Australia’s most popular bargain web forum has been thrown into chaos after a transphobic documentary was voted the most popular “deal” over the weekend, prompting an all-out war between the website’s commenters.
On Friday night, OzBargain user Arkan posted a link to conservative US media company The Daily Wire’s What Is A Woman? “It’s the movie they really don’t want you to see,” the user wrote.
The 2022 documentary follows host Matt Walsh as he puts the film’s title to different interviewees in his pursuit to critique what he calls “gender ideology”. It’s been criticised as spreading misinformation about trans people by LGBTQIA+ media and groups.
When the film was released for free to coincide with Pride Month after previously being available only on The Daily Wire’s paid subscription streaming service, What Is A Woman? was posted to OzBargain, between deals like free Amazon Prime when signing up for a credit card, cheap torches and sports shop sales.
The deal immediately rocketed to the top of OzBargain’s front page with hundreds of votes as commenters quickly broke out into skirmishes with hundreds of comments debating the film’s contents and whether it was, in fact, a deal.
Some comments in defence of the film veered into homophobia and transphobia, including a reference to a banner held up by neo-Nazis at anti-trans speaker Kellie-Jay Keen’s Melbourne protest. Others pointed individuals towards conspiracy-filled alt-tech platforms like BitChute and other fringe websites. Moderators deleted some extreme comments.
OzBargain founder Scott Yang told Crikey the deal website is no stranger to conversations around controversial topics: “As much as we want to focus the site on shopping and finding bargains, people do bring in their own agenda every now and then. Religions, firearms, politics, sexuality — you name it.”
Yang dismissed claims by some users that there had been inauthentic behaviour — like one person who implied another user was part of a foreign interference operation because they claimed not to know about the television show Home and Away — by saying the website showed that most people responding were established OzBargain members.
Some members argued that posting the documentary, which was released for free over the weekend, shouldn’t qualify as a deal and was allowed to be posted because it aligned with the forum moderator’s views. One user even repeated the same type of deal but for a different, less controversial documentary. His post was deleted, he wrote, and his account was given a warning for trolling.
A moderator defended the warning by saying that the warning was warranted because “when someone’s intention is not posting a bargain, e.g. … a post to prove some point in another thread then it’s considered trolling”.
Yang said the site’s rules allow discussions to stay, even though the moderators don’t agree with the views: “While we don’t agree with many things that have been discussed (yes, moderators are different individuals with their own opinions), we also agree that we aren’t really the arbitrator of right and wrong (other than what has been defined in the guidelines which focus on posting deals).”
