Edit 2025-01-13: LW has indicated they will be clarifying these rules soon. In the mean time, the community will remain locked until those are updated and deemed acceptable.
So the LW Team put out an announcement on new, site-wide moderation policy (see post link). I’ve defended, to many a downvote, pretty much every major decision they’ve made, but I absolutely cannot defend this one. In short, mods are expected to counter pretty much every batshit claim rather than mod it as misinformation, trolling, attack on groups, etc.
My rebuttal (using my main account) to the announcement: https://dubvee.org/comment/3541322
We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments. The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so.
(emphases mine)
Me: What if, to use the recent example from Meta, someone comes into a LGBT+ community and says they think being gay is a mental illness and /or link some quack study? Is that an attack on a group or is it “respectful dissent”?
LW: A lot of attacks like that are common and worth refuting once in awhile anyway. It can be valuable to show the response on occasion
I understand what they’re trying to address here (highly encourage you to read the linked post), but the way they’re going about it is heavy handed and reeks of “both sides”-ing every community, removing agency from the community moderators who work like hell to keep these spaces safe and civil, and opening the floodgates for misinformation and “civil” hate speech. How this new policy fits with their Terms of Service is completely lost to me.
I’ll leave the speculation as to whether Musk dropped LW a big check as an exercise to the reader.
For now, this community is going dark in protest and I encourage other communities who may disagree with this new policy to join. Again, I understand the problem that is trying to be addressed, but this new policy, as-written, is not the way to do it.
What happended to “Don’t feed the trolls”? I thought it’s shared expirience that giving attention to trolls like that only gives them motivation to keep on going. Ignoring them is the only way to stop them from spamming.
As somebody running a cryptography forum elsewhere, if I was forced to accept lies that endanger people I’d rather shut down the forum instead.
I can imagine lots of other moderators in science and medical forums would hold the same opinion.
Your opinion seems valid. I’d be fine with leaving a flat earth post up, locked, with a comment that OP has turd brains.
The “different sides” argument is a fallacy. If 100 geologists say the planet is round, and one geologist says it’s flat, both sides don’t deserve equal amounts of space to discuss it.
@admiralpatrick@lemmy.world , seems like the LW admins changed their decision: https://lemmy.world/post/24135976
There will be a new announcement soon to clarify.
I was waiting for something like this to happen. I’m not surprised it happened to world, mainly because it ended up as default.
TLDR;
- LW policy perspective --> I agree on balance
- LW enforcing it on all LW communities --> I disagree as it is not necessary, but it’s their instance, so…
- Fediverse strength --> Move your community to another instance. I’ll susbscribe if you do.
I can see both sides.
On the one hand, history is replete with popular opinions that were later shown to be incorrect. One of the reasons I chose to move to Lemmy was the inherent resistance of the fediverse to the enforcement of a particular narrative, and the inherent potential for respectful discussion and debate. As long as people remain respectful, my inclination is to leave up content that I disagree with. Please note, it has to be respectful, not merely polite.
On the other hand, there’s no shortage of evidence that deliberate misinformation remains a threat in online communities. This is why we implemented no astroturfing and no sealioning rules in the larger community I help mod.
Holding these two competing thoughts, I think that points of view that run (edit: contrary) to the current scientific understanding should not be removed provided that the quantity is limited, it’s respectful and it’s not-harmful. But that’s just my perspective, and how we handle it in the communities I mod. The beauty of the fediverse is that I also have no problems with someone setting up a competing community that takes a much less tolerant perspective and has a rule that participation is conditional on agreement to certain perspectives.
Hello,
I think that points of view that run to the current scientific understanding should not be removed provided that the quantity is limited, it’s respectful and it’s not-harmful.
Sorry to ask for clarification here, but would that mean that flat hearters could ask people why they think Earth is a globe on !asklemmy@lemmy.world ?
As you have worded it, I would be fine with that question provided they were respectful, and weren’t obviously sealioning or astroturfing. It would be thought/discussion provoking, open ended, and they might just end up reevaluating their beliefs as a consequence.
The comments might get spicy, but that’s what mods are for.
Am I missing something or is this policy change to combat the tankie mods who are just banning left and right for anything that doesn’t match the tankie narrative?
As I understand it, yes, that is the intent of the policy. However, as-written and presumably as it is to be enforced for all mods LW-wide, it has wide-reaching implications with worse side-effects.
Basically, the proper tool is a scalpel and they brought out a machete.
