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.
But if this policy goes into effect. You are saying it’s all subjective and thus the hate speech policy only applies if you or a server level admin say it’s hate speech. You’re asking moderators not to moderate if there’s any question about whether it is OK or not. And a large number of people now believe it’s OK which is why X and Meta have these policies, so to me and likely to many moderators here, you’re saying exactly as Meta just said, don’t moderate these things as hate speech. Remember, Meta also still has an anti-hate speech policy, it’s just that these subjects are no longer considered hate speech by enough of their users that they don’t allow moderation of it. You’re asking for the exact same thing, you just haven’t called out the specifics, you’re leaving it “subjective”. And with moderation, abstaining from action is the exact same as acceptance.
Please do ban anyone who trolls with the “mental illness” thing. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear.
But what about black people should be slaves or women should be household objects or Autism needs to be “cured”, or all of the other hate speech that some people think is not hate speech? I hope that you’ll clarify the rules because the post here left it open for interpretation and specifically made it policy that anything “subjective” to any person’s point of view shouldn’t be moderated. Free speech isnt free if it’s not regulated. If people are free to say I’m not human because I’m LGBTQ+, autistic, or any other trait that is considered “bad” by some group of people, then I’m not free to exist, much less speak.
If this isn’t clear, I’m not sure how else to make it clear. I’ll be moving along and dragging my groups with me, but for those remaining, I hope you’ll reconsider trying to ban objective moderation and create very specific categories of what can be moderated. But that’s a huge undertaking.
It’s generally better to come from the other side. Give a set of things that should NOT be moderated on top of the things that MUST be moderated (like the concept of “protected classes” in many anti-discrimination laws) and as exceptions come up, add them to the NOT moderated list.
Your way is stating everything is in the NOT moderated as it’s all subjective to someone and thus the hate speech policy is void unless all parties including the ones saying it agree that it’s hate speech (which they never will). This is backwards and will create a ton of hate speech to get through and thus a ton of true free-speech to be lost from the minorities they attack. This is how it has worked throughout history. It’s not a new concept, so I’m unsure how else to say it to convince you.
It states nothing like that. You’re filling in the blanks with things you want to be angry about.
I’m filling in the blanks with the logical conclusion based on the direction of social media in general since there are blanks and this policy discourages moderators from moderating when there are blanks. And moderators trying to not get banned will often do the same.
Lack of specific directions for a scenario with conflicting, subjective options, a limited leadership empowered to make decisions so the lower levels can’t all have direct access, and the threat of serious consequences for doing it wrong is how fascism thrives through inaction against it. Same goes for regulatory systems and thus is likely to happen in a moderation system. This is just sociology.
Anyway, I’ll be moving my main profiles and communities for now and check in at a later date to see how the policy develops. Hope you’ll consider the needs of the communities over the needs of the extremists.