Moderation Policy Change - Respectful Dissent
Moderation Policy Change - Respectful Dissent
There will be a new announcement soon to clarify.
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.
Humans are naturally inclined to believe a single narrative when they're only presented with a single narrative. That's the basis of how fiction works. You can't tell someone a story if they're questioning every paragraph. However, a well placed sentence questioning that narrative gives the reader the option to chose. They're no longer in a story being told by one author, and they're free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.
Unfortunately, some malicious actors are hijacking this natural tendency to be invested in fiction, and they're using it to create absurd, cult-like trends in non-fiction. They're using this for various nefarious ends, to turn us against each other, to generate profit, and to affect politics both domestically and internationally.
In a fully anonymous social media platform, we can't counter this fully. But we can prune some of the most egregious echo chambers.
We're aware that this policy is going to be subjective. It won't be popular in all instances. 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. One sentence that doesn't jive with the overall narrative should be easily countered or ignored.
It's harder to just dismiss that comment if it's interrupting your fictional story that's pretending to be real. "The moon is upside down in Australia" does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than "Nobody has crossed the ice wall" does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.
A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.
Of course this isn't about marijuana. There's a small handful of self-selected moderators who are very transparently looking to push their particular narrative. And they don't want to allow discussion. They want to function as propaganda and an incubator. Our goal is to allow a few pinholes of light into the Truman show they wish to create. When those users' pinholes are systematically shut down, we as admins can directly fix the issue.
We don't expect this policy to be perfect. Admins are not aware of everything that happens on our instances and don't expect to be. This is a tool that allows us to trim the most extreme of our communities and guide them to something more reasonable. This policy is the board that we point to when we see something obscene on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com so that we can actually do something about it without being too authoritarian ourselves. We want to enable our users to counter the absolute BS, and be able to step in when self-selected moderators silence those reasonable people.
Some communities will receive an immediate notice with a link to this new policy. The most egregious communities will comply, or their moderators will be removed from those communities.
Moderators, if someone is responding to many root comments in every thread, that's not "in a smaller proportion" and you're free to do what you like about that. If their "counter" narrative posts are making up half of the posts to your community, you're free to address that. If they're belligerent or rude, of course you know what to do. If they're just saying something you don't like, respectfully, and they're not spamming it, use your words instead of your moderation abilities.
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.
I get that those are examples, and I am pretty sure I understand the problem this is trying to address. Like, I get that.
But, aside from the aforementioned "many root comments in every thread", where do we draw the line with regard to misinformation and/or trolling? Are we expected to refute every crackpot claim and leave misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the like on display? I feel like that's just a recipe for gish-galloping mods to death while opening the door to mis-information.
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"? According to common sense and the LW TOS Section 1, it's the former. According to how this new policy is written, it seems to be the latter.
Again, I understand what this is trying to accomplish, but I feel the way it's being handled is not the best way to achieve that.
they’re free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.
This just translates to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean or "reversion to mediocrity". Much like 🤬🤬🤬🤬it's
/all, every time that mainstream spills into a community it ruins it and brings it closer to the mainstream.In biology, you may recognize some of these phenomena from biochemistry: osmosis and diffusion. The demand to disable the "semi-permeable membrane" ends the purpose of the compartment.
Either the invading posts/comments get removed or the influx of participants (including voting) has to be rationed somehow. Doing neither is not a discussion about narratives, it's a mobbing. It's the opposite of promoting discourse, as that setup heavily favors the "mainstream" narrative, the status quo.
I should mention that I've been a moderator of internet communities since before Web 2.0 and I find the moderation tools for Lemmy type platforms to be terrible. If the expectation is to not have practical moderation, but instead to separate into fedi-islands and block the problematic networks, well, that would be a very blunt way to get to the same goals. Instead of having moderators individually ban users, you have admins ban entire networks of users.
There is no getting away from the need for moderators. Musk proved that again since he took over Twitter. Zuckerberg is proving it again now. You're not building a protopia by hampering moderation, you're building a cyber-wasteland. Any success with that will be temporary, like a pump and dump: you get a period of growth and a honeymoon, and then the critical mass of assholes is achieved and they turn everything to shit, and then most users have to start searching for greener
pasturesfood forests to migrate to. Another term for that is unsustainable, it can't last.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.
