Hey all,
In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.
We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we’ve done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.
ToS Additions
That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.
Regarding misinformation, we’ve tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:
- Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
- We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
- When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
- Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
- Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
- Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.
We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.
We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.
By-laws Addition
We’ve also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.
This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we’ve created as a result of what has happened over the last week.
Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.
https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation
https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT:
We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.
EDIT 2 (2024-08-31):
We’ve posted a response, sorry for the delay.
👉 https://lemmy.world/post/19264848 👈
This is so dumb of course it’s a controversy about veganism. It’s so obvious that no imminent harm is coming from a community literally founded on the idea of reducing suffering. Probably switching instances sometimes soon
I love the strong emotional takes on what is animal abuse from all the meat eaters in here.
My goodness.
This is a bit learning the wrong lesson from what happened, isn’t it? The problem is admin overreach. There was some disagreement on a sub, no big deal. I don’t even care what it’s about, I have no opinion on it. But now this admin comes in like Eric Cartman “Respect mah authoritah!”. What am I supposed to make of that? Nobody was advocating animal abuse. I worry about admins who can’t just let something go, who can’t handle disagreement, like a cop always looking to escalate.
So thanks for the rules clarification, I guess, but what about:
- won’t this general guideline of ‘do no harm’ stifle discussion in case it isn’t clear which is the harmful position? For example covid
- is there a process in place when an admin does something in the heat of the moment, that the admin team can let them cool off for a bit?
- is removing mods going to be the norm?
- will there be more rules when another admin disagrees with a mod?
- why was this escalated like this? Don’t you think removing mod status is an overreaction (procedure wise)?
- does the ‘anti animal abuse’ statute apply to animal consumption and animal products? Vegan community has a point there
- what about rooki?
All in all, please don’t kill this instance by telling people what to think. There is healthy discussion and people don’t always have to agree. That doesn’t make me a ‘free speech absolutist’. I think removing admin privileges was quite out of bounds. Again, nobody was advocating animal abuse at all.
Mods and admins are here to keep discussion healthy, not impose their views on everyone else, right? So don’t! And don’t cover for others who do!
I didn’t consider admins any more qualified in parsing medical journals than mods are. I’ve got letters behind my name and am not supremely confident in that. That said, anything like a pro-ana community should be quickly purged.
I’ve got no idea about the context of the vegan drama though.
I am also interested in learning more about vegan drama
We’ll be posting a response to that in the next 24-48 hours, just finishing reviewing with the team.
Okay, specifically ignoring fediaf language because they’re a vet nutritionist with strong understanding of amino acid profiles I take it https://europeanpetfood.org/pet-food-facts/fact-sheets/nutrition/vegetarian-diets/
You keep posting this but it doesn’t back up your stance at all really
If you read what the vegans said, they pretty much echoed exactly what was on that site. “It’s hard, it’s likely not worth it, it requires cooperation with your vet, it’s possible.”
Reading the website, the message is pretty clearly “don’t fucking do this but if you do you have to go to a professional.”
And your cat will still feel like shit
Another fun note, the only sources for that article are over 20 years old with the exception of one in like 2013 titled:
‘Homemade dog food recipes can be a risky business, study finds’ (15 July 2013)
…yyyeeeeaaaahhhh
Uh huh. Here’s a literature review from a vegan.
“But what about this biased source!”
Nah…. I did skim it though, and the conclusion doesn’t actually provide anything solid other than “regular commercial food also bad”
Really my take away from all of this to is to stop buying cat food and start bringing home rodents and birds for them to chow down on.
Apparently that organization in your link has no issue advising its possible to have a healthy vegan/vegetarian diet. Guess they aren’t afraid people will kill their cats over it.
A panel of experts providing data driven advice, who knew.
I’ve got letters behind my name and am not supremely confident in that.
The more you know about academic research, the less you trust something just because it’s academic research.
Like, even after peer review, it’s not uncommon to find out the peers who first reviewed it missed something or just flat out don’t know what they were reading.
It’s like my stats professor said:
Anyone can produce stats to show what they want, the hard part is getting clean stats and interrupting them without any bias.
probably could have used a less loaded term than purging in relation to the pro-ana problem. lmao.
Well that would be pro-mia.
Technically, sure. But never let a technicality get in the way of a laugh.
Respectfully, I believe this incident serves more as a learning opportunity for the admin team rather than a reason to amend the rules.
