Intro
We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we’ve gleaned from the threads linked here.
Links
Actions in question
Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.
The comments have been restored.
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.
Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.
Removing some moderators of the vegan community
Removed moderators have been reinstated.
This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).
The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.
We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.
Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict
Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility
Moderators’ and admins’ comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.
These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.
In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.
Community Responses
The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.
Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.
That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.
The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.
That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.
Rooki’s actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.
Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.
Conclusions
Regarding moderator actions
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.
Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100’s of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don’t immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.
While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.
We’ve also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we’ve provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin’s report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.
TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.
Regarding censorship claims
Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we’ve ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we’ve set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.
Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of “do no harm”.
We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.
While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement “do no harm”.
To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT: Added org operations contact info
Tldr: we will do more internal talks, was right just needed to tell mods why they were removed, just talk to admins if happens again so we can quietly handle it.
This is what you came up with after all that time?
The site admins are below the org operations team, so you can “go to their boss” / “talk to a manager” if you have a issue you feel is being handled unfairly.
https://fedihosting.foundation/lw-team/
Just search the next higher person and click on him, you will get redirected to their lemmy profile.
good look
There could be a technical fix for this. Lemmy could use a system that requires certain moderator and/or admin actions to require a 2-person authorization, and temporarily put the action in an “under review” state for a set amount of time.
For instance, an admin removing content would replace it with a placeholder for up to 2 days. If another admin accepts the change then the comment is removed. If no other admin responds then the content is put back.
This is pretty much Change Management.
Would be fine as an option that could be enabled, especially for larger communities, but an instance run by a single person wouldn’t be able to host communities if it was a built in requirement for all communities.
Solid idea. One consequence of this would be the possible delay in removing material that really should be removed as fast as possible, though.
Which is why the content would get masked until a 2nd person approves or it gets unmasked.
Personally, I like this idea. But it can be equally abused if two admins colluded to agree with each other. But, I think it’s at least better than nothing.
I would imagine this would need to be done at the software level to be most effective. You should request this sort of feature from the Lemmy team to integrate into both the backend and the UI.
If you do create issues for this request, you should post back here (or whatever related community) so people can upvote the issues to show the devs we really want the feature.
You can’t fix people problems with technical solutions. I know tech folk like to think they can, but it really doesn’t work. Sometimes you simple needs some rules, guides, and a good book to slap someone with.
I think a 3 person team is better. 1 mod/admit marks something for moderation. 2 other mods need to agree to mod. If 1 of the mods disagrees, it stays.
This is inspired by true events in September 1983, where a russian command post in charge of their nuclear weapons caught on radar 4 incoming missles, supposedly fired from America. The captain in charge turned his key to fire every nuke they had at America. The second in command turned his key as well. The third in command refused. His logic was if America was going to fire nukes, why fire exactly 4 nukes and only 4 nukes, all targeting the same location? Would it not make sense to deplay thousands if you’re trying for a surprise ambush?
Those nukes that America fired? Clouds. The Earth was at just the right rotation for 30 minutes to confuse the russian radar into interpreting 4 missle shaped clouds as solid objects.
America was almost turned to dust for no reason, 2 weeks before I was born. Because of some happy fluffy white clouds, that even Bob Ross will admit almost DID cause an accident!
So yeah. Maybe we do a 3 mod system.
This reads like more misinformation so I had to look it up. I’m seeing that it was one person that made this decision.
In theory a good idea, but there is lots of content that needs to be gone serverside asap - either because it’s CP, otherwise illegal, spam that clogs down the Fediverse/can even be used to DoS a server,etc.
Illegal things probably need to be retained as evidence. It’s many times illegal to remove evidence if you think it’s possibly relevant.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’d consult one about this.
A slight modification, it could be implemented as a suggested action where the admins (or mods) can ask for a second opinion when they feel it’s appropriate.
That way urgent actions can happen right away, and potentially controversial actions can be discussed. It should solve the problem without forcing a specific workflow
so this is an endorsement of animal abuse from the admins?
I’ve seen many comments on Lemmy glorifying hunting and fishing and nobody gets angry when they don’t get removed. Someone makes a comment about the theoretical possiblity of vegan cat food and people freak out when they reinstate it.
its almost as if like people can make conscious decisions for themselves, yet have to be proper caretakers for animals that can not make such decisions, even if it includes going against the owners inbuilt beliefs, because it is in the best interest of the animal which is reliant wholly upon your care taking.
