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.
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Tbh it doesn’t really seem like a change since all of the world communities have been on seem to follow this notion anyway.
Even though I see a lot of dissenting voices, they don’t get removed or banned.
Especially in c/Politics which has a very high amount of senseless content lol. Even if you roll in as a tankie or a party shill, you’re free to engage.
Just as long as everybody remembers that fighting ideas with ideas only works when everybody is honest.
This is a great change. We shouldn’t create environments where people falsely believe pseudoscience and misinformation isn’t being posted. Instead, we need to equip people with the tools necessary so they can identify misinformation for themselves. Kind of like giving a man a fish vs. teaching them how to fish.
This should encourage more people to be more inquisitive in their discussions, rather than accepting what users post as fact. Don’t be afraid to ask for sources. Don’t be afraid to point out that someone is believing a lie.
In principle, this seems like a solid rule change.
However, considering that lemmy unfortunately has a large number of tankies, I could see how it could be abused lower the quality of discussion and spread tankie propaganda and genocide whitewashing.
tankie
They love their slurs against anyone they disagree with
tankie is a slur
Jfc I get that the term is overused by liberals who think it just means “anyone to the left of me whom I don’t like” but saying it’s a slur is fucking pathetic.
What its origins are I neither know nor care.
Tankie is an easy-to-remember word for people of limited intelligence and vocabulary to throw around. u/Skiluros managed to use it twice in one sentence in his efforts to assert that only propaganda that fits the approved narrative should be allowed.
Yeah and? You’re not the dumbfuck who said it was a slur, I wasn’t picking a fight with you.
Props to those on smaller instances, especially communities. This space will be so much better when not dominated by just a few big ones.
Weirdly the ability for Lemmy to have many versions of the same community is both the solution to this policy change and the best argument against it being necessary. If the mods in one version want to be a fan club rather than a debate club, that’s not a problem because there are other communities out there. And at the same time, if World wants to mandate all communities be debate clubs, people can stop visiting World communities.
Decentralization ftw!
This seems oddly timed with the whole meta thing going on.
Are people going to be forced to accept ‘a small amount’ of, ferinstance, asserting that homosexuality is a mental illness?
It does feel oddly timed, but I personally made a new news community on my instance to fight back against the mod abuse on the more popular news instance in this part of the fediverse.
People are taking notice of mod abuse and leaving because they don’t support it.
I really thought this was satire.
Seems to me there is a big difference between attacking someone’s identity and claiming the earth is flat or marijuana is bad. The fact the mods don’t seem to address this is concerning.
If you see offensive content, as always, report it, but the default position now is to respond with “No, you’re wrong, here are the supporting documents showing how wrong you are” rather than instant ban and removal.
Look, I respect the intent, but as someone who’s been on forums since the freaking 90s, I can say with confidence that that’s a toxic meltdown waiting to happen.
You need at least two bitter jaded cybersec experts and at least one game theory person on your team to stand a chance with this kind of thing.
Can you provide supporting documents that disprove :nasty insinuation about you:? Of course not. Do you want to have to keep being required to? No.
Can people provide supporting documents disproving :nasty insinuation about :demographic::? Also no. And they don’t want to have to keep being required to.
So there’s the constant tide of exhaustion of people being constantly undermined and dehumanised, and being forced to either respond to yet another argument that :demographic: don’t really count as people, or to just let it ride and try to ignore it. And then the wreckers use it as rage-bait to get people angry to the point of getting banned, and others walk off in disgust, more trolls smell blood in the water and the whole thing spirals.
It’s the damn nazi-bar problem: even ‘just a few’ nazis smirking in the corner create a hostile and unpleasant environment that other people don’t want to be in. And so they drive the good posters off, reducing the opposition - and within a depressingly short time, you’ve got yourself an alt-right shithole full of trolls and sociopaths that just love being able to exert that kind of power.
I’ve seen it approximately three bajillion times so far, and god dammit why won’t you youngins learn.
Yes, powermods and power-tripping mods are a problem. But the approach to it you’ve chosen was gamed out and defeated in detail probably before you were even alive.
And oh god, if you try to parse a rule about what categories of opinions and statements are covered by this, the rules lawyers are going to clown-shibari the entire damn site.
The only two rules I’ve ever seen be effective over time are:
- Don’t make us ban you
- Don’t make us de-mod you
and probably hard-cap the number of communities one person can mod.
Have other stuff on top of that, but they’re load-bearing and non-optional.
And I get that the site is trying to be a neutral platform that’s insulated from the content, but honestly I don’t think that’s feasible. Sometimes you need to just throw people out of your bar regardless of the exact phrasing of the terms and conditions, and that means picking a side.
Also can we have a better markdown parser that doesn’t turn angle brackets into failed html markup sometime please
For folks who have missed the Nazi Bar reference, this should be required reading:
https://bsky.app/profile/iamragesparkle.bsky.social/post/3lbidcyu5ic2b
(glad to see he left the Nazi bar X is becoming.)
and probably hard-cap the number of communities one person can mod.
I would like to underline and emaphasize this one.