This isn’t the first time I’ve observed Rooki acting inappropriately for an admin of a community. As an admin of a (admittedly much smaller) corner of the internet, I’ve learned to interact with users in a way that is polite and ensures they feel safe and heard. This is at least the second instance where I’ve seen Rooki respond emotionally and rather adversarially towards users, which has, in my view, undermined their credibility, to the point that I hope to avoid future interactions with them.
I understand that managing LW, one of the largest and general-purpose instances, especially with Lemmy’s still rather limited moderation tool, is challenging, and I appreciate the hard work all of you, including Rooki, put into maintaining it and making it run as smoothly as it does. However, this is not the first time I’ve seen Rooki behave uncivilly and antagonistically towards users. I’m not suggesting their removal, as I recognize the effort all admins, including Rooki, invest in LW, but I hope that this incident, also considering that it is not the first time something like this happens, will be used as a learning experience for them.
Just want to pitch in as an outsider that I too have experienced Rooki acting inappropriately and frankly immaturely. This has happened multiple times and it doesn’t give a good light to the rest of the Lemmy.world administration that they seemingly tolerate Rookis behaviour. It’s not up to me, especially as I am not even a lemmy.world user, but in my opinion Rooki should not be an admin following these incidents.
I’ve experienced Rooki acting inappropriately and immaturely as well. This recent incident is part of a pattern of behavior.
Thank you for being understanding about it 🙏
If you won’t admit Rookie made a mistake then it makes the whole site/team look bad.
Amending the rules puts out a message of: “we were right the whole time but you all just didnt understand it”.
Thank you for this comment.
I’ve interacted with Rooki a few times, most of them were nice, but I’ve also seen Rooki being indeed unicivilly and antagonistically towards users.
Let’s see what the update brings.
Peer reviewed scientific sources for people talking about health stuff? I can understand modding out “cyanide makes everything taste yummy” but at the other side, this isn’t Wikipedia. It’s a discussion forum and a lot of the topics will be about users’ own experiences and perceptions. If you want to run an academic journal instead, this isn’t the right way to do it.
The parent post also offers no answer at all about what decision was reached regarding the c/vegan intervention and whether such things should be allowed to happen again. Is there any update about that?
Please see above. Thanks.
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I don’t see anything there about what (if anything) was absorbed from the c/vegan incident. If you’re still working on it, that’s fine, just say so, there’s not a huge rush. The original post instead seems to imply that some kind of decision was reached, but leaves it up to user detective skills to figure out what it is. I’m an outsider to c/vegan, I’m not out for anyone’s blood, but I saw the intervention as a good faith error that should explicitly be called out as one. Any resulting policy change should be designed to prevent similar errors going forward. If you’ve decided something different from that (i.e. that the intervention was valid and that you want to see more of the same), that’s fine, it’s your server, but please tell us in so many words so we can react accordingly.
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The same thing about the academic journals. “Encouraged” is one thing but it would help enormously if you tell us what the admins are going to do if someone posts based on direct observations, personal experience, etc. It’s well established now that the COVID-19 virus is transmitted through the air and that N95 respirators and HEPA air purifiers are hugely valuable preventive measures, but it took a ridiculously long time for health authorities to admit that fact (Science, Nov 2022). Thus in many cases, community awareness about health issues is ahead of the authorities and journals. We should be encouraging that, not trying to shut it down. (See for example r/ZeroCovidCommunity on Reddit).
Anyway, I’ve been under the belief that the instance admins are basically server operators or assisting the server operators, dealing with system maintenance and software problems, or sometimes, serious and obvious policy breaches like threats of violence. They aren’t supposed to be medical experts or pet dieticians, so (following Reddit, since Lemmy positions itself as a Reddit alternative) they should generally defer to community mods about discussions within communities. Community mods, at least, are supposed to have some kind of understanding of the topics under discussion.
If you’re saying that server admins should be able to override community mod decisions about discussions regarding stuff like pet diets, then fine, but again, tell us so we know what kind of environment we’re in.
Just because someone mods a community doesn’t mean they inherently have more understanding of a topic.
Everyone can have an opinion but Google-fu is not real research. Citing random websites that only support your view isn’t either.
