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.
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.
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
From @TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
Look, I respect the intent, but as someone who’s been on forums since the freaking 90s, I can say with confidence that that’s a toxic meltdown waiting to happen.
You need at least two bitter jaded cybersec experts and at least one game theory person on your team to stand a chance with this kind of thing.
Can you provide supporting documents that disprove :nasty insinuation about you:? Of course not. Do you want to have to keep being required to? No.
Can people provide supporting documents disproving :nasty insinuation about :demographic::? Also no. And they don’t want to have to keep being required to.
So there’s the constant tide of exhaustion of people being constantly undermined and dehumanised, and being forced to either respond to yet another argument that :demographic: don’t really count as people, or to just let it ride and try to ignore it. And then the wreckers use it as rage-bait to get people angry to the point of getting banned, and others walk off in disgust, more trolls smell blood in the water and the whole thing spirals.
It’s the damn nazi-bar problem: even ‘just a few’ nazis smirking in the corner create a hostile and unpleasant environment that other people don’t want to be in. And so they drive the good posters off, reducing the opposition - and within a depressingly short time, you’ve got yourself an alt-right shithole full of trolls and sociopaths that just love being able to exert that kind of power.
I’ve seen it approximately three bajillion times so far, and god dammit why won’t you youngins learn.
Yes, powermods and power-tripping mods are a problem. But the approach to it you’ve chosen was gamed out and defeated in detail probably before you were even alive.
And oh god, if you try to parse a rule about what categories of opinions and statements are covered by this, the rules lawyers are going to clown-shibari the entire damn site.
The only two rules I’ve ever seen be effective over time are:
- Don’t make us ban you
- Don’t make us de-mod you
and probably hard-cap the number of communities one person can mod.
Have other stuff on top of that, but they’re load-bearing and non-optional.
And I get that the site is trying to be a neutral platform that’s insulated from the content, but honestly I don’t think that’s feasible. Sometimes you need to just throw people out of your bar regardless of the exact phrasing of the terms and conditions, and that means picking a side.
Also can we have a better markdown parser that doesn’t turn angle brackets into failed html markup sometime please
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.
Move the community to a different Instance?
It’s an option, sure. But (at this point anyway) it’s more about making a statement and trying to bring visibility to the horrible side effects of this new policy.
I’m not trying to burn bridges, lol, merely shine a light and hope the LW Team sees it.
I think the policy is too heavy-handed. Forget who’s right and wrong, keeping a discussion topical to the post is really helpful to help the community grow.
On a more practical level, enforcing this at the admin level is going to require a lot more oversight and work from the administrators.
If u move instances can i take over this one. Allow people who want to see decenting opinions to choose or do u not believe people should be given that choice?
Why don’t you create your own community if you care so much about giving people a choice?
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.
