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.
This is a bit learning the wrong lesson from what happened, isn't it? The problem is admin overreach. There was some disagreement on a sub, no big deal. I don't even care what it's about, I have no opinion on it. But now this admin comes in like Eric Cartman "Respect mah authoritah!". What am I supposed to make of that? Nobody was advocating animal abuse. I worry about admins who can't just let something go, who can't handle disagreement, like a cop always looking to escalate.
So thanks for the rules clarification, I guess, but what about:
All in all, please don't kill this instance by telling people what to think. There is healthy discussion and people don't always have to agree. That doesn't make me a 'free speech absolutist'. I think removing admin privileges was quite out of bounds. Again, nobody was advocating animal abuse at all.
Mods and admins are here to keep discussion healthy, not impose their views on everyone else, right? So don't! And don't cover for others who do!
I never saw the thread, but based on what I'm hearing, it's animal abuse.
If you look at Reddit and Facebook they've both been mostly consumed by anti science communities which put people in real danger
We see communities like this create an echo chamber which grows and make it impossible to argue sanely.
The fact is, I have seen some increasingly toxicity in some vegan (and some other) communities on Lemmy too. And it is one reason why I left beehaw. Because they allow toxic communities to flourish (as long as they were driven by a minority).
I'd even go as far as the behavior of some of these communities look like femaledatingadvice/thedonald on Reddit slowly. It's ok to have disagreements, but nobody and no animals should be put at risk.
Yeah, it was definitely Animal abuse. Switching carnivorous animals to plant-diets to satisfy their humanitarian urges, is straight up abuse.
When I argued sanely over there I was basically just called a carnal apologist and banned. Shit was wild. Glad Lemmy picked up this stance; because what they were advocating was entirely wrong.
I suppose if those plant-based diets were based on peer-reviewed scientific studies and shown to cause no nutritional, physical, or mental harm to the animals then it wouldn't be animal abuse. But I haven't seen the threads so I'm assuming that wasn't the case.
The problem with that, is you can find a scientific study that will give you almost any result you want. Scientific studies exist at all ends of the spectrum, contradicting each other constantly. It's rather hard to actually get unbiased information today. Additionally, it's pretty common knowledge that cats eat meat in the wild; no scientific reviews needed for that one.
Scientific consensus is still a thing. You can find out what a majority of well accepted studies say, whether something is controversial or not. Sure, some all new discovery in nuclear physics might not have consensus yet but whether you can feed cats a plant only diet should. If it doesn't thats probably because everyone assumed that was a dumb thing to research that wouldn't provide any unexpected results.
Sounds like its not settled science and we should be able to discuss the spectrum of studies and current science around the topic without fear a man-child will take this as their moment to protect all of the cat world from the evil vegans.
Its absurd. Current science does not say that a cat cannot be healthy or healthier on a vegan diet, which is the only reason vegans are considering it in the first place.
If you all haven't figured it out yet, animal wellbeing is the whole point, noone was advocating for hurting a cat.
Cats are carnivores. It's as simple as that.