cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24135976
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 [email protected] 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.
When I saw the original announcement from LW admins, I was extremely surprised find that I, with some reservations, agreed with it.
Lemmy definitely has a problem with single-viewpoint moderated communities. I am banned from some anarchism communities because I came in and did exactly what Serinus described, gave a point of view that poked a hole in the only officially allowed narrative, and I definitely have observed particularly on lemmy.world moderators who are very unapologetic about banning people who try to poke a hole in the only allowed viewpoint. I don’t think anyone on a social network should be in the business of policing the allowed points of view. You can kick out the agreed-to-be-obnoxious stuff, and there’s going to be a big grey area there, but once you’ve come out with it that you want to allow side 1 but not side 2, in my opinion you shouldn’t be a moderator anymore.
Of course, announcing the policy and implementing it are two very different things. Implementing it perfectly will be impossible. Also, there are people who use “poking a hole in the only allowed viewpoint” as their excuse for being an absolute knobhead, never shutting up, and being hostile and disingenuous. (Depending on who you ask, I might be one of them.) I’m a little bit suspicious of how well lemmy.world is going to implement this extremely-difficult-to-implement policy change. I was sort of expecting it to be some kind of red herring which was forbidding moderators from dealing with trolls or propagandists when they found them, though. It still might be that in practice, of course.
But overall, I was more than a little surprised when I read a LW moderation policy announcement and found it describing a genuine problem and a pretty credible attempt at a solution. I don’t even know if the communities I was thinking of while reading it are still around and still doing their thing, but if they are, it’s a problem.
You sound like a troll who went to the anarchism community for the purpose of starting an argument. “Debate me bro” isn’t a personality that should need to be supported by topic-focused communities.
By “troll” you mean someone who you disagree with?
I don’t even know what his belief or the prevailing narrative of the community is. He sounds like a troll because what he described is trolling. He “came in”, implying it was his first or nearly first post, and immediately wanted to “poke a hole in the narrative”. That’s classic trolling.
Sincerely expressing your actual viewpoint, which disagrees with the community’s consensus viewpoint, is classic trolling? And then explaining why and asking questions about what people mean in their disagreements with you? You gotta update the urban dictionary and all, they’ve got it all wrong.
I’m a little hesitant to restart the drama, but if you’re curious, here’s what happened:
https://slrpnk.net/post/14823401
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30753583/14479446
You can draw your conclusions about whether or not I’m a troll. I will take no questions and reply to no comments attempting to restart the debate. I do think it’s semi-on-topic to discuss one specific instance of when this type of “you’re not allowed to moderate that way” policy might have been a good thing, but an extensive argument about whether I should have been allowed to say those things in that specific instance is not.
I’m also fascinated to discover that the person who’s been swearing to me recently that Wikipedia is evil, NATO is evil, Russia doesn’t care about Greenland and Trump’s desire to invade them is no big deal… was way, way back at the time when this happened, out stumping for the Green Party in the anarchism community and being protected by the mods while doing so. That is fascinating.
Every troll thinks they have a justification for it. They’re fighting the good fight and “poking holes” in groupthink. Was that or was it not one of your first posts in the community? And were you or were you not going in to argue?
You literally have comments in the mod-complaint post about how you think anarchism is fundamentally flawed. You didn’t go in there to understand anarchism or debate with fellow anarchists about what anarchism should be, you went in to argue for a political goal.
It doesn’t matter if you were doing it for the right reasons. It also doesn’t really matter if the mod was also posting for the wrong reasons. The pattern of going into a community to immediately debate them is classic trolling behavior. The various people who responded to you in the mod-complaint community told you all these things.
I was really trying not to get drawn into this. Maybe I am not strong enough.
I said I thought it had some fatal flaws. Then, two different people came out to tell me I was ignorant about anarchism. I allowed as how maybe I was, and asked them what I should read to learn more. Then I read it. Then I got back to them to say I liked it a lot, and on reflection made it clear that I was talking about a particular breed of faux anarchism, and not anything to do with the philosophy I was reading about in Kropotkin.
You know, like trolls do.
The exchange is here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30753583/14477565
It’s honestly kind of hard to remember, in internet spaces, that most people are reasonable. It’s easy to misinterpret things or classify someone you’re talking to as some kind of “enemy” of one breed or another, but most people can work past it. I talked about it in that comments section. At a certain point I made a realization that almost everybody there, even among people who were telling me I was wrong, were pretty civil about it. They said what they said, I said what I said, and we sort of moved on our separate ways having had the exchange. All good.
Then there were a very small minority of accounts where it had to be personal. It’s not enough just to disagree and talk about it. Someone has to be “bad”, and someone has to “win.” People will start reaching for what the other person really meant to do, or how they really feel about things. It’s like they can’t let it resolve into anything positive; they have to “prove their point” and assign a bad belief or action to the enemy so they can succeed in their case that the other person is “bad.”
I think that second type of argumentation is actually a small minority. I think they’re just super loud and tend to dominate comments sections sometimes, because they trigger other people and trigger each other, and they never stop once they get started. Part of the reason I feel like defending myself here is that I do feel like it’s relevant to look back at that comments section as a whole, and see how overall productive it is. (It also doesn’t say what you think it says, although there is a minority that does think what you said, yes. Sort by top, read the top five comments, and you tell me what the consensus is.) The more that it is “You are trolling! You must shut up!”, the less light and the more heat the overall exchange of words is going to generate.
The one thing I will allow, is that maybe I have a type of sarcasm and instant-disagreement that makes it easy for something to spiral into more of an argument than it needs to be, or cause way more friction than needs to be there. You can see some of that in the comments section too. I’m not doing it for the sake of trolling. I am very sincerely explaining what it is that I think, and why, and I’m generally listening for the counter-explanation. If someone makes a point that I think has a fatal flaw I will sometimes point it out in, I guess, a very mean and talking-down type of way. That part I can see, yeah, if that’s what you’re talking about, maybe you are right that I should not do that.
No. That’s what is called a “discussion”. As opposite to a “echo chamber”.
Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of remote psychology?
In the World community, I am not shy about removing comments and banning users pushing outright propaganda, such that the Ukrainians are Nazis, Gaza is not undergoing a genocide and Chinas persecution of the Uyghurs is at best just a wacky misunderstanding and at worst Western propaganda against the wise, benevolent CCP.
But when I do that, I cite my sources.
Yeah. It makes a big difference what communities and what type of “poking holes in the narrative” comments they are talking about. It could be a way to crack down on fake leftist communities that will ban you for saying Biden has been raising working people’s wages for the last four years, or it could also be a way to force you to accept misinformation because banning it would be against “free speech.” I wish they had listed some specific examples.