I’ve seen many comments on Lemmy glorifying hunting and fishing and nobody gets angry when they don’t get removed.
Hunting and Fishing is the circle of life. As long as we do it as humanely as possible it is necessary to feed 8 billion people. In fact in some instances it can be ecologically helpful, like culling invasive species. The same cannot be said for continually feeding an inadequate diet to a living animal.
Someone makes a comment about the theoretical possiblity of vegan cat food and people freak out when they reinstate it.
To me there’s a fine line between discussing “the theoretical possibility” and recommending it to cat owners. Of course it’s theoretically possible, but as far as I can tell it has not been proven in practice yet, and should not be recommended.
Hunting and Fishing is the circle of life. As long as we do it as humanely as possible it is necessary to feed 8 billion people.
We do not need to hunt or fish to feed 8 billion people. In fact overfishing is a big ecological issue. And hunting and fishing are the circle of death, not life, as we don’t need to hunt or fish to survive, assuming you live in a technologically advanced civilization.
Hunting and fishing for sustenance could be described as the circle of life. Trophy hunting and catch and release fishing are not. Something something we are not the same meme.
It is an endorsement of allowing discussion of a controversial topic that didn’t break the posted rules.
Feeding a cat a vegan diet is animal abuse because it requires a workaround for their biology as an obligate carnivore instead of just feeding them what they have evolved to need. If a vegan can’t properly feed a particular pet, they shouldn’t have the pet.
But we should be able to discuss it unless the rules for the community are changed to prohibit that kind of discussion.
Yes, although should be a rule that prohibits promoting antivaxx misinformation. If communities that discuss medical topics don’t have rules against promoting disinformation, they are not being moderated very well.
Keep in mind there will need to be an opportunity to explain why something is wrong, and that requires explaining what it is.
By this logic, oxygenating a fish tank to provide the fish with oxygen is animal abuse. You are artificially adding the necessary oxygen into the water, after all.
Okay, so this is just factually wrong.
Putting oxygen in a tank is necessary for the health of the fish. Feeding a cat meat is necessary for the health of the cat.
It’s also a false equivalence.
There is no workaround for oxygenating fish tanks; we don’t find something that ‘might work as well as oxygen’ according to poorly done studies. We just give them oxygen, the thing they actually need to live.
we do not consider feeding a cat vegan food as animal abuse, provided there are no health issues arising from this.
most of the research i’ve looked at seems to point out that there are various pitfalls, e.g. just feeding a cat vegetables will result in malnutrition. having synthetic additives for this can be one way to address that problem. just because something is sold as vegan cat food that doesn’t necessarily imply that it’s healthy for the cat, as some of the articles were pointing out that some of the cheaper ones were lacking the right ingredients.
as an example, “my cat now only gets potatoes and apples and nothing else” would be considered animal abuse.
additionally, if moderators were to remove arguments pointing out the risks of e.g. missing nutrients in a civil discussion and leaving the other side that just argues “vegan cat food works” without any arguments as is then we would also consider this animal abuse.
in this specific incident the conversation was certainly not civil, which is unfortunate, as this situation would likely have gone a very different way if it was.
we do not consider feeding a cat vegan food as animal abuse, provided there are no health issues arising from this
Docking tails, snipping ears, and a bunch of stuff we do to dogs is abuse even if they don’t have health issues down the road.
One issue with feeding cats a vegan diet is that cats hide their pain, so if the diet is causing pain due to a lack of nutrients that don’t have obvious external signs like death, they could be suffering for their entire lives. We don’t have long term studies about other health impacts from a lack of meat, and the primary focus has been keeping them from dying. It should be assumed that there are other negstive side effects we cannot see when at least one missing enzyme kills the cat.
Plus the only possible outcome is that some vegan is able to avoid feeding an obligate carnivore they voluntarily adopted the wrong diet.
This looks to be more an endorsement of moderation principles and rules, not determining truth of comments.
For the difficulties in determining what’s true, see the kerfuffle about Media Bias Fact Check.
You obviously did not read or comprehend the post, and are attempting to troll in Bad Faith.
If you had read and comprehended this post, you’d have found that they updated the by-laws to include language to prohibit animal abuse. You’d have also read their reasoning for what they did in their post-mortem to Rooki’s actions.
Do better.
I love the compassionate intervention that allows @Rooki@lemmy.world the opportunity to learn and correct his behaviors and models that level of compassion. Thank you very much! 😊
