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.
But you did construct a strawman which I addressed. Anecdotally the bit about pets for vegans being “companions” came directly from the person who posted the initial thread calling out rookie (which by the way, rookie seems like kinda of a jerk and probably shouldn’t be making decisions like these).
An animal is incapable of providing any consent, they are incapable of understanding the ethical choices a vegan may make, or the reasons behind it. The fact that instead of many viable alternatives, they selfishly choosing to keep an animal that would need to have those choices made for them is an ethical problem in their own philosophy.
These vegans choose to keep a cute kitty or puppy, even old and sick kitties and puppies are cute and rewarding, for selfish reasons. If you truly need to keep an animal, keep a vegan pet. Then you don’t need to participate in the food system, and a non-vegan pet owner can provide for the animal best suited to their lifestyle.
Like there is an understanding that engaging in the meat industry, even on the fringes, perpetuates that industry hurting animals. The same is true for pets, even good pet owners engage and support a system where by animals are exploited and hurt, even if it’s not THEIR animal. I don’t see why this is so hard, honestly.
I called it a straw man because neither of us are vegans and creating an argument between ourselves about a hypothetical vegan’s ethics seems about as productive as sniffing our own farts.
That’s not the definition of a strawman. We can discuss this philosophy from outside of it. That’s a thing that’s ok to do!