If someone doesn’t like the administration of an instance they can find another one they agree with or spin up their own. Don’t complain you don’t like how something was handled just because you didn’t get your way when you don’t contribute anything to the maintenance or upkeep of the service.
They asked for clarity on the admin position, thats all.
The original post leaves a lot open for interpretation. There are a group of people who would leave over this decision, and they are just asking to be able to make a decision more easily.
I will say since this post was the admin team saying they did nothing wrong, that the followup specifically about the vegan post in question will be full of similar nonsense.
That’s the glory of the fediverse. If you’re going to caterwaul over a service that you don’t pay for and expect you have any sort of right to how the instance run you are probably best served finding an instance that aligns with you.
at least for now I have a right to express my opinion here. I never demanded the instance change. I’m sure most would leave rather than fight an admin team over something so trivial, theres plenty of other instances out there.
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I’m normally a Vegan hater but this is a whole new level. 👀
Yeah few vegans would steep as low as feeding a cat a vegan diet. So not really sad to see the particular individuals gone.
It’s perfectly possible to give animals vegan diets.
Yes, until the poor animal dies due to malnutrition. Just get a vegan pet
More animals die because non vegans decide that allowing one pet to live is fine but then go and pay in the supermarket to have some freshly slaughtered other animal.
Please don’t be a hypocrite.
lol, who’s the hypocrite here? People who openly admit to eating meat and not having a problem with animals getting killed for that purpose? Or maybe it’s a group of people who vehemently insist on animal rights but they end up abusing their own pets. What a twisted logic, mate.
You are incorrect. A vegan diet for animals is perfectly possible. You are thinking of vegans giving them salad, but vegans are actually carefully selecting and giving them the nutrients they need.
As I said, don’t be a hypocrite. You know jack shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwD3dv24xGk You’re pathetic. I feel sorry for your animals.
Please don’t be a hypocrite.
It’s ridiculous that you don’t seem to realize how much this applies to your first post. 😂
Hahahah. This ignorance from the carnivores here truly knows no boundaries.
I’m not a carnivore? Been a vegetarian since for-fucking-ever, considering my age probably long since before most here knew about a word like “vegan” existing, on account of existance. Seriously, the fuck where did you take that from?
Don’t project, please.
Sure. It’s also possible to feed your animal a bad diet. Notable, and in this particular case and for the particular animal, the two happen to go together, when you feed a cat a vegan diet, that’s a bad diet for a cat.
Will the cat immediately keel over? No.
Will some cats live long lives and be pretty healthy? Sure.
But on average, will your cat live shorter and worse if you feed it a purely vegan diet, respectively if you let it roam outside, will it be a seriously ferocious hunter as it tries to re-balance it’s diet? Yes, definitely.
Whether that’s consciable to you, that’s something you have to decide. I would however hope that especially someone who subsides on a vegan diet for their human diet would be against animal cruelty, and hence just feed their cat a mostly meat-based diet (not entirely, that’s not healthy either).
I was under the impression that most criticism was directed not towards veganism per se but rather feeding a carnivore vegan diet which is animal abuse .
Obligate Carnivore: Cats, Dogs, and What it Really Means to be Vegan by Jed Gillen
Great read!
It isn’t animal abuse, it’s perfectly possible.
I just want to say thank you, and I appreciate the team’s efforts to be excellent to each other.
Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
Even in shitpost/meme communities?
I understand this intended mainly toward health and news communities but as a site rule there might need an exception for other type of communities.
Getting advice from a shitpost is probably not a good idea.
I know that. But if a site rule state that posts should be “true and helpful” it leave no room (legally) for shitposting communities. I assume this is not the idea, so the wordings should take that into account.
We’ll look into updating it. Thanks for the feedback ❤️
I mean there’s a mod that thinks trolling isn’t allowed in shit post comms.
Yeah this is quite obviously more intended to prevent someone taking advise to put glue into pizza sauce serious because it was posted in a serious tone in a serious context. Which shitpost stuff would never be.
This is why I left .world in the first place, and that was even when their censorship was understandable. That’s the beauty of Lemmy.
Can someone explain to me the context behind the incident that caused this? I am entirely out of the loop.
This thread. Apparently the dietary requirements of cats is a contentious topic.
edit: Sorry also this thread that I hadn’t seen before.
Ugh I can’t tell if this is trolling. I got a sentence and and noped the fuck out. Getting a group of humans together in an online setting without being ridiculous is f’n hard.
