It’s super legal, but it’s not always super cool:
Lw mods aren’t nearly as awful as Reddit ones - most removed comments are either personal attacks or open calls for violence. Even calls for civil disobedience are usually allowed unless they’re clearly direct threats.
I got a comment removed because they said insinuating Isralies shouldn’t be allowed somewhere was racism. It was fine to do that with Russians during their active war, but Isreal is special and its racist when you hold them accountable the way we hold Russia accountable. And thats when I was specifically refering to the Israeli football hooligans who literally trashed the country they were guests in. So I dont buy that they aren’t as bad. They just don’t control the whole fediverse.
It was clarified that talking about Jury Nullification in the context of future crime is a no-no because it’s a no-no in the country lw is based. But in the context of already committed crime it’s fine.
So “Go ahead and commit the crime and we’ll do jury nullification!” Is bad, but “Crime was committed, but we sympathize with the motive/person/whatever so let’s do jury nullification !” Is OK
The whole thing sounded to me like a smokescreen for, “We fucked up, and we shouldn’t have banned talking about it in the first place. We talked about it and banning it was a bad decision that we briefly doubled down on.”
Credit to them for reversing themselves, I guess. That said, coming up with contrived explanations for why you never made a mistake in the first place, because you’re always right, is one of the telltale signs of being full of shit. You can just tell people the main explanation. They’ll actually respect you more, not less, if you don’t engineer your reasonings to maintain this Wizard of Oz veneer.
No, it was not clarified, they vaguely mentioned they were not based in “free speech” US but it’s pretty clear that it was their own policy since they changed it (they do say they were asking mods to ban all mentions of jury nullification).
If their opinion was actually based on law, they would not change their policy. They would probably also have added it to their TOS before hand.