Well I suppose it’s a good thing .world isn’t the entirety of lemmy.
It is particularly egregious that they decided the flat earth thing was the example they were going to run with. We don’t need to refute it every time a dunce brings it up and it’s nobody’s job to attempt educating the willfully ignorant. If the counter opinion is a thoroughly dead horse that’s been beaten into paste, we collectively expect that to get downvoted and or moderated if it’s actively harmful.
True the admin should’ve used a different example
I get where you’re coming from. I’m curious to see how all this plays out.
A user in one of my communities raised this salient point:
https://lemmy.world/comment/14406565
I will say, if Musk dropped a check, I never saw it. :)
Man, that’s ridiculous. Requiring mods to have to do deep research in order to rebut every single ridiculous claim is not how forum moderation has ever worked.
Why? Because no forum moderator is going to do that.
This would only be fair if the admins had to produce sufficient documentation to show that the ridiculous claim is true, thereby justifying action against a mod who failed to produce their documentation.
It’s documentation all the way down.
It would just end up with a series of blog posts (because who’s going to keep writing the same thing over and over) and people being dismissed with a collection of links, which both means the asshat and other bypassing readers won’t read the linked content but everybody still sees the bullshit
Holy shit this is such a bad policy lol. World is known for being too aggressive at deleting a lot of content they really shouldn’t be deleting, but this policy really doesn’t seem like it will improve that. The issue is most of the time if they want something removed they do so and then add a policy after to justify it, meaning that regardless of this rule people can’t “advocate for violence”, but they will be able to post misinformation and hate speech since apparently “LGBTQ people are mentally ill” hasn’t been debunked enough elsewhere and a random comment chain in Lemmy is where it needs to be done. Never mind the actual harm those sorts of statements cause to individuals and the community at large.
All I can see this doing is any actual types of that get wrongly overly censored will still do so since the world admins believe they are justified in doing so, while other provably false information will be required to stay up since the admins believe the mods aren’t justified in removing it.
This policy seems to only apply to actual misinformation too, not just subjective debates. So if there’s a comment thread about whether violence is justified in protest would likely have one side removed, while I guess someone arguing that every trans person is a pedophile would be forced to stay up and be debated. Its like the exact opposite of how moderation should work lol.
Oh also something I just realized, they basically want to force mods to debate misinformation, which is literally a tatic used to spread disinformation in the first place. By getting people to debunk a ridiculous claim it lends credence to the idea as something worth discussing and also spreads it to more people. I feel like the intentions behind this are noble, but it’s been proven that presenting evidence doesn’t really get people to change their opinion all that often. The whole thing is super misguided.
Hell yeah! I’m with you on this one. Maybe I should start intentionally brigading communities and start spewing fascist bullshit just so they can see how dumb this rule is
But @GrammarPolice@lemmy.world you already do that.
Why are you on my ass bro?
Brother*
Ain’t no way you just correct bro to ‘brother’
They’re literally just asking mods to wield their power like a surgical scalpel and not a cudgel and actually do more than see a triggering keyword or phrase and instantly dropping the ban hammer based on a knee-jerk reaction.
Someone who is misinformed saying something that is incorrect doesn’t mean they should be banned for spreading misinformation. There has to be intent behind it.
Someone saying they wish so and so would drop dead shouldn’t instantly warrant a ban for “inviting violence” if it’s not an actual, credible, serious call for organized violence.
I don’t really expect that shit to change, regardless. Most people who create a community, volunteer to moderate or even administrate a whole ass server, do so because they want to set the rules and run things their way.
Why not just migrate to another instance? Have you forgotten that we are in the fediverse? This is a good opportunity to move communities to other instances.
I explained that in another comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/14408131
It’s not that easy for some of us. I’m using the voyager app on iOS. Otherwise I have no idea or technical knowledge to get on Lemmy. I don’t know how to change instances and keep what I’ve subscribed to
If you go to the settings (on the website, not in an app) there’s an import/export settings on that page. Save your settings to a file. Then, create an account on a new instance and import that file. Note that you will get subs and blocklist and all that, but your comment history will not follow you.
I don’t use the website. I wouldn’t even know where to go. That’s the problem with Lemmy and the fediverse. I’m not some tech pleeb. I could figure it out, I’m sure, but it’s not where I can just open an opp therefore it’s not something I will do and Lemmy will never supplant Reddit because of that
“Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.”
It looks extremely reasonable to be honest