If you are a vegan and want animal companionship, get a vegan pet!! Rabbits, birds, and guinea pigs are great options. Cats and dogs are not options for meatless pets, regardless of how avaliable they are.
Thank you medical professional who surely also has experience with nutrition.
There there pet.
FWIW having pets who eat meat isn’t incompatible for most vegans. In fact it is likely that a majority of pet owners who are vegan have dogs and cats and feed them normal pet foods
And that’s fine! I just meant that if you’re looking for a pet that can be 100% vegan alongside you, there are definitely options for that.
It’s only contentious for vegans. No one else thinks cats can be vegan
… and yet here we are.
that’s like saying round earth is a contentious topic. some people will believe anything.
Noone else has considered it, and they are going with their gut reaction rather than consider both sides. Isnt the internet a fun place!
ask your vet if they have considered the topic of vegan cats.
lemmy a year ago may have provided that, lemmy today will be unlikely to, lemmy next year will be indistinguishable from reddit as it is today
Mainly because of the admins
Vegans advocated for feeding cats vegan diets (which, cats being obligate carnivores, is equivalent to slowly torturing them to death), admin (rightfully but possibly excessively hamfistedly, though not unusually so for a lemmy.world admin) shut it down, vegan animal abusers got a bit histerical about the whole thing.
Some additional context is that the vegan animal abusers immediately banned anyone who was trying to correct this misinformation.
That’s just how vegan communities operate from what I’ve seen
Yeah well considering how the admins have been treating rogue mods, I have a hard time believing ANY of this is in good faith.
Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
Note that even if a study is currently reproducible, it will only continue to be reproducible until it isn’t. There isn’t something fundamental that makes a specific scientific study objectively true or false — that isn’t how science works.
When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
I understand that that’s likely well-intentioned, but, imo, it’s rather subjective — it’s more often a matter of relative perspective. That being said, it would be in your best interest to set as clear and precise definitions as you possibly can.
Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.
What does this statement mean? You are banning anyone from sharing anything that is not peer-reviewed…?
We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance
That’s a bit of a stretch.
The rules are written so the admins and mods can maintain their positions and feelings without having to explain themselves. Its an insistence that whatever they do is right because they own the place.
Note that even if a study is currently reproducible, it will only continue to be reproducible until it isn’t. There isn’t something fundamental that makes a specific scientific study objectively true or false — that isn’t how science works.
no one said anything to the contrary. that is just the minimum requirement for health claims to not get removed, not an endorsement of absolute truth.
You’re backing yourself into a corner where you’ll have to respond to every shitbird that comes crying some content hurt their feelings. Removing illegal material is the only thing that’s expected, moderating people’s opinions because they might make someone put glue on pizza is solved by a “nothing on this instance should be considered a fact” banner. It seems petty and the optics only get worse as you slowly burn out and stop being consistent in censoring shit. Because that’s what it is. A cat might not be too stoked with its carefully balanced plant-based slop, but it’d be alive. Hope you’ll go into kink communities and censor the shit out of risky sexual practices.
A cat might not be too stoked with its carefully balanced plant-based slop, but it’d be alive.
No, it wouldn’t, that’s the point.
Cats are obligate carnivores, they’ll die if they don’t eat food containing certain amino acids which aren’t present in plants.
That said, advocating animal abuse, even if it didn’t lead to the animal’s death (which in this case, again, it would), should be a bannable offense.
Hope you’ll go into kink communities and censor the shit out of risky sexual practices.
Those are consensual.
A cat being fed the feline equivalent of poison can’t consent.
So I understand this, vegans promoting vegan cat diets need scientifically proved reproducible peer reviewed studies backing their claims, while the “feed cats whatever garbage is in these cans as long as its meat™” crowd can just say it with their chest, right?
This is misinformation. Please add a source for the study.
I’m not vegan so I won’t take sides in this particular debate (to me it seems like a trolley problem whether risking the harm of a pet is worth reducing the systematic harm of animals at-large), nor do I have any specific comments on the new rules…
I will say though, that these incidents are opportunity for growth and learning for both users and admins when it comes to running a grassroots online community. Whether people agree with the new rules or not, I think all of Lemmy is better for it if we have examples of how large instances can be run and how conflicts can be addressed cordially.
Thank you, the team is trying our best to learn and grow.
