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.
Ok so I held back my vomit long enough to read your mental diarrhea and I’d like to point out that I’ve never had a catholic walk up to me while I was enjoying a nice burger on the patio seating and have them rail at me for 20 minutes about my sinful and destructive lifestyle.
On the other hand, while not always a burger, I have had this happen from random vegan passerbys three times now in the last year.
So certainly you can claim that I’m ‘only noticing the obnoxious vegans.’ except that neither me or my social circles know of ANY vegans who aren’t obnoxious. In university I often wanted to ask vegans some questions critical to me like ‘What do you plan on doing with the current living animals once you outlaw meat?’, and ‘what about critical medicine research that saves human lives?’ but every fuckdamn time the minute they have me sitting down it becomes a blame fest where I am the evil person for living like humans have for over 200,000 years.
I will say this again: Fuck vegans. Every one. I don’t care if you think there are ‘good’ ones, in 5 decades of living I’ve never met a single one. Arrogant sanctimonious assholes on a crusade against human nature. Every pet and infant that dies from being forced a vegan diet is blood on all of your hands.
To be fair, you aren’t vegan and are incredibly obnoxious. Maybe you just attract obnoxious people in your life, vegan or not.