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.

EDIT 2 (2024-08-31):

We’ve posted a response, sorry for the delay.

👉 https://lemmy.world/post/19264848 👈

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
    289·
    3 months ago

    As a former site admin, I will say right now that leaving any kind of rule “open to interpretation” is the WORST thing you could do. The only interpretation of the rules of your site should be the your interpretation. That’s it. Rules should be easy to understand and easily convey the correct interpretation.

    This might be a language-barrier thing, but that’s the meaning of “open for interpretation”.

    It means that the admins and moderators are judging it on a per-case basis instead of a hard delineation that anybody could use to decide whether something is against the rules or not (and hence use technicalities to skirt the rules, naturally).

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
      811·
      3 months ago

      We didn’t cover that in ESL, because open to interpretation means open to interpretation. If what you’re trying to say in your comment was the admins intention then the language should’ve been: “Admin’s interpretation of the rules is the last word and will be judged in a case by case basis”. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s how laws and court systems work. Anyone can interpret laws as they see fit (see sov citizens) but when push come to shove, judges have the last word and the courts interpretation is the only valid interpretation of the law. Hence debate based trials, checks and balances. When rules are open to interpretation, they become useless as a tool for defining truth.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        47·
        3 months ago

        because open to interpretation means open to interpretation

        And most people understands when a company says that. They mean:

        “Admin’s interpretation of the rules is the last word and will be judged in a case by case basis”.

        It’s just understood that a company always means “we can do what we want, deal with it”.

        • dustyData@lemmy.world
          84·
          3 months ago

          But this is not a company. What are you talking about?

          But in a real sense, yes, the admins can do whatever they want. We as users have no power or recourse. They could just turn off the server tomorrow and that’s that.