As for the rule change in general (note: I’m from a different instance so it doesn’t influence me much) - it seems reasonable.
If there is a community where a respectful disputation of facts - with sources to back it up - gets immediately resolved with a ban hammer, that community is not a healthy thing to have on an instance, so administrators might want to step in.
Myself, I’ve noticed one such community on the “hexbear” instance. Got banned for explaining well-known historical facts, with references to sources and all. The reason: I was “reactionary” and only one narrative was allowed. If it had been on another instance, maybe the admins would have done something. But since it was there, there was no recourse except leaving.
A lot of that falls under “attacks on users” or “attacks on groups”. Of course we’re still going to enforce that.
“Don’t make us de-mod you” is effectively what a lot of this comes down to. The goal is to be just a little less quick with moderation tools and, when we can, use our words a bit more.
I don’t expect this to change much for 95% of communities. The ones that are really going to have to change are the ones with super fragile philosophies that can’t stand up to a single sentence of criticism.
But you’re taking ‘don’t make us ban you’ off the table for the mods.
“Oh no, I’m not attacking trans people, I’m just saying that children deserve protection. Surely you’ll agree there’s no rule against that?”
Sealioning. JAQing off. Ragebait. That very specific, slightly-too-formal dialect of trollspeak. Shitty edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line, and a bat-signal to like-minded sociopaths that the dog is chained up.
Hell, bluesky has been infested with LLM debate-bots recently that fucking automate the process.
I suspect that you’re mistaking the symptoms for the problem: it’s not that mods are too quick on the button and need to learn to tolerate a little raw chicken in the mayo, it’s that some of them have been captured by corporate / PAC / generally-unsavoury interests, and use the button as a weapon.
And to those people, there’s only one thing you need to say.
Mods are still generally going to have a lot of discretion. How often do you see admins get involved here?
We’re not going to allow hate speech. This is fully intended to give us something against those who, as you say, use the button as a weapon.
Give us a chance and let’s see how this actually plays out.
Shitty edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line
You could as well have said “I want to ban everyone who disagrees with me without them having any recourse”.
Introduce rules disallowing lies (anything which can be proved as not being factual - hard facts rather than opinions) Nazi propaganda, illegal contents, post supporting genocide. This is completely sufficient for the vast majority of contents. You definitely should not ban users because they engage in what is in your OPINION “edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line”.
Lolno. God, lawful-neutrals and their damn rules.
If you do that, they get to play the dictionary-definitions game and well-ackchewally at you indefinitely and demand you provide sources for the word ‘the’, while creating endless reports demanding people be banned because technically that’s not paedophilia that’s ephebepholia… or whatever the fuck.
It’s a game to them; all they care about is making a disruptive and unpleasant environment.
The only way to win is to not play.
When you recognise the pattern, you short-circuit the whole damn thing and just boot them out.
This only works when the majority of the audience can tell who’s right
Discussion about it started before the meta announcement, it just took time to work out the verbiage.
Huh… that’s disappointing.
It was entirely predictable from Vichy Twitter and Meta, but I didn’t expect lemmy - even .world - to kowtow.
When I saw the original announcement from LW admins, I was extremely surprised find that I, with some reservations, agreed with it.
Lemmy definitely has a problem with single-viewpoint moderated communities. I am banned from some anarchism communities because I came in and did exactly what Serinus described, gave a point of view that poked a hole in the only officially allowed narrative, and I definitely have observed particularly on lemmy.world moderators who are very unapologetic about banning people who try to poke a hole in the only allowed viewpoint. I don’t think anyone on a social network should be in the business of policing the allowed points of view. You can kick out the agreed-to-be-obnoxious stuff, and there’s going to be a big grey area there, but once you’ve come out with it that you want to allow side 1 but not side 2, in my opinion you shouldn’t be a moderator anymore.
Of course, announcing the policy and implementing it are two very different things. Implementing it perfectly will be impossible. Also, there are people who use “poking a hole in the only allowed viewpoint” as their excuse for being an absolute knobhead, never shutting up, and being hostile and disingenuous. (Depending on who you ask, I might be one of them.) I’m a little bit suspicious of how well lemmy.world is going to implement this extremely-difficult-to-implement policy change. I was sort of expecting it to be some kind of red herring which was forbidding moderators from dealing with trolls or propagandists when they found them, though. It still might be that in practice, of course.
But overall, I was more than a little surprised when I read a LW moderation policy announcement and found it describing a genuine problem and a pretty credible attempt at a solution. I don’t even know if the communities I was thinking of while reading it are still around and still doing their thing, but if they are, it’s a problem.
Lemmy definitely has a problem with single-viewpoint moderated communities. I am banned from some anarchism communities because I came in and did exactly what Serinus described, gave a point of view that poked a hole in the only officially allowed narrative,
You sound like a troll who went to the anarchism community for the purpose of starting an argument. “Debate me bro” isn’t a personality that should need to be supported by topic-focused communities.
You sound like a troll
By “troll” you mean someone who you disagree with?
