On Content Removal
docs.beehaw.org
On Content Removal # Harmful, bigoted, or generally distasteful content isn’t as frequent on our site as it is elsewhere, but these do still appear enough that we sometimes get questions about why certain comments are left up. This post is meant to help you understand a bit about how we moderate. As stated in our sidebar and in tons of other places on our site, Beehaw aspires to be(e) a safe, friendly, and diverse place.

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.

  • Link.wav [he/him]@beehaw.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgOPM
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.