MOD POST: Progress on creating community guidelines; next steps for mods and users
Good day to everyone! Heads up: this post is going to be very long.
First off, I want to thank everyone who engaged in some hearty discussion in my mod post soliciting input for community guidelines, vision for the magazine, and submission rules. There were some different viewpoints discussed, but we all had space to express those viewpoints and some minds were even changed (namely, mine) about a few topics. I have to say that it gave me a ton of hope that we are going to make this an absolutely wonderful space to belong to on the Fediverse.
Based on that discussion, we as the mod team decided to add at least a few items to the side bar to establish community guidelines that had a lot of consensus. More community guidelines will be added later, but these topics were repeated by multiple community members enough times that it seemed important to make very clear statements as early as we could that civility is the goal of our magazine's engagement and that we will not tolerate hate speech/ trolling/disinformation/fascism parading as "politics."
If you're visiting our magazine from a mobile device, you may not see the side bar as prominently displayed as compared to using a tablet or computer/laptop. So I'm copy and pasting the guidelines here:
Preliminary @politics community guidelines until further notice
Be civil. Don't know the difference between the various levels of debate until it descends into incivility? Refer to this graphic for details. Safe zone is everything above tone policing. Engage in too many occurrences of the lower three tiers, and you're likely to be banned.
Post links to respected or reputable outlets of information. Need a definition of respected or reputable sources of news? Refer to this Media Bias Chart for details. Links to sources that rank in the 32.0-64.0 range on this graph will be permitted. Links to sources that rank lower will be removed.
No neo-Nazi, fascist, or white supremacy sympathizers or content. We want to encourage community engagement from a variety of positions on the political spectrum. Nazism, fascism, and white supremacy are not political positions; they are postures of authoritarianism, which is inherently anti-democratic, and are methods of exerting control through bigotry and hate. No hate speech will be tolerated.
Posts must be links to informative or educational content. Memes or links to screen shots/image captures will be removed. Submissions must link to either a news article, opinion/analysis writing, video, or other informative content that relates to politics, policy making, and politicians at all levels of governance both domestic and international. To reiterate: the source of this content must be from respected/reputable outlets.
Submission rules will be established within a week or two.
Thank you for being part of our magazine and helping to create a great community! Please start actively using the report button, but please allow your mod team a few hours to respond to reports.
Additionally, all the mod team is up to snuff on how to use kbin's current moderator tools and we have caught up on the reports that have been made in the past 3-4 weeks. We have banned the worst contributors to this magazine already. Please make use of the report button whenever you feel the need for submission and comments! Just be aware that none of the mod team are making this work our full-time jobs, and we also are very involved contributors to other magazines. Please give us a few hours to address any reports that are filed.
Sort through all the comments left in that first mod post and start unpacking some of the requests for community guidelines that didn't have clear consensus or were complex and need more qualifications/context. We need time to figure out if everything asked for can even be achieved through moderation in the first place, and then start ascribing consequences and actions that we are capable of following through with.
Establish submission rules to the content shared here based on that first mod post. It is not our goal to get bogged down as moderators in the bureaucracy of a too-finely set of created submission rules, so please be aware that these rules will be meant to prevent @politics from becoming a cesspool; it's unlikely that these rules will be so stringent that we will start removing submissions for not using a colon in the right place in the title.
Roll out badges (similar to submission flair from reddit) so that posters can indicate the characteristics of their post and add transparency to the content being shared. As of right now, the functionality of badges is limited, but I trust that this will become more useful in future kbin core updates. On Lemmy, it is possible to filter out posts based on badges, so our goal is to have this established as a culture here in kbin so we're ready for the day that a filter-by-badge feature is ready for use. Early stages on this, but here are the badges so far. Content: Election coverage, SCOTUS, International, Federal Government, State Government, Local Government. Media: Article, Video, YouTube. Slant: News, Opinion/Editorial, Discussion. When you create a thread, there is a text field for you to indicate one (or more? I'm unsure) of these badges.
