak around it, there is still a measure right now that I'm seeing where you have a channel on your server that is open, but that is set to ban anyone that types a message in there. And you're very explicit, like, do not type here, no matter what you do, don't send a message, we are not joking, we will ban you, this is going to ban you if you type in it, do not do it. And then, obviously, a bot doesn't care. And so they just post there and then are quickly deleted. So there's measures that you can do, the more clever you are, you know, catch more flies with honey situation.
Oh, that's cool. I had thought about that. That would be fun. That would absolutely be fun. But there's also those people that I've seen in streamers will have, for 100,000 points, you can be banned from the channel, you know? Right. And somebody will just save up so they can do that and say they did.
But there's a difference between jest and, you know, protecting and doing those things. I did have one other thing as you were talking about things. And please, if other people have questions, you know, put them in there. So on the creating the safe online space and doing no harm, how do you assess that? Like, I know you talked about doing training annually. So things are going to grow and change. How do you keep that culture of doing no harm?
And how do you know, for instance, that what you have been doing now has changed in the perception of people? So 10 years ago, it wouldn't have been harm. But today it is. And the way the Internet changes is so much faster than that. Like, and to pick a really bad example. But, you know, people that were, you know, doing blackface, I'm not condoning it. But fraternities would do things like that 25, 30 years ago.
And people are getting banned now for something they did when they were in college. I'm not in favor of that. But if I'm doing harm today or within the last six months and now something's changed and you bring it to my attention, how are you keeping up with those kinds of things to know you're doing no harm? I think you have to offer a lot of grace. I think grace is the best way to approach it. See the nuance of the situation. See the harm they've caused.
I think that people, if they truly have ill intent, they'll let you know. You don't really have to, like, wait for them. Like, we have, we have a problem, we had a problem, not, we don't have it anymore, but this person is now gone. But we had someone that was subtly weaving in, I mean, I'll just call it as a skit, they were Nazi dog whistles. And we had to say something. We were like, hey, look, you can't keep doing this. Like, what's going on?
Why are you, why do you keep doing this? We know what you're doing. You're not being clever. Like, you're also not causing any harm, but clearly something's going on. Like, you shouldn't be doing this, you shouldn't be using this language or saying these things, you're concerning us. And they just kept on, like, trolling past that. And so I think trolls are probably the hardest ones to really figure out when they just want to be funny or whatever they think is funny.
But again, it comes down to then just, like, listening and hearing people out, giving benefit of the doubt where and when you can, and then just approaching it. I think that if somebody is doing something wrong and you call them out and they won't name it or, you know, you're in a ticket private conversation and they're acting like it's not happening and you're explaining to them exactly what they did wrong, you know. There's a certain time where somebody will just show you who they are and you've got to, got to, got to do what you've got to do after you've tried again and again to, to forgive and to create a space. Very cool. Uh, supersonic, people set a role above owner role or insert better name role. If a troll comes in and wants to hack controls, if the top role is this, you can program it to ban anyone with this role. Interesting.
Um, yeah, the owner, if, uh, him herself or the server may be forced to have this role. But given that they are the owner themselves, they're immune to the bad effects. Welcome in supersonic. We did have a couple other people come in. Pastor Druzy, see you in here. Stacey, good to see you, friend. Um, I don't see any more questions specific for Pastor Nate, um, in regards to what we're talking about.
So if you want to dive into the, uh, communion, baptism, how do you do that?
— departure log decoded via WhisperX, lightly cleaned for reading —
Nathan Webb is an ordained United Methodist elder and the founding pastor of Checkpoint Church, a digital-first congregation built for nerds, geeks and gamers that lives on Twitch, Discord and YouTube. He holds the title Nerd Pastor Nate not as a brand but as a theological claim: the people who grew up feeling like they did not belong in church deserve a pastor who speaks their language. He is the author of God and the Machine (Abingdon Press), a six-session study on AI and faith, and writes at Pixel & Pulpit.