2y ago

Moderation Philosophy - On Content Removal

docs.beehaw.org

On Content Removal

Hey all,

Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I'd learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it's run.

This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.

56 comments

What about misinformation?
Without downvotes it will slowly bubble up to the top because the only barrier is finding enough people gullable or ignorant (precisely, not demeaning) enough to believe it. Or if it's "pop culture misinformation", it rises to the top by virtue of it being popular misinformation.
Both of those are not ideal for quality conten, or fact based discussion and debate when vote counts exist. As more often than not more votes = more true to a layman.
We've seen this on any other platform that have "the only direction is up" mechanics, because the only direction is up.
Another risk is promoting misinformed communities, who find comfort in each other because their shared, incorrect, opinions of what should be fact based truths find common ground. I don't think those are the kinds of communities beehaw wants. Thankfully community creation is heavily managed, which may mitigation or remove such risks entirely.
What I'm getting at is what will the stance be here? If beehaw starts fostering anti-intellectualism, will that be allowed to grow and fester? It's an insidious kind of toxicity that appears benign, till it's not.
To be clear I'm not saying these things exist or will exist on beehaw in a significant capacity. I am stating a theoretical based on the truth that there is always a subset of your population that are misinformed and will believe and spread misinformation, and some of that subset will defend those views vehemently and illogically.
I would hate to see that grow in a place that appears to have all the quality characteristics I have been looking for in a community.
The lowest common denominator of social media will always push to normalize all other forms and communities. It's like a social osmosis. Most communities on places like Reddit failed to combat and avoid such osmosis. Will beehaw avoid such osmosis over time?
- Most misinformation is poorly veiled hate speech and as of such it would be removed. Down votes don't change how visible it is, or how much it's spread. You deal with misinformation by removing it and banning repeat offenders/spreaders.
Does not check out, anyway. This is most definitely a "sanitized space". Just for liberals, not leftists. Reddit 2.0. https://beehaw.org/comment/606420
- This comment doesn't seem to be in good faith. Can you elaborate?
  
  It's in good faith. Follow the link. Check that community's modlog if the big tree of removed comments isn't sufficient.
  TL;DR - OC shit on people who don't vote for Democrats. I replied saying the current state of affairs is thanks to people like them who vote for mainstream parties, with the same kind of snark they used against the implied target of anyone who doesn't vote or votes third-party. The mod removal based on "needlessly antagonistic" started with me—the leftist—and left alone the reactionary liberal who blamed leftists and working-class voters for the state of U.S. politics. Removing whole conversation trees for the sake of people who want to defend the honor of Democrats looks an awful lot like a liberal "sanitized space", I'd say.
Question:
“It’s ok to punch a Nazi” or “It’s ok to execute a pedo” content acceptable? and tangentially related Publishing “Mugshots of criminals” fetishism posts, in the moderation philosophy here?
My personal ethos of moderation is to recognize in written policy that we have these biases to have “they/them” which can backdoor exceptions content moderation standards. The backdoor is that if someone is sufficiently and clearly “bad” for the majority of the community then it becomes ok to wish harm on or dehumanize someone. In my opinion shouldn’t entertain these sorts of post because of the harm/damage done if the mob is wrong, or harm to ourselves by indulging in this sort of pornography of moral certainty. Because as long as a broader culture finds certain categories of people are ok to dehumanize, then there’s no (real) objective check upon what is acceptable based on the desire of that majority, even in a community like beehaw.org.
A tangible legal example which I think provides an example of my personal philosophy is how Human dignity is enshrined in the first article of the German Basic Law – which is the German Constitution. Article 1 reads:
Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.
The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.
The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive and the judiciary as directly applicable law.
My two cents here is that if a social media policy is to succeed, it needs something akin to this in it’s “constitution”, because to not have it opens too much moral relativism by bad-faith actors unrestrained and unconcerned by cultural norms to test and push the limits of what they can get away with by dehumanizing their enemies off-platform. ( IE: imagine Pizzagate, and it’s ultimate effect on Beehaw if it’s premise was accepted by the broader community. )
I saw a very popular post on Beehaw yesterday that clearly fit this pattern, and it seems like content designed to test the relative limits of the moderation policy of philosophy of places like Beehaw.>___--
- Ideally, we don't want people dehumanizing others, ever. Realistically, if someone is intolerant to you, we're not going to tone police you for responding in kind. There's nuance in there we touched on a little with this post, but it's hard to itemize every possible human behavior.
  If you see anything on Beehaw that makes you think twice about whether it should be up, please report it.
  
  I read this as modspeak for “ideally, those posts wouldn’t be up, but because it’s usually intolerant people we’ll file the calls for violence towards these groups as just minority frustration that shouldn’t be tone policed.” Am I correct in my interpretation?
  There’s annoying insults and there’s normalizing violence and dehumanization of the Other. I’m going to be disgusted with myself if I ever dehumanize even the worst person out of frustration. Have to remember that no, they’ve not monsters, they’ve made a series of bad choices that any of us could have chosen to make, we could all be “monsters” if we choose wrong enough. They’re not some odd other species of being that we could never ever fall into being.
  Kick them off the platform, figure out how to make acts of bigotry illegal, but I don’t believe in violence unless it’s protecting yourself or others. And what I see looks much less like a preemptive strike to protect yourself/others and more like “whee, acceptable target, it’s punching time baby!”
- You're more than welcome to share your opinion. The issue I've found is that what's considered harmful by different people varies quite a bit. Safe spaces online seem to run into a frequent problem of brooding persecution complexes which leads to having to self censor around specific individuals. This can lead to a very specific kind of bullying and in rare cases a hijacking of these spaces. More importantly for our purposes, it's the assumption of bad faith that's not compatible with what we're trying to accomplish here- these spaces often become echo chambers for the most marginalized identities because no one is perfectly educated and omnipotent and any discomfort is viewed as problematic discussion and removed even in cases when it is tolerant (simply due to the perceived discomfort from having ones views challenged). They're also fundamentally incompatible with intersectionality in a variety of ways, but perhaps most notably a person of privilege may be chastised for not recognizing their privilege or being educated and the person of privilege can use the idea of a safe space to censor a more marginalized individual on the grounds that it made them upset.

56 comments