The NYC MBB is a a public, unvetted chat for marshals, organizers, and volunteers interested in supporting safe and effective non-violent protest actions in New York City.
We follow a set of community norms laid out below in order to mitigate risks and allow our small team of volunteer admins to manage the chat.
We keep us safe.
Be Decent & Respect Privacy
Please be respectful, kind, and inclusive.
Never share information about individuals from this chat with others without explicit consent.
Send Direct Messages
To talk with other people, send them a direct message (“DM”), rather than having a conversation in front of everyone else.
- Do not post in the chat to say that you want to participate in an action, or if you have questions about an action. Instead send the original poster a direct message, or click the link they shared.
- Do not post in the chat if you have questions about the chat or need help. Instead DM an admin user. (To see the current list of admins, click the chat’s name.)
To Use Signal’s Direct Message Feature: Look next to each person’s comments for their avatar or profile picture, which you can tap or click to see a “Message” button that will let you chat with them one-on-one.
Only Post Announcements
What to Post: There are only two kinds of posts that should be sent to the this chat:
- A call for volunteer marshals, posted by an event organizer or lead marshal, describing the action and how marshals can help.
- A link to resources of broad interest to the marshal community, such as upcoming trainings or informative websites.
Tell People How to Respond: Your posts should always direct marshals to click through to visit another site, join a new Signal chat, fill out a web form, or send you a direct message. Never invite people to respond to your posts in comments or reaction emojis.
No Discussion
This is an open chat, but it is not a chatroom.
We do this both for safety purposes discussed elsewhere on this page, and also to keep the volume to a minimum, because experience shows that if a chat gets more than a few messages per day, many people will stop reading it, and important requests will be overlooked.
- Do not post information about organizations, campaigns, issues, or breaking news; we’re all totally oversaturated already.
- Do not post detailed information about actions that you are planning; store that information somewhere else and share it only with the relevant people.
- Do not post live updates during an action, and do not use this chat to communicate between marshals on the ground at an action.
To Delete a Signal Message: If you post a message by accident and want to remove it, use Signal’s “delete for everyone” feature within 24 hours.
Be Secure
Do not share any sensitive personal information in this chat.
This is a public, unvetted chat, and it might include untrustworthy individuals who do not have your best interests at heart.
- Someone could take screenshots of messages posted here and share them with government agencies or hostile media outlets.
- Someone in this chat could send you a direct message or respond to your post in hopes of learning something from you that isn’t public.
- It’s not common, but in other communities there have been cases of bad actors pretending to be trusted users in order to trick others into revealing sensitive information or compromising their security.
We recommend that you anonymize your Signal information. Consider changing your Signal profile to use a nickname, or at least short your last name to an initial, and select a profile photo that isn’t identifiable.
For more digital security advice, consult these resources:
- Digital Security Checklists for Activists from ActivistChecklist.org
- How To: Use Signal from the EFF’s security-minded Surveillance Self-Defense website.