Lemmy.World ToS and the murder of the UHC CEO
Lemmy.World ToS and the murder of the UHC CEO
Hello World,
following feedback we have received in the last few days, both from users and moderators, we are making some changes to clarify our ToS.
Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance. We are not located in US, which means different laws apply. As written in our ToS, we're primarily subject to Dutch, Finnish and German laws. Additionally, it is our discretion to further limit discussion that we don't consider tolerable. There are plenty other websites out there hosted in US and promoting free speech on their platform. You should be aware that even free speech in US does not cover true threats of violence.
Having said that, we have seen a lot of comments removed referring to our ToS, which were not explicitly intended to be covered by our ToS. After discussion with some of our moderators we have determined there to be both an issue with the ambiguity of our ToS to some extent, but also lack of clarity on what we expect from our moderators.
We want to clarify that, when moderators believe certain parts of our ToS do not appropriately cover a specific situation, they are welcome to bring these issues up with our admin team for review, escalating the issue without taking action themselves when in doubt. We also allow for moderator discretion in a lot of cases, as we generally don't review each individual report or moderator action unless they're specifically brought to admin attention. This also means that content that may be permitted by ToS can at the same time be violating community rules and therefore result in moderator action. We have added a new section to our ToS to clarify what we expect from moderators.
We are generally aiming to avoid content organizing, glorifying or suggesting to harm people or animals, but we are limiting the scope of our ToS to build the minimum framework inside which we all can have discussions, leaving a broader area for moderators to decide what is and isn't allowed in the communities they oversee. We trust the moderators judgement and in cases where we see a gross disagreement between moderatos and admins' criteria we can have a conversation and reach an agreement, as in many cases the decision is case-specific and context matters.
We have previously asked moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification when this was suggested in context of murder or other violent crimes. Following a discussion in our team we want to clarify that we are no longer requesting moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification in the context of violent crimes when the crime in question already happened. We will still consider suggestions of jury nullification for crimes that have not (yet) happened as advocation for violence, which is violating our terms of service.
As always, if you stumble across content that appears to be violating our site or community rules, please use Lemmys report functionality. Especially when threads are very active, moderators will not be able to go through every single comment for review. Reporting content and providing accurate reasons for reports will help moderators deal with problematic content in a reasonable amount of time.
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A very weak response, and several days late. Not impressed.
It's their computers, their network storage, their internet hosting costs - they can do as they please. So too can you, e.g. move elsewhere, or even spin up your own instance. This shit gets expensive though, and people have irl jobs as well - this is VOLUNTEER efforts on their part!?!?
Be the change that you want to see in the world. And then watch as others are similarly not impressed.
Fwiw, I for one am impressed though, at the speed with which they got all of this done. I am not advocating that people use Lemmy.World - in fact I think they should not, but for other reasons of decentralization rather than this - but I do appreciate their efforts on behalf of keeping the entire Fediverse alive and going (as opposed to e.g. the police being able to shut the server down, which may or may not have happened but anyway it's a legit fear that they were reacting against imho), which enriches us all.
What would you prefer then?
A response when the topic was first blowing up and something that either better justifies the mods' actions or justifies actions taken to address mods.
Well as for the first part, I suspect the admin(s) had to talk to each other and the mods first? They probably don't all have bat-signal and instead had to sent emails or messages around and wait for replies, takes a few days? I mean this shooting happened five days ago, not even a week. Would you pay for the 24/7 social media marketing team on call to handle such cases in 1-3 hours like for some larger companies? I doubt it, no?
Man someone doesn't like this vein of discussion.
Anyway, I don't know what the admin staffing looks like, or what availability they have. I do think when there's multiple posts from other instances specifically criticizing lemmy.world (including posts detailing post removal etc.) hitting the top of the feed, that 3 days of silence isn't a good look.