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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • I’m personally trying to stay out of (especially US) politics discussions as much as I can, as I don’t think there’s much to gain there for me anyway while potentially costing a lot of time and energy. I’m not from US, so most of that stuff isn’t anything that is relevant/influenceable for me anyway.

    I haven’t actively looked whether that person has been posting content that is violating our instance rules, that is simply not a reasonable task to do without leads pointing out specific cases. Without supporting their statements, unless they’re violating instance rules we’re generally trying to allow people to communicate their thoughts here without applying political bias to rule enforcement, at least on instance admin level. I can’t speak for community moderators, but I’m sure that there are communities with bias in rule enforcement or even rules themselves in both directions. If LW users or users in LW communities are violating LW instance rules, we recommend reporting them with references directly to admins, which will bypass community moderators, so our admin team can review it.

    I’m also not directly involved in how the bot is used/discussed, but I did have a look at votes targeting the account in the past and there were several accounts heavily involved in automated or at least not legitimate votes, which on its own is generally also a violation of our ToS and would usually lead to a ban. Votes are therefore not really something that can reasonably considered at face value as peoples opinion either, as they’re skewed by those who abuse the system.

    The leading case for this is an account with zero posts or comments, that downvoted more than 8k comments by the bot, 98.5% of all its comments. This is not legitimate voting behavior. This user does have other voting activity that is at least not immediately obviously abusive, but their downvotes on the bot comments are about 65% of their total comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

    Following that, I see another user that downvoted the bot about 6.5k times, almost 80% of the bot’s comments, which makes up around 40% of their comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

    Interestingly there are also a few cases where people have massively upvoted the comments, which is the case for 3 out of the 13 accounts that have more than 1k total comment votes for the MBFC bot each.

    Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 23% were upvotes, 77% downvotes.
    Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 41% were created by those 13 users with more than 1k votes each.
    Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 51% were created by 28 users with more than 500 votes each.

    I can’t say what a reasonable cutoff might be for gauging vocal minority vs representative user base.

    If I exclude the top 13 voters with more than 1k votes each, this leaves 59.5k votes, which is 28% upvotes and 72% downvotes.
    If I exclude the top 28 voters with more than 500 votes each, this leaves 49.3k votes which is 31% upvotes and 69% downvotes.

    I’ve excluded the bots own automatic votes that Lemmy adds when creating a comment from these calculations.

    I don’t know how people typically vote on bots they like, for me I wouldn’t usually vote on automoderator-style bot posts, it’s not like anyone really gains or loses anything from that anyway.

    Anyway, this is really just some additional data to think about.

    fyi @Blaze@feddit.org @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com

    edit: typos/missing letters













  • The animal abuse alleged at the time was that there was supposedly no healthy vegan cat food.

    While the section of the rules was the same (violent content), animal abuse was a separate sentence, not the one about visual depictions:

    No visual content depicting executions, murder, suicide, dismemberment, visible innards, excessive gore, or charred bodies. No content depicting, promoting or enabling animal abuse. No erotic or otherwise suggestive media or text content featuring depictions of rape, sexual assault, or non-consensual violence. All other violent content should be tagged NSFW.

    This is the exact same paragraph we have today and we had before these changes.

    If there was no healthy vegan cat food then this would be considered content enabling animal abuse.


  • The ToS had no rules on misinformation at the time.

    it still had rules about animal abuse, which this misinformation, had it actually been misinformation, would have lead to. while the removal reason could have been more clear, the justification was still covered by our ToS.

    new rules created to back their talking points

    the additional rules provided more clarification on what we intend to achieve with them, but they would not be required. based on what we know today the removal was neither justified by the original ToS nor by the updated ones.