Hello World,
following feedback we have received in the last few days, both from users and moderators, we are making some changes to clarify our ToS.
Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance. We are not located in US, which means different laws apply. As written in our ToS, we’re primarily subject to Dutch, Finnish and German laws. Additionally, it is our discretion to further limit discussion that we don’t consider tolerable. There are plenty other websites out there hosted in US and promoting free speech on their platform. You should be aware that even free speech in US does not cover true threats of violence.
Having said that, we have seen a lot of comments removed referring to our ToS, which were not explicitly intended to be covered by our ToS. After discussion with some of our moderators we have determined there to be both an issue with the ambiguity of our ToS to some extent, but also lack of clarity on what we expect from our moderators.
We want to clarify that, when moderators believe certain parts of our ToS do not appropriately cover a specific situation, they are welcome to bring these issues up with our admin team for review, escalating the issue without taking action themselves when in doubt. We also allow for moderator discretion in a lot of cases, as we generally don’t review each individual report or moderator action unless they’re specifically brought to admin attention. This also means that content that may be permitted by ToS can at the same time be violating community rules and therefore result in moderator action. We have added a new section to our ToS to clarify what we expect from moderators.
We are generally aiming to avoid content organizing, glorifying or suggesting to harm people or animals, but we are limiting the scope of our ToS to build the minimum framework inside which we all can have discussions, leaving a broader area for moderators to decide what is and isn’t allowed in the communities they oversee. We trust the moderators judgement and in cases where we see a gross disagreement between moderatos and admins’ criteria we can have a conversation and reach an agreement, as in many cases the decision is case-specific and context matters.
We have previously asked moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification when this was suggested in context of murder or other violent crimes. Following a discussion in our team we want to clarify that we are no longer requesting moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification in the context of violent crimes when the crime in question already happened. We will still consider suggestions of jury nullification for crimes that have not (yet) happened as advocation for violence, which is violating our terms of service.
As always, if you stumble across content that appears to be violating our site or community rules, please use Lemmys report functionality. Especially when threads are very active, moderators will not be able to go through every single comment for review. Reporting content and providing accurate reasons for reports will help moderators deal with problematic content in a reasonable amount of time.
we are not a (US) free speech instance
Thank you for reminding this. Some people always think that Lemmy.world is US-based or managed, while this is clearly not the case.
People also seem to somehow believe that free speech in the US means that private instances can’t deplatform you for the things you say.
I have no idea why anyone thinks that extends to anyone besides the government censoring speech or why they think free speech means freedom from the consequences of that speech.
Many Americans have a weak grasp on even the most basic details of their constitution. During my stay there, I heard “free speech” improperly being used as a defense by people of many different backgrounds.
This drives me crazy. I’ve commented this before, but I’ll say it again:
People in the US love to cry first amendment (freedom of speech, etc) any time something they say has consequences.
- Sexually harass a coworker? Freedom of speech!
- Business owner says something bigoted and people stop patronizing their business? Freedom of speech!
- Get banned from a Facebook group for being an ass? Freedom of speech!
- Kicked out of a shop for your offensive shirt? Freedom of speech!
Funny how the same people with wE tHe PeOpLe bumper stickers are the ones who haven’t actually bothered to read their own bill of rights. These people also seem to think that “free speech” (as they define it) should only apply to speech they agree with.
Exactly right.
Free speech means that the government can’t prosecute you for what you say (except in certain specific circumstances).
Free speech doesn’t mean that I can’t kick you out of my house for what you say.
What we need is a government-operated fediverse instance to serve as a public forum.
Free speech is a principle (like free trade) in addition to a fundamental right enumerated in the 1A enforceable against the government. People are making policy arguments when they discuss it in the context of private entities deplatforming advocating for private implementation of the principle into business practices.
It’s still unethical to bar speech that you don’t agree with
Sure, but not if that speech is incitement to violence. Then it’s a legal responsibility to shut it down.
