Hey all,
In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.
We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we’ve done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.
ToS Additions
That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.
Regarding misinformation, we’ve tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:
- Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
- We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
- When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
- Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
- Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
- Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.
We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.
We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.
By-laws Addition
We’ve also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.
This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we’ve created as a result of what has happened over the last week.
Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.
https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation
https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT:
We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.
EDIT 2 (2024-08-31):
We’ve posted a response, sorry for the delay.
👉 https://lemmy.world/post/19264848 👈
As a former site admin, I will say right now that leaving any kind of rule “open to interpretation” is the WORST thing you could do. The only interpretation of the rules of your site should be the your (the site admin’s) interpretation. That’s it. Rules should be easy to understand and easily convey the correct interpretation.
Leaving the rules open to interpretation only leads to disagreements and arguments. It is better for users to have concrete rules with a reliably consistent correct interpretation than for everyone to complain because their interpretation of a rule lets them do whatever they want. Just my two cents on that.
As a former site admin, I will say right now that leaving any kind of rule “open to interpretation” is the WORST thing you could do. The only interpretation of the rules of your site should be the your interpretation. That’s it. Rules should be easy to understand and easily convey the correct interpretation.
This might be a language-barrier thing, but that’s the meaning of “open for interpretation”.
It means that the admins and moderators are judging it on a per-case basis instead of a hard delineation that anybody could use to decide whether something is against the rules or not (and hence use technicalities to skirt the rules, naturally).
They are literally saying the opposite.
We didn’t cover that in ESL, because open to interpretation means open to interpretation. If what you’re trying to say in your comment was the admins intention then the language should’ve been: “Admin’s interpretation of the rules is the last word and will be judged in a case by case basis”. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s how laws and court systems work. Anyone can interpret laws as they see fit (see sov citizens) but when push come to shove, judges have the last word and the courts interpretation is the only valid interpretation of the law. Hence debate based trials, checks and balances. When rules are open to interpretation, they become useless as a tool for defining truth.
because open to interpretation means open to interpretation
And most people understands when a company says that. They mean:
“Admin’s interpretation of the rules is the last word and will be judged in a case by case basis”.
It’s just understood that a company always means “we can do what we want, deal with it”.
But this is not a company. What are you talking about?
But in a real sense, yes, the admins can do whatever they want. We as users have no power or recourse. They could just turn off the server tomorrow and that’s that.
But this is not a company.
I think we’re still have language issues
Yes, indeed we are still in have language issues is.
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This rogue admin was absolutely not acting with the best intentions. Is he kicked out of the admin team?
He was abusing the term “misinformation” even though it was extremely obvious that he had a personal vendetta against vegans. A vegan pet diet is perfectly possible, and vegans were merely saying that. There was no question for a source by anybody, because the source is just a simply google search away.
This admin is just anti vegan and was on a personal vendetta. He saw an opportunity to classify it as misinformation, so he just started removing posts and banning people. Why was /c/Vegan specifically targeted by this person?
“Oh but this vegan diet for your pet might hurt it!!”, bro you’re literally the one paying others to slaughter living beings.
If you can’t feed a cat a proper diet reflecting their needs, don’t keep one.
Yep exactly. A vegan diet is perfectly possible.
But I’m not here to discuss that. I’m here to discuss how this admin this abused their powers.
The community mods were banning anyone challenging their misinformation and deleting the comments. This is precisely the type of behavior that admins should curtail. It wasnt done in the best way but to call it abuse is a stretch.
We shouldn’t let anti-vaxers have free reign just because they make a community, it’s the same for people that champion animal abuse.
If you aren’t able to decouple your personal beliefs from what is right for your cat, and purposely harm him so he isn’t a “bad mean carnivore”, you don’t deserve to keep him.
Is this really about peoples inability to consider that cats could live long healthy lives on a vegan diet?
I don’t understand the aversion to it. Noones on here going to read any of the post in question and then go and kill their cat with an unhealthy diet.
Here’s an idea. Don’t base medical decisions solely on internet conjecture. If you think this is meant to be a place for only settled science from decades ago, then what is the point of discussion.