Rationality is much more complex than you think. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic should've taught you that already, first hand. The simple model of persuasion by presenting reasonable arguments and evidence is wrong. There's an entire field looking into cognitive biases that show how irrational humans are. How exactly do you plan to argue with people who believe in "alternative facts" and "post-truth"?
All I see in the article you posted is a lack of experience in dealing with bullshit, a lack of understanding of the viral or memetic nature of bullshit.
It’s harder to just dismiss that comment if it’s interrupting your fictional story that’s pretending to be real. “The moon is upside down in Australia” does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than “Nobody has crossed the ice wall” does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.
It's disheartening that you haven't learned yet that flateartherism is a variant of creationism, another religiously inspired pseudoscience.
I couldn't care less about flat earthers. It's the lack of moderation of hate speech that prompted me to leave Meta products. When the speech is specifically designed to harm others it's a huge difference from just harming themselves and their willing peers. Allowing spreading that LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill or that Autistic people need to be fixed rather than accepted, or that all immigrants are bad people, those things are not just bad science (though that's part of it). They are designed to have those people ostracized or murdered. That is not "respectful disagreement". That is pure hate-speech, even if the person saying it truly believes it. It is detrimental to the community and if that is allowed here like on Meta now, I'll happily leave as a proud LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent person among other things that current "political discourse" (i.e. acceptable hate) is being allowed to spread.
I posted this in another thread but I also wanted to say it here so it's more likely one of you will see it. I get the intention behind this, and I think it's well intentioned, but it's also definitely the wrong way to go about things. By lumping opposing viewpoints and misinformation together, all you end up doing is implying that having a difference in opinion on something more subjective is tantamount to spreading a proven lie, and lending credence to misinformation. A common tactic used to try and spread the influence of hate or misinformation is to present it as a "different opinion" and ask people to debate it. Doing so leads to others coming across the misinfo seeing responses that discuss it, and even if most of those are attempting to argue against it, it makes it seem like something that is a debatable opinion instead of an objective falsehood. Someone posting links to sources that show how being trans isn't mental health issue for the 1000th time wont convince anyone that they're wrong for believing so, but it will add another example of people arguing about an idea, making those without an opinion see the ideas as both equally worthy of consideration. Forcing moderators to engage in debate is the exact scenario people who post this sort of disguised hate would love.
Even if the person posting it genuinely believes the statement to be true, there are studies that show presenting someone with sources that refute something they hold as fact doesn't get them to change their mind.
If the thread in question is actually subjective, then preventing moderators from removing just because they disagree is great. The goal of preventing overmodedation of dissenting opinions is extremely important. You cannot do so by equating them with blatent lies and hate though, as that will run counter to both goals this policy has in mind. Blurring the line between them like this will just make misinformation harder to spot, and disagreements easier to mistake as falsehoods.
This policy to me seems as an attempt to sensibly resolve the power trip problem, but it appears a bit vague and there is still room for improvement. There are some communities where this makes sense but I think there are others where it does not. Moderators are volunteers and I think they should have a degree of discretion how they run the community. You're the admin so do as you will, but may I suggest:
Where a one sided narrative is strictly being enforced that world admins don't appreciate, would it be better to just move/rename that community to better reflect it? Such as moving the example community mod to a new community called "marijuana is bad", to better reflect the variety of views the moderator is looking for? I know a pervasive issue is a single poster/moderator just posts and enforces a one-sided view, but perhaps the root of that issue is that the community's name misleadingly looks to be a neutral place when it is not being run that way.
I say this because there are places that are not intended for neutral discussion and are meant to be more supportive of one group.
LGBTQ+ safe spaces are a prime example, but a different example about more trivial matters would be, say, Premier League football clubs.
If someone makes a Chelsea fan community, someone else coming in to say why Liverpool is better can be removed, as it should be more of a Chelsea echo chamber. Whereas in a Premier League community, blocking Liverpool posts and only allow Chelsea supportive posts would make sense to get admins involved to have it be more open and neutral.
Personally I think it would be better to enforce a policy of ensuring a community's moderation matches the intent implied by the name of it. The policy as it stands feels heavy-handed on moderators.
We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments.
In general I would agree, but if the community moderators decides to set some ground truths (aka an echo chamber), I don't think the admins should be involved.
Allowing these posts and comment despite these agreed upon ground truths (ex: the earth is round, vaccine works, eating animals is unethical, etc) is only going to generate noise by having to refute these again and again instead of fostering productive discussions.
I say let the communities handle their own affairs, and the admins should only intervene in severe cases.