Legally you’re right. But I think it sort of ignores the spirit of what that free speech should be and the reality it actually exists in. There are corporations that have reached a level of size and power comparable to governments. Plus the government in general is an arm of the capitalist class it represents. Most of the speech that happens today is on these privately owned services. To allow those large corporations to act as censors, it makes the protections on speech from government interference largely moot. Generalizing more, the way I put it is in America, you have freedom… if you can afford it. Sure, nobody is able to stop you from saying what you want to say. But you get to say it to a handful of people you know while a rich person gets to say it to millions of people through media channels and advertising. Sure everyone gets one vote, but if you’re rich you can influence a lot more than one vote (and you can probably buy more than one vote of influence with whoever wins.) You may have the right to an abortion, but if you’re poor you might not have the means to actually do it. People have the legal right to due process, but despite that, tons of cases end in plea deals or settlements because people don’t have the means to be adequately represented in a legal case. When the US legally abolished (most) slavery, many of the freed slaves ended up as share croppers, not much better off or free than they were before because they didn’t have the material means to exercise that freedom. Later, the US passed anti-discrimination laws. No more barring black people from living in some towns/neighborhoods. But despite that, the area I grew up in was still heavily segregated. Legal freedoms don’t mean much if you don’t have the economic freedom to exercise them.
Now, there’s clearly a line. It seems obvious that say, if you had some private chat room it would be fine to kick people out of it for whatever reason. And at the extreme end we have these massive platforms acting which perform the role of a public service but in the hands of private interests. There I think there should be limits on what censorship they should be able to do. So where do you make the cutoff along that spectrum? Idk. I feel like a Lemmy instance is probably closer to a private chatroom than a social media corporation. They’re small, they’re not run for profit, and they’re not engaged in any anti-competitive behavior. There’s not that much stopping someone from moving to another instance or even making their own.
A huge number of Americans are dumbfucks. I deal with that every day.
911 = life or limb emergency.
I can assure you that 98% of Americans can’t even grasp that simple concept.
I think the issue is, there IS NO major Lemmy instance that IS us based. So Americans just sort of clump where the other Americans are. Then, that sets the tone for where we are. Everybody has a us centric experience, and so it becomes well known that Lemmy.World is a us based instance…even if it’s not true.
So now all of it’s users are behaving in a manner which lines up with their own local culture, in this case America, and have no clue which other nations laws apply, or what those laws even are.
You could tell me that Germany has a law that every 300th meal has to be sausage and schnitzel. I would be doubtful that you’re telling the truth, but I’d have no leg to stand on to dispute.
So you say “Go to the american instance then!!!” And to that I say “It doesn’t exist. Or if it does exist it’s too small to notice.”
I’m confused, what does free speech have to do with where the instance is based? This is the internet, what country is going to extradite a US citizen for making a comment on a defederated social platform?
The overreach is insane.
I don’t know anything about Dutch or Finnish laws, but I’ve seen many recent articles about people arrested in Germany for their social media posts that were considered hateful or violent (which is frankly a culture shock to me as an American), so I can see why some of the posts on Lemmy in the past week would be concerning.
https://lemmy.world/comment/13870047
If you are a US citizen and would prefer a US-based instance, there is
- https://discuss.online/ which blocks hexbear and lemmygrad
- https://lemmy.today/ which does not block any instance
Will check them out, just want to make sure they’re not like what the askthedonald became where it’s another echo chamber. I like perspective, but I loathe the virtue padded safe spaces.
I would argue that it’s certainly not clear. That’s probably part of the problem.
How is this not clear?
From https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
Our Governing Laws
The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed per the laws of the following countries and/or states:
The Netherlands
Republic of Finland
Federal Republic of Germany
If people are looking for US-based instances, there is https://discuss.online/
That’s at pretty much the very bottom of the TOS and given the number of people who skim or don’t even read TOS and EULA’s (and the number of jurisdictions that have ruled they aren’t a binding agreement), I’d say something directly on the sign up page is warranted. Additionally this information is not anywhere that I can find on any sidebar or about section.
People don’t often “look” for instances specific to their locale when joining Lemmy. That’s a lot of the reason this instance is so large. I would wager that most people who are users of this instance do not know that this instance is based in Scandinavia (and Germany). I bet most of them are also unfamiliar with the laws and regulations of those countries as well.
Why would you assume “.world” would mean the USA…? It’s obviously NOT USA, so why assume USA instead of the other 99.99% countries? Thats why you read the shit dude. This whole idea that the USA is “the world” is only in Americans head and it’s hilarious to see from the outside in this frequency.
There’s even a term for it since it’s so common “Americentrism”
That’s not what I’m assuming. The assumption isn’t that it’s the USA or any country at all. The assumption most people make is that they and their actions are covered under the laws of their locality.
There are a large number of people on Lemmy who believe that you could be literally Hitler and that a human life is still worth saving. To some, human life is some unwavering near-godlike thing that nobody should ever take away.
But I like math. And I know that sometimes a -1 gives you positive values.
But I like math. And I know that sometimes a -1 gives you positive values.
