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.
Thanks for the post! (Highly relieving compared to some of the abusive stuff some are hurling).
Removing posts is arguably a pretty severe act when applied to discussion. I don’t know what the original incident was (thus my original questions), censorship around “dangerous” topics doesn’t need to be absolute and runs the risk of being dogmatic I’d say.
EG, How easily persuaded are “young vegans” and what else can be done to ensure no false impressions are made? Is outright banning the conversations actually preventing damaging behaviour or encouraging it by burying the issue and pushing it into more niche environments?
Also, it’s not irrelevant here, and hopefully common ground, that the underlying motive on both sides is to reduce harm to animals.
I have to say that given all of the concessions or potential issues with the pet food industry you go on to detail, this line seems strange.
In the end I appreciate your expertise and effort here (a great deal actually), but I think the only thing you’ve really convinced me of is that this could be an interesting discussion without posing any risks to cats.
It’d be interesting to know how good/bad some mainstream/popular cat food is and how it’d stack up against a decent attempt at a plant-based version and how well or badly it could be done.
Which doesn’t mean I’m about to go torture my cats with an experimental diet. Not at all! Many vegans, IME, care about their food (and of course animals), and so I find a default concern of vegans going off to do something stupid kinda weird and probably condescending.
Yeah that’s an interesting point. I guess with good enough mod-tools, some sort of flag that shows up “Hey, please don’t base your decisions on health or XYZ on something you hear from people you don’t even know on the internet, just go and ask a professional please” would be neat instead of outright removal.
I have frankly no idea how good or bad the modding tools in Lemmy are, I just always hear they’re pretty bad. But I know some other sites do this, flag potentially misleading or questionable content wit ha warning.
Yea flagging like that is definitely NOT (edit!, sorry) available.
But a mod/admin can post “as a moderator” which kinda counts. Beyond that a discussion can be had with the mods of a community to establish an understanding some new rules if necessary etc, and if negotiations breakdown, the community can be moved to a new instance in an orderly fashion.
It may not be enough for some situations, but seems like a reasonable starting point to me. AFAICT, there may have been a bit of a freak out from the admin in the original incident (which happens, it’d just be good to see if any lessons are being learned).
Thanks for the chat!