I appreciate everything the .world admins do. As a mod of a community here, I also agree with the general concept of letting the community downvote posts that aren't actually harmful in terms of hate/abuse. That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement: what events precipitated this policy change, what are going to be permitted kinds of content, and what is not allowed. This post is just a kind of wandering philosophy right now.
!linuxsucks@lemmy.world is about to get heated.
Is there some context that could help clarify what's led to this change?
Similarly, could you provide clearer examples, and how this is intended to fit into the existing Terms of Service/Rules? Despite the length of the post, the way in which it's written leaves this change too ambiguous to be easily understood, which I think is evident both from the voting and commenting patterns.
In my opinion, my questions should have already been addressed in the post, and I think may have helped reception of this change (supposing at minimum it's to curtail some abusive moderation practices).
What a real Steve Huffman post. Really impressive.
Good fucking luck.
There's something that everyone should keep in mind with this announcement. Due to the nature of federation and the fediverse, it can ONLY apply to lemmy.world. Users and communities on other instances can, do, and will continue to have their own policies on the matter.
Expect the tankie and fascist instances to keep doing tankie and fascist shit, and very little has changed in that regard. They still have the same risk of defederation, even if the chances have inched up slightly.
Straight up bullshit and a completely half-baked, ill-considered, ill-conceived idea. Completely disconnected from reality.
You fucking idiots.
This policy is the board that we point to when we see something obscene on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com so that we can actually do something about it without being too authoritarian ourselves.
Any comment on this one?
https://lemmy.world/post/23229045
I checked the thread, those comments are still removed: https://lemmy.world/comment/13966483
“The moon is upside down in Australia”
A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.
So users should also be able to post about Flat Earth and Antivaxxing on science only channels, by that logic.
No thanks.
What absolutely cowardice. There are no "alternate facts".
Edit *you actually admit you're going to forced science communities to post flat Earth? Ok gg Lemmy, it wasn't that good of run anyway but cya. Russians and flathearhers. Star trek memes aren't worth enough for me to stay.
I support you in this decision. To me, Lemmy is fundamentally about the free exchange of ideas, independent from the prevailing mainstream dogma. This platform was built to accommodate a diversity of experiences and viewpoints, and allow people to engage with unfamiliar perspectives without being overwhelmed by them.
This policy only applies to lemmy.world, it doesn't apply to every server on the fediverse. If the complainers truly feel that their experience is being negatively impacted by this policy, then go ahead and move to one of the many servers that maintain the policy of removing and banning opposing viewpoints on sight. There's absolutely nothing wrong with finding your preferred walled garden and savoring that environment.
But if Lemmy is just a collection of echo chambers, there won't be any space for people to hash out their differences of opinion, and we will just become more isolated and out of touch. As the largest server in the network, I think it's quite suitable for lemmy.world to explicitly advocate for a diversity of viewpoints, and I believe it will ultimately benefit the platform as a whole.
Communities should not be overly moderated
You should have stopped at that.
Pretty much the only comments/posts which should be removed are these posted by bots, these outright illegal, these supporting nazism (in all it's iterations, including bashing racial/sexual minorities and migrants) and supporting genocide.
Pretty sure I agree with the gist of this, and it's welcome. My corner is small anyway, with not a lot of trolls and troublemakers, and I hope I'm already in line with this policy.
Well, unless I'm one of the mods who'll "receive an immediate notice with a link to this new policy."
Fair, just don't expand this any further, because its a slippery slope into taking autonomy from community mods.
Let’s say every community allows one lunatic post. It’s downvoted to hell and thoroughly refuted in the comments.
Every time someone tries to say the same thing again under a different post, the comment gets a reply “[lunatic opinion] was refuted under [lunatic post link] - you may comment there” and then the stray lunatic comment is removed. Only the reply stays to inform other lunatics. Other comments saying the same lunatic opinion again are removed, because the canonical reply linking the canonical lunatic post is already in the comments. All discussion about the lunatic opinion will be contained under the canonical lunatic post.
Would this work?
I like the pinholes theory and I think it's a wise idea
We are already seeing the fallout from this as there is a right wing chud spewing all sorts of half truths, hate speech and misinformation. @max55@lemm.ee is gonna tank your credibility.
@Serinus@lemmy.world this post seems relevant as to what people are afraid of. I am glad that the admin team is taking time to reword this policy to make more clear what is meant:-).