It’d sure be nice if this guy’s death would result in fewer people being denied life saving care for spurious reasons, but I’m definitely not holding my breath
If things get better for a week while the insurance companies try to hide from the fallout, hundreds of lives will be saved or made measurably better.
If one harmful CEO’s murder makes society better for a week…
I’d be banned for finishing that sentence.
His death alone won’t change anything, what will change this is something that violates TOS to mention.
Yeah, because a CEO is ultimately just another employee in shareholder capitalism. If the shareholders want more money, and of course they do, things will continue as usual after this brief, unplanned change on the board. I’d fully expect anesthesia not being covered to happen too, just not right now, they’ll wait for marketing to says it’s safe in a couple months.
Not hard at all. Both responsible for many millions of needless deaths while holding power.
So obviously the last part can be turned around, right? If we had reason to assume you kill 5 people later in your life, it’s worth killing you now, right? Or what is the cutoff value?
(mind you I’m not disagreeing with the underlying statement, but who gets to make the judgement call?)
Good thing no assumptions have to be made. CEO’s policies had already killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Advocating murder says nothing about the murder victim’s character, and everything about yours. It’s like how charity says nothing about the people you give to, and everything about you.
I’m sorry if this isn’t straightforward.
Advocating murder doesn’t say anything about the victim’s character, and it doesn’t have to. The victim spoke for himself, making 8 figures by denying >30% of claims. The world is better without him, and it would be even better without more people like him. Hopefully that happens because other people like him see this as a sort of Ghost of Christmas Future and start getting their shit together like Ebeneezer did
I’m sorry, definitely on the fence philosophically about the line in the sand with vigilante killing, but wtf are you trying to say about charity and what it says about the person? I’m imagining someone sipping on their expensive tea sitting in their “designer” chair reminiscing about their grand-papi’s charity advice. Meanwhile, inheriting a large bank account and looking down on anyone extreme enough to illicit actual change in a defunct system that you benefit comfortably from.
If you’re unfamiliar with the realities of charities or meant something different than I apologize
It’s genuinely hard to recognize when a rule that almost always applies doesn’t apply to the specific situation at hand.
Killing bloodthirsty rich people who are beyond the reach of the law and can’t be stopped any other way is a valid exception to the otherwise valid rule that murder is bad.
Exactly that. And anyone shutting down the conversation is just siding with them.
I excuse this guy’s actions and hope it’s not just a one-time target. Shit has to change. Let’s trade in a few hundred for a few million saved.
Look, I excuse this guy action, and I’ll never shed 1/10th of a tear for the CEO And I’m rooting for smiling man to not get caught. But in Europe, we gave this prohibition about calls for hatred and murder. It’s culturally strong. Notice that it didn’t prevent us from guillotining a king or two. Anyway, give lemmy.world admins a break. There are laws they’re meant to comply to and we’re a vast fediverse. Better keep your anger for our actual enemies.
Exactly that. And anyone shutting down the conversation is just siding with them.
Not the point of the admin post up top, mind you. As so often, if you’re an adminsitrator, it really does not matter fuck all what you think about an issue, it’s what your server wants to, can or has to think about an issue.
It’s crazy to see the stark difference in
- CEO killed and that’s bad, you can’t say anything negative about dead people with families
And
- President of Syria is dead and that’s good, we should all be able to agree that Freedom Rings with the execution of this human filth
Real mixed bag of moderation from a community that seems overwhelmingly in favor of killing certain kinds of people and extremely touchy about other kinds of people.
If you doubt this, stop and do one simple thought experiment. What would you be allowed to post on Lemmy if police identify, track down, and execute the CEO Slayer?
It’s all down to the instance owners political compass. However they ‘feel’ is how the rules are made. They’re treading a very dangerous line given how this platform is still in its infancy and we all just migrated from reddit after their owner decided to do the same.
If you lift the hood of Lemmy up too far, I think you’re going to find a lot of the same cockroaches underneath.
Ahh you see this has all been already settled for you, take the case of Twitter.
Calls of violence are not allowed on Twitter! Wow so simple right? What if there was a notorious user who was also a US President and made a call for violence? Well… guess what Twitter clarified those rules by saying:
You’re allowed to call for violence if you’re talking about America’s foreign policy.
That’s why you can say “death to Assad” but you can’t say “death to healthcare CEO”. It’s all propaganda anyway. While there are liberals who truly believe “all lives matter”, they’re few and far between, most liberals use civility as cover for their ideology. That’s why healthcare CEO death is bad, but Assad death is good.
You’re allowed to call for violence if you’re talking about America’s foreign policy.