I have to say that the moderator team here doubling down is absurd and shows they take themselves too seriously.
This site is literally an opinion board, and they are now saying that these opinions are so scary and dangerous they might hurt someones cat.
Childish behavior from what I’m sure are actual children running this website.
Good thing theres a bunch of other lemmy providers because this one is proving to be just as awful as reddit was, which I guess I should have expected since thats where everyone here came from.
Its harder to get a vegan cat post through this site than posts covering pedophilia or sexual assault, so I guess which of those three things is too dangerous to talk about, really?
Fine, we don’t want animal abusers on here anyway. Just go.
Cats are carnivores. 😡
Keep in mind that these “morals” come from people that most likely are paying others to slaughter animals for their consumption.
A vegan diet for a cat is possible, but hard, which was exactly what the posts in question were talking about.
Anyways, look at the Admins actual behaviour: https://lemmy.world/post/18817262
He didn’t do enough IMO. The people that were propagating harmful disinformation should have gotten an instance ban.
Harmful disinformation? The information was correct.
Yeah, the correct information was given by the admin’s decision to get involved. Feeding cats a vegan only diet is tantamount to animal abuse, via slow malnutrition torture.
This is a bit learning the wrong lesson from what happened, isn’t it? The problem is admin overreach. There was some disagreement on a sub, no big deal. I don’t even care what it’s about, I have no opinion on it. But now this admin comes in like Eric Cartman “Respect mah authoritah!”. What am I supposed to make of that? Nobody was advocating animal abuse. I worry about admins who can’t just let something go, who can’t handle disagreement, like a cop always looking to escalate.
So thanks for the rules clarification, I guess, but what about:
- won’t this general guideline of ‘do no harm’ stifle discussion in case it isn’t clear which is the harmful position? For example covid
- is there a process in place when an admin does something in the heat of the moment, that the admin team can let them cool off for a bit?
- is removing mods going to be the norm?
- will there be more rules when another admin disagrees with a mod?
- why was this escalated like this? Don’t you think removing mod status is an overreaction (procedure wise)?
- does the ‘anti animal abuse’ statute apply to animal consumption and animal products? Vegan community has a point there
- what about rooki?
All in all, please don’t kill this instance by telling people what to think. There is healthy discussion and people don’t always have to agree. That doesn’t make me a ‘free speech absolutist’. I think removing moderator privileges was quite out of bounds. Again, nobody was advocating animal abuse at all.
Mods and admins are here to keep discussion healthy, not impose their views on everyone else, right? So don’t! And don’t cover for others who do!
Lol
And now the incident’s “debate” is here.
Oh my drama.
This is so dumb of course it’s a controversy about veganism. It’s so obvious that no imminent harm is coming from a community literally founded on the idea of reducing suffering. Probably switching instances sometimes soon
I just want to say thank you, and I appreciate the team’s efforts to be excellent to each other.
Yep, this shit is part of why I gave up and went back to reddit. The extreme stances here are too fucking normal
I love the strong emotional takes on what is animal abuse from all the meat eaters in here.
My goodness.
Not my instance, but after perusing those links, what’s the point? “Generally” this, “generally” that, paired with vague obligations. Doesn’t matter a bit if you have an actual problem with a member of the administration time and the rest buddy up and play silent.
Let me ask you this, you’ve been up for quite a while, you’ve had staff rollovers, you must have had issues with at least one of your admins. Have you been transparent about them and reached out to anyone who might have been affected by them and publicly apologized and addressed any actions on their behalf, or have you played coy and just ignored them and kept quiet about them, releasing at best only excuses that have kept any internal drama hidden lest they affect the donation/income streams?
Not really launching any accusations, but actions speak louder than words. Look at Reddit, it has a decent community guideline, and it means shit except whitewashing when it comes to actual enforcement.
This is why I left .world in the first place, and that was even when their censorship was understandable. That’s the beauty of Lemmy.
The biggest issue with Reddit and Facebook was that they let stuff like this stick around it and eventually consume it.
It’s a good policy imho, and I’m happy to see it
Science should prevail
