A thing we (#medium) need to figure out is in what ways, if any, we need to adjust our existing moderation policy to fit in. I don't want to be defederated unnecessarily but it's hard to even define unnecessary.
I think our existing policies are pretty close to mainstream policies, i.e. mastodon.social
Also, our policies pre-date me joining the company and so I have my own personal learning curve here.
For example, looking at mastodon.social and starting at the top.
We do have a healthy sex & erotica community.
If we include them on me.dm, then one rule we could add is that they need to cw their posts?
Ok, we're adults. We know how to scroll past that if, for example, we are at work.
This, btw, is our current Rules as applied to Medium.com.
https://policy.medium.com/medium-rules-30e5502c4eb4
And this addendum for controversial, suspect and extreme content is pretty illuminating.
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018182453-Controversial-Suspect-and-Extreme-Content
Remember, I'm on a learning curve too. So if someone complains directly to me about how these rules have been enforced against them, I generally do look into it.
The people I've looked into have fallen into two camps:
A) Swear that hating on trans people is done out of love.
B) Are anti vax and citing a news story on the website of their local TV news channel as conclusive evidence.
I'm sure we apply the other rules on a day to day basis, but I don't end up hearing about them.
More on figuring out moderation changes between medium.com and me.dm...
Yes to content warning on graphic and adult topics. We should make that a server rule because our main thing will be onboarding mastodon newbies. So the visibility of a rule will help teach a core concept here.
But what about more edge case warnings? Someone suggested on images of food out of sensitivity to people with eating disorders.
That's definitely outside of the level of sensitivity that we currently ask for on Medium.com.
It brings up two questions. One is whether this is a mainstream level of CW? Do most servers put CW on this?
Then two, there must be many other sensitive topics of similar severity and occurrence. What are they? What about lesser sensitivities?
Some of those questions read naive to me because in a lot of ways I am naive.
I think where they head though is to what degree are we responsible for what we put out into the fediverse and to what degree are we responsible for advertising who we are so that some parts of the fediverse can block what we put out?
I do get that being blocked at an instance level and at a user level is a feature here.
We should be blocked by people that don't want to see commercially run instances, by people that don't want to read self promoters (that is what defines the difference between an author and a diarist), etc.
But more than medium.com, a bad actor on me.dm has the potential to bring bad consequences to the other people on me.dm. That cooperative nature begs for tighter moderation.
Placeholder right now based on feedback is to say:
Required CW for adult and violent content. Recommended for trauma, addiction and phobia triggers.
Now another one someone brought up to me is the pro-Russia side of the Ukraine war. Literally they said we should ban it.
The current state of Medium.com is that the Ukraine side is very well represented and often trending. But I'm sure the Russian side exists.
I could imagine this coming up in other harder to police ways too. For example, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the One China concept is fairly mainstream in China.
Thoughts?
@coachtony I've found it interesting and valuable to read your public discussions and thinking on moderation policies for the #fediverse, so I wrote a quick report on it here, so that other people can also see it:
Tony Stubblebine
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Coach Pāṇini ®
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