Again IANAL, but the legal notice does not look airtight, at least to me at a <1 minute glance. e.g. it points to the GDPR for usage by children, somehow defining those as age 16? That’s an EU provision, and in the USA “children” is generally considered to be up to age 18. So I very much get the sense that the admins of DO are very much not wanting to push the legal boundaries of anything at all - which is what they both literally said as well in the discussion (which jgrim unlocked btw, if you wanted to respond to him).

So then with that in mind, I am not sure what language would be “necessary”, beyond what they have already said? Also yours was very much a hypothetical and delivered entirely in good faith so I would have thought it would be fine? The worry I suppose would lie in someone else perhaps saying identical words, but NOT be delivering in good faith. At which point by the rules of the instance it would need to be removed. I do agree that in an ideal world it could be clarified - you can tell from my writing style that I am very much a detail-oriented person:-) - but on the other hand, in such matters it always seems to be the case that the more that is written, the more that people will hyper-focus on the boundary conditions and ignore the spirit of what was written?

“discovery, fun, & sharing” is fairly general, but if someone gets their comments or post removed b/c they said that murder is good, will they really be all that shocked? Especially keeping in mind that said person is extremely likely to have felt whatever they feel regardless of what rule had been cited or why. And like, rule #2 is literally “Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.” - but would a healthcare CEO feel comfortable here? That’s the thing about being liberal, when people say that EVERYONE should feel comfortable, that truly does mean EVERYONE - the exception (requiring intolerance to such) being those who break the rules (i.e. who are themselves intolerant of such). I may not like someone’s creed, gender, race, able-bodiedness, sexual preference, or nationality (+ in this case choice of career path), but I am bound to at least act in a tolerant manner of them regardless.

Mind you, I feel like it is obvious (though perhaps it is not) that we can say that when a CEO does actions that lead to the deaths of people, that such actions are not okay? And should be punishable in the usual way, as in via a court of law where he is entitled to a jury of his peers, the same as every other citizen would be? “Innocent until proven guilty (beyond a shadow of a doubt)” But that is so extremely obvious that why would anyone even bother saying that? I guess emotional venting? But while “he (the CEO) should himself be on trial for murder!” seems totally fine to me, as your phrasing implied “he should receive vigilante justice!” is not, b/c the former is obvious (if less so that he would actually receive that penalty) whereas the latter is flagrantly illegal, by design. Yeah it’s a dance isn’t it, but the former doesn’t land anyone in jail whereas the latter literally might, plus as a matter of conscience I would not want to encourage thoughts that could eventually lead to such a horrific outcome, as in the breakdown of all law & order in the USA society where anyone could be gunned down at any time for any reason, just b/c the shooter felt that they had no legal recourses to vent their frustrations, or more likely that they did but that they did not want to bother going through the arduous process of proving guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt in an expensive legal courtroom (or arbitration) setting.

To help handle depressing topics it would indeed help to have another mod - fortunately we now have 3 additional ones, and AP even has a DO account, though refuses to be the top (and yet we would need a top mod with a DO account as we said earlier?). I wouldn’t mind handing over “ownership” to m_f, although at this point with clarification from the admins that the most extreme topics as you were asking about aren’t allowable in any case - at least, not on DO (it would have to go to some other instance if you wanted such, like midwest.social or perhaps something in the EU would work better for that?) - I am also convinced that I won’t be hindering any conversations that would be helpful to have, like non-light-hearted but otherwise non-DO-rule-violating ones. So I removed that from the sidebar text, and am happy to help out that other team, if they’ll help pick up especially that kind of slack. We’ll shuffle the order if need be, but as that’s a pain and only AP has a DO account so far, I don’t even see the need to bother with that. Or if m_f wants to migrate the community elsewhere I’m supportive of that too, but that’s an ongoing conversation nowhere near finalized yet.

Anyway, you can respond now to the post in Discuss, if you want to suggest any particular language for jgrims to use? Though despite how the USA allows “free speech”, DO itself is limiting that to be for “discovery, fun, & sharing” and to “Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.”, which seems to me (naively, not having researched this topic in the slightest!:-P) to be even more narrow than legal notices about “hate speech”?