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.
What? You have just been given two example paragraphs that create a legal responsibility for the German executive to shut down violent speech. Yes, only certain kinds of violent speech as you put it in the sibling thread, but that still falsifies this statement.
It’s not a law against violent speech. It’s only a rule against certain kinds of violent speech. Calling it a law against violent speech is misleading.
Look if you want to apply an overly broad definition of violent speech to score some weird semantic point, be my guest. But the original point upthread was that incitement to violence specifically, not “violent speech” in general, is outlawed in many countries, among them those that are hosting the .world instance. And that point is very much correct.
Which is all beside my original point, which was that the §130 StGB does not work like you boldly claimed it does.
Incitement to violence isn’t outlawed in any country. As we’ve seen, Germany only outlaws incitement to certain forms of violence. Other forms of violence are okay.
Again if you want to see it like that, fine. Doesn’t change the fact that people from these countries mean something different than you when they say inciting violence is outlawed. They are obviously referring to their specific laws, that use that specific language, in this case verbatim. The “oh but there are conditionals in that law” bit you are doing here isn’t the gotcha you seem to think it is. We are aware of that. And it’s not relevant to the original question of there being potential legal consequences for the people hosting the lemmy world instance. So what is even your point?