Roll out Discussion threads. The crowd was mixed on whether there should be special threads for users to discuss politics without sharing content alongside. I'm picturing a couple of options for this type of thread: 1. Posting philosophical or meta questions about politics to inspire lively and civil debate. 2. Sharing content that isn't breaking news but still educational/informative about politics. I'm thinking here posting an episode of a podcast that focuses on the history of political movements, or a video essayist on YouTube that traces the philosophical underpinnings of modern day politics.
We still need your help shaping the community here. Please add in your two cents about anything you've read above. What's currently on the screen and in the side bar is not set in stone. Keep in mind we're still compiling from the last big discussion, so just because you don't see your specific suggestion highlighted yet doesn't mean it's been ignored.
We now have to count on you heavily to use the report button. Again, the moderation is not likely to be instantaneous, but we won't let abusive commenters and awful content go unabated forever.
Also, we need to ask you to please start testing the badges feature. For now, you have to type in the badges (so I guess stay consistent with how they're labeled above), but I imagine that this would be a drop down menu in the future. Who knows! But give it a shot and let's see if it's working yet.
Next, we still need clarity from you about some questions.
Do you want this magazine to only be U.S. politics, or is it okay for politics from other countries to be posted here? On that note, should it go without saying that all content must be in English?
Do you want a Discussion-style thread in this magazine based on the description above? Would you want this style of thread if the description was tweaked?
What should the consequences be for violating community guidelines? What should the consequences be for violating the submission rules?
Would anyone like to volunteer to help with QoL issues in this magazine such as rebooting our magazine image? With CSS or JS design?
Thanks for reading this far, and I look forward to another terrific conversation here.
Agreed. Political movements are less tied to political boundaries than they ever have been in the past, and elections have significant consequences that reach far beyond borders with the advent of globalization.
I like the idea behind the Media Bias Chart, but I do see an issue to keep an eye on.
The website appears to do some sort of averaging. MSNBC and Fox News score 34 and 36. If you mouse over MSNBC, you'll see only a few items below 24, and only a few above 50 but they mostly cluster between 32 and 40. There's only a few things from MSNBC that are stinkers. When I read a piece on MSNBC, I have high confidence it's decent. I would be hard pressed to cherry pick 10 BS pieces to support a BS narrative.
However if you do the same thing with Fox News You'll see a bigger swing in the extremes. They do real some journalism at Fox news, but they spew a ton of shit opinion too. Just like MSNBC they have a decent chunk between 24 and 32, but they also have a decent chunk below 24. If I wanted to get 10 BS pieces to support a BS narrative, I probably could.
Also thanks for taking this on, it's a huge task and it's appreciated.
I also saw this scatter plotting that you described, and for Fox News, it is more of a swing / crap shoot. Another media watchdog organization called Poynter used to have a media bias report and ultimately deemed Fox News reliable for any coverage besides politics.
To get around this, we can utilize a whitelist/blacklist of news sites. For sources of information not on those lists, we as the mods can refer to the Media Bias Chart from Ad Fontes. For sources of information not measured by Ad Fontes, moderators may use personal discretion.
Example: yesterday someone posted a link from pinknews.com, but I couldn't find it on the media bias chart. That's fine. The headline seemed like credible news, but from a queer news source.
m/politicus on kbin. There is also m/USpolitics. This magazine should allow for politics from all over. Especially so if you plan to allow discussion threads revolving around general political themes instead of specific stories, since you will likely draw in more participation from non-Americans as well.
It is extremely easy to start a magazine for only uspolitics, but I won't be taking that on. Maybe another mod here may be interested. Or even you (hint, hint). 😄
Do you want this magazine to only be U.S. politics, or is it okay for politics from other countries to be posted here? On that note, should it go without saying that all content must be in English?
Politics from anywhere is politics. Post it all.
