Hey all,
In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.
We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we’ve done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.
ToS Additions
That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.
Regarding misinformation, we’ve tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:
- Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
- We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
- When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
- Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
- Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
- Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.
We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.
We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.
By-laws Addition
We’ve also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.
This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we’ve created as a result of what has happened over the last week.
Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.
https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation
https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT:
We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.
There’s a fine line between misinformation and “subjectively offensive information”. To me, this seems like it was a pretty clear case of abuse of power regardless of where you stand on the original issue and retroactively changing the rules to excuse that abuse does not bode well for this community.
You always have the option to move to another instance such as lemm.ee.
It takes a few clicks from the settings to export and import your subscriptions and block lists
Did you literally just tell them “if you don’t like the rules then you are free to leave”?
Well, the Fediverse relies on trust between the instance admins and the users.
A few people have already left LW over time
As a disclaimer, besides all the points I listed above, I still think Lemmy.world do a good job overall. They were there when there was a need for a reliable instance, they went through all the technical issues after the API exodus, that really helped Lemmy as a whole at the time.
That being said, I also think it’s healthier to spread the responsibilities and influence across several instances rather than having everything centralized on one instance, as stated above.
That’s why I suggest people unsatisfied with LW for whatever reason to leave for another instance. You’ll still be able to access everything, and you would give another instance more weight.
You summarized it perfectly. We do not force you to stay here. You can still access your communities on LW if you still want some of them and it relieves us from stress of beeing “literally reddit 2.0” because we are literally so big that every small move a huge wave of backlash is always incomming even from non LW users.
As we are the biggest instance we are a big target for trolls, bots and legal vultures.
Glad to see we agree!
You do know that everyone is aware they are not trapped here right?
You would be surprised by how many people don’t know.
I regularly find people who aren’t aware of this possibility
Don’t send them here.