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.
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.
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.
Source?
You know, you can google these things, but here I’ll help you.
So according to this article, if there was a high-protein, low-carb food with taurine, it would be nutritionally satisfactory? Taurine is already lab-made and added to most pet foods, including animal-based ones. Protein is easy to separate from carbs in plant-based foods. Pea protein, for example, has a 15:1 protein to carb ratio.
I still don’t see a case for malnutrition. Every article that claims cats can’t be plant based repeat the same “taurine” and “protein” concerns, but again, those are so easily debunked. What magic ingredient of meat is necessary for cats that can’t be found in plants, causing them to die a slow, tortuous life of malnutrition?
It was incorrect.
That information was what the vegan person was citing! :)
They were saying that you can have a animal on a vegan diet if you supplement or buy reinforced vegan pet food with all that stuff.
And then the admin removed it.
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.
The information was correct though.
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