Hey all,
Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I’d learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it’s run.
This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.
You’re more than welcome to share your opinion. The issue I’ve found is that what’s considered harmful by different people varies quite a bit. Safe spaces online seem to run into a frequent problem of brooding persecution complexes which leads to having to self censor around specific individuals. This can lead to a very specific kind of bullying and in rare cases a hijacking of these spaces. More importantly for our purposes, it’s the assumption of bad faith that’s not compatible with what we’re trying to accomplish here- these spaces often become echo chambers for the most marginalized identities because no one is perfectly educated and omnipotent and any discomfort is viewed as problematic discussion and removed even in cases when it is tolerant (simply due to the perceived discomfort from having ones views challenged). They’re also fundamentally incompatible with intersectionality in a variety of ways, but perhaps most notably a person of privilege may be chastised for not recognizing their privilege or being educated and the person of privilege can use the idea of a safe space to censor a more marginalized individual on the grounds that it made them upset.
A situation that might be relevant to this. For most people in the western world communism (Marxism, Leninism, Maoism and all the variants) are largely theoretical constructs.
Unfortunately there are people for whom oppression under these kind of political order has not been that far in their memories. Beehaw for good or bad seems to have inherited a connection with lemmy.ml due to historical reasons and there seems to be many users there who bring bad faith support in this context.
Does this not count as important as transphobic or islamophobic content because it’s outside the general experience of people in the western world who likely makes up a majority of users on this platform?
From the perspective of a person in say America, it’s a theoretical discussion about something that acts as counterweight to the flaws of the capitalistic system, a topic of debate. Saying oppression under communist (popular definition, not technical) regimes are made up by western media is something that might not qualify as hate speech.
I’ve lived in places where you were brutalized and sometimes executed by maoists if you dared to leave your house after 5pm.
spoiler
I’ve seen a tree which was used to kill babies of supposed anti-communists by bashing their heads against it. You could see little bits of skull on the ground in the soil after all these years.
Edit: Added spoiler tag to some disturbing content.
Thank you for making me read this in the morning. You could have asked me a question without that imagery.
We do not allow bigoted content on our platform. This is explicitly called out in many parts of our philosophy documentation.
I apologize. It wasn’t my intention to hurt people in any way. An attempt at communicating how different realities might be based on where you’re from. I’ve tried to add spoiler tags to it, though I don’t know how successful it was.
In a way I’m sorry I asked this question as well.
Thank you for apologizing, I promise I’ll be fine 💜
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I’m thinking for example of people who try to argue certain transphobic points of view, like claiming “there are two genders” or other thinly-veiled manifestations of bigotry. Imagine someone posting a Jordan Peterson video, for instance. It would only cause more harm than good to allow such things to stay up. It would push people away.
I think you’re actually being somewhat offensive by smearing people in marginalized groups with terms like “echo chamber” and “persecution complex.” That’s some really unfair loaded language you’re using there and really quite troubling that a moderator here is engaging in this type of campaign.
Absolutely agreed, we would be removing those. What you’re talking about is a space that’s intolerant of intolerant individuals. That is absolutely this space. But a safe space, a brave space, and a ‘sanitized’ space are all different concepts. Google can be of assistance for the first two if you need more context; the latter is defined in the piece we (admins and moderators, a diverse group consisting of several poc identities, men, women, nonbinary, lgbtq+, multiple theisms, and in general a high level of intersectionality) wrote.
Apologies if any of what I said was unclear. Echo chamber is not specific to marginalized identities and nor is persecution complex. These are specific kind of environments, and behaviors respectively. The nuances of this in relation to safe spaces are spelled out in the philosophy post, and I just attempted to distill a little of what isn’t fully touched upon or elucidated into a shorter form.
I’d like to address any concerns that you have, but I’m not sure what they are. Assuming my language is loaded without asking me questions about how I’m using my language has me hesitant and afraid to share more. I don’t want to upset you, but I’m struggling to understand your concerns, and when I tried to foresee them I both missed the mark and was chastised for it. If you have anything you’d like me to talk more about, could you help me understand the underlying concern you have here? What in the original post wasn’t explained well enough, or could use additional clarity?
I guess my primary concern is with language like “see a site where they don’t see unsavory comments at all” and even with the term “sanitized space” itself. It makes it seem like a platform free of hate speech isn’t a worthy or desirable goal.
Moreover, other comments in this thread seem to suggest that there in fact have been harmful comments not removed, which to me is indefensible.
If you see offending content, it should be removed. That is literally one’s primary duty as a moderator. I’m not saying every offender should be banned without recourse, but step one is content removal.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of what’s happening or what is explained in the philosophy post. In fact, we explicitly state that sanitized spaces are both desirable and needed in the world, but that’s not what we’re trying to accomplish here. The relevant quote is about 1/3rd of the way down, and copied here for posterity
We don’t spend a lot of time talking about the why, but that’s also explained in a footnote. Unfortunately we are busy running this website and moderating the content, which is a LOT of work - there’s often hundreds or thousands of messages a day in the moderator channels discussing what content should be left up and what should be taken down. There isn’t a ton of time to spend on posts like this one, which I made sure we prioritized, so that people could have better transparency into everything happening behind the scenes.
To be clear, nearly all harmful material is removed. This post was about the stuff that falls into a gray area, which we tried to do our best to explain. If you have specific examples of speech that you take issue with and are looking for more detail into why it remained up, feel free to reach out with tangible examples and we can do our best to explain how we arrived at a consensus on whether to leave it up or take it down. Most of the cases where content isn’t removed involve individuals who are learning and some of these examples actually result in the original poster editing their post and explaining that they learned something tangible that day and apologize for causing issues.
This is also addressed in the post - what is offensive to one user isn’t necessarily offensive to another user, and this is explaining how we do our best to accommodate that. Earlier this week there was an individual who had been traumatized by men who was offended by the very presence of cis men on this instance. If we were to accommodate this individual, we’d have to remove all cis men from the instance. That action would be offensive in and of itself to every cis man on the instance. There’s no way to accommodate both sides of this issue and that’s what the spirit of this post is about.
Okay, I think I understand better now. The post just sounded a lot like typical moderation on another site I used to visit, where it was a huge problem with literal hate speech left up in the name of “free speech.”
To answer your question from before: Maybe you could provide these tangible examples. It might make it clearer to people like me who have read so many things like this that ended up with us being subject to slurs, threats, or worse. Again, I have not seen this here yet.
I wasn’t trying to be difficult, just trying to determine if this is in fact a good place for me. Thank you for your time and explanation.
I understand being guarded against this. I have several queer identities, one of which is being trans, meaning that I’m often the target of hate speech. I have no desire to see this on this platform, and the easiest way to explain our space is to say that we are a safe space (this is itemized in another philosophy post), but we are not a sanitized space. I’m not sure how best to collect “best of community” type posts, or show examples of what gets left up, but I think you’re not the only person that this would benefit, so I’d love for them to get collected and shown off at some point.
This post was mainly to quickly address issues like the one I highlighted above, which are tricky to navigate. This post was to help users understand when they do come across content like this (which is awesomely quite rare) why it may have been left up. We of course always encourage you to report content if you are unsure, but we don’t always have time to explain everything and this is our attempt at a compromise where we explain the ideals as an attempt to gain a little bit of trust.