What languages you decide to allow/disallow depends very heavily on what languages the moderators speak/read fluently enough. It would become very difficult to moderate content in a language that none of the mods can read. There are already entire instances which have community focus on a specific non-English language, and I would expect to find a "politics" community somewhere in a language I prefer if English does not suit me. Beyond that, English is factually a very widespread language (whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing), and is a second language for very many people in the world.
Congrats on the initial guidelines, I believe they are a great step forward for the community! Glad to have participated in some of the conversation. To me, this is an exciting development in forming a new community within our respective instant.
- Do you want this magazine to only be U.S. politics, or is it okay for politics from other countries to be posted here? On that note, should it go without saying that all content must be in English?
I think we should embrace politics from not only the U.S., but from other countries as well. I believe it fosters a robust community.
- Do you want a Discussion-style thread in this magazine based on the description above? Would you want this style of thread if the description was tweaked?
I love the idea of discussion-style threads and wonder if they could be incorporated into microblogging. I have no problem if they're included in the main threads of the community, however wonder if microblogging is the best place for them. Open for discussion and further input from the community on this...overall, not a deal breaker on the community decision, as long as the discussions are labeled as such in the thread
- What should the consequences be for violating community guidelines? What should the consequences be for violating the submission rules?
I believe a "3 strikes your out" consequence structure is applicable. 1st offense, warning...2nd offense a week...3rd offense ban.
- Would anyone like to volunteer to help with QoL issues in this magazine such as rebooting our magazine image? With CSS or JS design?
I wish I had the background to help here, yet I don't. I only hope that some of the ideas I've provided have positively contributed to setting up the community. I look forward to contributing and commenting for a long time.
Thanks everyone for all the hard work!
@HandsHurtLoL I've really enjoyed conversing, and sharing ideas with you throughout the process.
Thanks for the kind words, but honestly - just the fact that so many users felt confident enough here to voice their views is already proof that we're headed in the right direction.
I agree with what you've said here, but I have my concerns about the microblogging feature of these ActivityPub instances. I'm going to be honest and say that I'm not super clear about the interplay of threads and microblogs in the magazines. When a user boosts an item, it appears on their timeline feed in their microblog, if I'm understanding this platform correctly. My reservations about using tags is that they could put the spotlight on our magazine across the entire Fediverse at once, which may end up a nightmare. I am confident we can influence events between kbin and Lemmy. But I think it will feel like drinking from a fire hose if we get all of Mastadon jumping down our throats, too.
For what it's worth, I wish we could move more quickly on some of these magazine rules, but two of us mods had real life stuff planned prior to taking on the magazine that's made the timing weird. When I asked Ernest to hand off the reigns, I assumed he would be too busy to do anything for a few days. He replied within an hour, so I became a mod for a topic I deeply care about knowing full well that I was supposed to get on a plane and fly across the country for a weeklong work event in not even 9 hours! I've been doing all this in spare time from the hotel. Guess I must have been pretty convincing to Ernest lol
Anyhow, I have appreciated your engagement! Thanks for being a member here.
FWIW, I've never seen a more orderly, rational, engaged effort to start up a moderation team on a relatively new community completely from scratch. Your time and energy investment hasn't gone unnoticed. Cheers.
I certainly don’t wish to exclude anyone on language- I won’t freak out over it…But on the other hand wonder how it is that Google translate hasn’t started ww3 yet.
I do feel like people might be better served more broadly if languages are split off, but also like maybe this is something that shouldn’t be dealt with until it needs dealing with .
localization
As somebody from the US, I feel that I gain more with more globalized political discourse, though I suspect we’ll run rough shod over the others- and they again may be better served with dedicated mags for their particular location.
Again, feel as though this might be a better issue to revisit as it becomes a problem.
consequences
I’m a firm believer that consequences should fit the actions, somebody posting a funny and not particularly offensive meme should maybe get a warning or a take down or whatever.
Somebody posting hate speech (anything expressed as “no tolerance” to be honest”) should absolutely not have any tolerance.
discussion threads
Is there a reason we can’t try them? I dunno. Maybe it will be useful, maybe not.