cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24135976
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.
Sounds like you need to be clearing out that banned list
So they are going the Facebook route of you need to allow untruth to prevent this fake sense of censorship. This is just a rule in bad faith that diminishes real debate/discussion. I will not be tolerating lies in bad faith to appease someones fake sense of a censorship boogyman.
It’s a direct response to some communities with out of control moderation. I won’t name and shame them here, but they essentially reddit style banned and removed all content contrary to the owner’s opinions.
I think it will have larger ramifications in Politics and World, but we’ll see where it goes!
The two examples given, “marijuana” and “flat earth” are two completely different topics, and should be handled IMHO in two completely separate ways. Marijuana you could have a discussion/debate about because it’s a real thing and very little real medical research has been done on it. On the other hand allowing bad faith discussion/debate about “flat earth” is pointless and a waste of time and energy for anyone with critical thinking. Those types of comments should just be shutdown as you can’t argue a bad faith topic and leaving it around only reinforces these bad faith view points creating an eventual decline in a community.
Bowing to those that use bad faith arguments as a way to “prove” this fake sense of censorship should not be tolerated, and deserve to be called out and removed. Removing posts in bad faith is not censorship, and claiming it is, makes you a bad faith actor.
I always respond to flat earthers by linking them to hollow earthers. Let them fight it out. LOL.
Bad faith commenting can happen without notice, I can claim yours too. Whether it’s flat earth or marijuana, it’s not critical thinking skills to know what is obvious and taught in school. The idea of ‘listening to the other side’ and ‘using words’ to state your argument and change minds are thoughtful & courageous ideas that actually problem solve rather than merely win debates, remember the black dude who talked to kkk folks out of racism? Problem is that commenters are quick to reply and mods are quick to over-moderate because that is the quickest way to win the debate, no body cared to problem solve.
You could claim that mine is in bad faith yes, but to do so would be in bad faith. And pretending you can have any meaningful discussion around the topic of “flat earth” in a forum format such as Lemmy is naive. If these people can stick their head in the sand and not listen to indisputable science, Lemmy is not the format to try and convert them. And to use such an argument as the basis for new “rules” who’s sole purpose appears to be so that they can be wielded against a few mods in a community (or communities) that apparently people think are being moderated to harshly seems like a bad way to go about it all. Either replace the mods, or someone move the community. Don’t make these vague policy changes to try and “catch” them into changing their viewpoint when this whole dog-and-pony show is supposedly about censorship.
And stop trying to conflate real topics with wild conspiracy theories, unless of course the goal is to drag the value of real discussion as a whole down, because a “policy” like this using bad faith language and only backed by this censorship boogeyman talk does nothing to further discussion anywhere.
Please note, this is a lemmy.world change and as such applies to ALL lemmy.world communities.
