There will be a new announcement soon to clarify.
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.
@Serinus@lemmy.world this post seems relevant as to what people are afraid of. I am glad that the admin team is taking time to reword this policy to make more clear what is meant:-).
Is this a piefed thing I’m too Lemmy to understand?
Here is the link to the post from Lemmy.World directly:-)
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say or why. I’m generally not clicking random youtube videos.
Hello,
Any idea when the new announcement will be made?
We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
So basically you’re saying people should be allowed to post blatant false information and everybody should try their best to tell them they’re wrong rather than doing the sensible thing of stopping false information spreading in the first place.
People who would post that stuff would never argue with good intentions and would often argue in bad faith. What you’re suggesting trolling should be allowed, moderators and community members need to waste their time engaging with controversial content nobody wants to see, and threads will have even more people fighting in them. Who decides when wrong info and propaganda posts are allowed to be removed? LW admins? You won’t be able to keep up and are guaranteed to incite distrust in your community either way.
I’m with reducing echo chambers and taking action on bad moderators that abuse their positions, but making the blanket statement that basically translates to “flat earthers are now welcome here whether you like it or not, get ready to see posts unironically arguing about why flat earth is right in your feed” surely can ring some bells on why this is a bad idea.
This is like the third time LW tried to be front-and-center in deciding how conversations should happen on Lemmy. You are the most popular Lemmy instance and most content is on your instance. This isn’t an experimental safe space instance to dictate how social media should work. Please understand that any weirdly aggressive stances you take affects everyone.
Elon, Zuckerberg, whatever weirdos run Lemmy.world. The toadies are all lining up for Trump’s new world order, huh? Way to highlight the potential weak points of the fediverse when a server’s admins decide to jump on the big tech trend of forcing mods and users to accept disinformation cluttering their feed as if it’s equal to facts so long as it’s written politely. At least we know who’s the asshole at those companies. You sycophants are faceless.
This is my last post on this username. And I’ll never subscribe to another Lemmy.world community again. This server can no longer be trusted. At this point you people might as well just make spez an admin. Your administrative goals are in sync. Even your jargon like “respectful dissent™” is just a repackaging of Reddit’s “valuable discussion™“ excuse for allowing disinformation on their platform.
Having left Lemmy world myself, the communities aren’t at fault. Hopefully people will find a better instance. There are quite a few out there.
Wouldn’t this also do the opposite? prevent a sub like the_donald or lemmygrad from just banning everyone they don’t like? Did this place have professional fact checkers before?
You can ban the_donald for attacks on people or groups, same for lemmygrad. Having flat earthers in every community is a parallel matter.
Straight up bullshit and a completely half-baked, ill-considered, ill-conceived idea. Completely disconnected from reality.
Do these “flat earth” opinions that we’re meant to treat with unearned respect include bigoted opinions? Because this is dangerously close to being a “don’t sass the nazis” policy.
No. The ToS still applies.
then do something about @max55@lemm.ee
Please do not enshittify please do not enshittify please do not enshittify… Oh well too late
Just move to a better instance lol, wasn’t that the entire point of coming here? Lemmy.zip and Lemm.ee have been great.
Lemmy.zip is truly awesome
What a real Steve Huffman post. Really impressive.
I appreciate everything the .world admins do. As a mod of a community here, I also agree with the general concept of letting the community downvote posts that aren’t actually harmful in terms of hate/abuse. That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement: what events precipitated this policy change, what are going to be permitted kinds of content, and what is not allowed. This post is just a kind of wandering philosophy right now.
That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement:
Indeed. I know what they mean and why they arrived at this decision, and I agree with it, but I got bored half-way through.
Is there some context that could help clarify what’s led to this change?
Similarly, could you provide clearer examples, and how this is intended to fit into the existing Terms of Service/Rules? Despite the length of the post, the way in which it’s written leaves this change too ambiguous to be easily understood, which I think is evident both from the voting and commenting patterns.
In my opinion, my questions should have already been addressed in the post, and I think may have helped reception of this change (supposing at minimum it’s to curtail some abusive moderation practices).
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Let’s say every community allows one lunatic post. It’s downvoted to hell and thoroughly refuted in the comments.
Every time someone tries to say the same thing again under a different post, the comment gets a reply “[lunatic opinion] was refuted under [lunatic post link] - you may comment there” and then the stray lunatic comment is removed. Only the reply stays to inform other lunatics. Other comments saying the same lunatic opinion again are removed, because the canonical reply linking the canonical lunatic post is already in the comments. All discussion about the lunatic opinion will be contained under the canonical lunatic post.
Would this work?
If that would work they wouldn’t have those opinions to begin with, they always think they have a unique smarter interpretation of the truth and facts and largely enjoy arguing about their alternative facts so they can feel superior more than they care about the shape of the earth for how much it’ll affect their lives
Happy i migrated off of lemmy.world some months ago with the piracy mess.
Same here. While I appreciate the work LW sysadmins do, this kind of decision just seems questionable
Classic .world admins showing their constant incompetence
nice
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Well, hopefully this will finally get saner instances to deferate .world as the disinformation hub it’s now openly admitting to intentionally be (and has always been, see the misinformation bot debacle for a previous example), so that’s good for lemmy as a whole, I suppose, in the long term (once .world communities have moved to other instances).
“The moon is upside down in Australia”