I don’t even know what his belief or the prevailing narrative of the community is. He sounds like a troll because what he described is trolling. He “came in”, implying it was his first or nearly first post, and immediately wanted to “poke a hole in the narrative”. That’s classic trolling.
Sincerely expressing your actual viewpoint, which disagrees with the community’s consensus viewpoint, is classic trolling? And then explaining why and asking questions about what people mean in their disagreements with you? You gotta update the urban dictionary and all, they’ve got it all wrong.
I’m a little hesitant to restart the drama, but if you’re curious, here’s what happened:
https://slrpnk.net/post/14823401
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30753583/14479446
You can draw your conclusions about whether or not I’m a troll. I will take no questions and reply to no comments attempting to restart the debate. I do think it’s semi-on-topic to discuss one specific instance of when this type of “you’re not allowed to moderate that way” policy might have been a good thing, but an extensive argument about whether I should have been allowed to say those things in that specific instance is not.
I’m also fascinated to discover that the person who’s been swearing to me recently that Wikipedia is evil, NATO is evil, Russia doesn’t care about Greenland and Trump’s desire to invade them is no big deal… was way, way back at the time when this happened, out stumping for the Green Party in the anarchism community and being protected by the mods while doing so. That is fascinating.
Every troll thinks they have a justification for it. They’re fighting the good fight and “poking holes” in groupthink. Was that or was it not one of your first posts in the community? And were you or were you not going in to argue?
You literally have comments in the mod-complaint post about how you think anarchism is fundamentally flawed. You didn’t go in there to understand anarchism or debate with fellow anarchists about what anarchism should be, you went in to argue for a political goal.
It doesn’t matter if you were doing it for the right reasons. It also doesn’t really matter if the mod was also posting for the wrong reasons. The pattern of going into a community to immediately debate them is classic trolling behavior. The various people who responded to you in the mod-complaint community told you all these things.
I was really trying not to get drawn into this. Maybe I am not strong enough.
You literally have comments in the mod-complaint post about how you think anarchism is fundamentally flawed.
I said I thought it had some fatal flaws. Then, two different people came out to tell me I was ignorant about anarchism. I allowed as how maybe I was, and asked them what I should read to learn more. Then I read it. Then I got back to them to say I liked it a lot, and on reflection made it clear that I was talking about a particular breed of faux anarchism, and not anything to do with the philosophy I was reading about in Kropotkin.
You know, like trolls do.
The exchange is here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30753583/14477565
It’s honestly kind of hard to remember, in internet spaces, that most people are reasonable. It’s easy to misinterpret things or classify someone you’re talking to as some kind of “enemy” of one breed or another, but most people can work past it. I talked about it in that comments section. At a certain point I made a realization that almost everybody there, even among people who were telling me I was wrong, were pretty civil about it. They said what they said, I said what I said, and we sort of moved on our separate ways having had the exchange. All good.
Then there were a very small minority of accounts where it had to be personal. It’s not enough just to disagree and talk about it. Someone has to be “bad”, and someone has to “win.” People will start reaching for what the other person really meant to do, or how they really feel about things. It’s like they can’t let it resolve into anything positive; they have to “prove their point” and assign a bad belief or action to the enemy so they can succeed in their case that the other person is “bad.”
I think that second type of argumentation is actually a small minority. I think they’re just super loud and tend to dominate comments sections sometimes, because they trigger other people and trigger each other, and they never stop once they get started. Part of the reason I feel like defending myself here is that I do feel like it’s relevant to look back at that comments section as a whole, and see how overall productive it is. (It also doesn’t say what you think it says, although there is a minority that does think what you said, yes. Sort by top, read the top five comments, and you tell me what the consensus is.) The more that it is “You are trolling! You must shut up!”, the less light and the more heat the overall exchange of words is going to generate.
The one thing I will allow, is that maybe I have a type of sarcasm and instant-disagreement that makes it easy for something to spiral into more of an argument than it needs to be, or cause way more friction than needs to be there. You can see some of that in the comments section too. I’m not doing it for the sake of trolling. I am very sincerely explaining what it is that I think, and why, and I’m generally listening for the counter-explanation. If someone makes a point that I think has a fatal flaw I will sometimes point it out in, I guess, a very mean and talking-down type of way. That part I can see, yeah, if that’s what you’re talking about, maybe you are right that I should not do that.
No. That’s what is called a “discussion”. As opposite to a “echo chamber”.
Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of remote psychology?
In the World community, I am not shy about removing comments and banning users pushing outright propaganda, such that the Ukrainians are Nazis, Gaza is not undergoing a genocide and Chinas persecution of the Uyghurs is at best just a wacky misunderstanding and at worst Western propaganda against the wise, benevolent CCP.
But when I do that, I cite my sources.
Yeah. It makes a big difference what communities and what type of “poking holes in the narrative” comments they are talking about. It could be a way to crack down on fake leftist communities that will ban you for saying Biden has been raising working people’s wages for the last four years, or it could also be a way to force you to accept misinformation because banning it would be against “free speech.” I wish they had listed some specific examples.
Please note, this is a lemmy.world change and applies to all lemmy.world communities.