Cool cool cool. Glad we got that cleared up. Liberty, Whiskey, and Sexy are back on the menu.
I don’t even believe in the death penalty for most murderers.
But when you’re murder count would make any serial in killer that did it with their bare hands instead of an email in all of history, with the cold calculation of a sociopath, there’s really nothing more to say.
I can empathize with murders of passion, even misguided, ignorant hatred as that was usually something impressed into them, but murders of “We’ll if I murder these thousands of people, I can increase quarterly profits by 2.4%! Score!” then it becomes impossible. It’s like trying to empathize with a computer devoid of any humanity.
Who decides who deserves it? How many denied claims qualify to deserve to be killed? 100? 10? How about 2? How about 2 that didn’t kill anyone but made the persons incapacitated in some way? That’s a slippery slope, and in these current times of misinformation and troll farms I wouldn’t like people to be classified as “deserving to die” by the internet, specially when a big chunk of society is easily manipulated.
So, numerically, I couldn’t figure this out easily to an exact integer. BUT, it’s very easy to figure out when taken to extreme integers.
I’d term this something like a “morality margin of error”. We should all struggle with questions like the trolley problem, weighing one life against five, debating the complicity of the action, etc. There shouldn’t be any easy shortcut answers to deciding the validity of life. But if there were TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE on the track that the trolley is headed down, and only one on the other, then those morality questions absolutely should get much easier.
Out of curiosity, what is your opinion of the allies killing Hitler Nazis during WWII?
I think this is a good time to remind everyone that the strength of federated social media (and a big reason why we’re all here) is that no private company or country’s laws can have total control over the fediverse.
Everyone who runs an instance is going to have a different risk-tolerance for legal issues however, and I can’t fault anyone for making a judgment call that they feel best protects the server and their users. I don’t know anything about Dutch or Finnish laws, but I’ve seen many recent articles about people arrested in Germany for their social media posts that were considered hateful or violent (which is frankly a culture shock to me as an American), so I can see why some of the posts on Lemmy in the past week would be concerning.
In my interactions with the .World admins, I’ve seen nothing but people trying to run an instance in the most fair and neutral way they can, and I personally trust them to make the hard calls when they come up. That being said, if you’re frustrated with the legal concerns of a host’s country or have had a run-in with a mod that upset you, it only strengthens the fediverse if you spread out or create similar communities elsewhere.
Midwest.social is located in the US and is also a leftist instance. However, we don’t host many large comms ourselves.
Well, your instance also doesn’t, as of my last check in mid August, accept new accounts, sooo…
Yeah, if you run an instance, and you decide this is a hobby for you not your main job and you’re also not a lawyer and hence you just go “Sorry, all denied” then honestly, more power to you. It’s a hobby, not a job. If anybody disagrees, they have just volunteered to be the named person of legal representation for this instance, tbh.
Jury nullification should not be a banned topic. It’s perfectly legal and is the only direct way citizens can object to interpretations of the law. The very fact that the courts and government don’t want people to know of it is a testament to its effectiveness in cases where the public will opposes the government in matters of law. Particularly when public opinion differs drastically from a strict interpretation of the law, but most especially when citizens find a law, its often limited proponents, or its execution to be objectionable, unconscionable, cruel, or unwilling to take circumstances into consideration. It’s crucial for us to all understand our limited power over the government, especially when it’s acting in an oppressive manner, violating human rights, ignoring the principle of justice in favor of a literal interpretation, or is otherwise objectionable by the majority of citizens as opposed to the minority of lawmakers.
We will still consider suggestions of jury nullification for crimes that have not (yet) happened as advocation for violence, which is violating our terms of service.
?? So, discussing jury nullification by itself, or suggesting ‘crimes that have not yet happened’ - itself is not a violation (i.e. someone should disturb the peace) but suggesting that “someone should disturb the peace and everyone on the jury, should they be prosecuted, should advocate for jury nullification” is a violation of the ToS?
I’m not understanding that part.
Specifically where it relates to violent crime.
Essentially it is supposed to make statements like the following a rule violation:
“If someone murdered [fictional person] they would totally get acquitted because any jury would just nullify the charges.”
While the following sentence would not be a violation of TOS:
“The murderer of UHC CEO Brian Thompson should get acquitted via Jury Nullification because [reasons] and this is super dope.”
The first example could be read as a call to violence, while the 2nd is not calling for a crime.
As I understand it “All future jurors in money laundring cases should nullify, because tax evasion is… like… super cool” would also be legal, because money laundring is not a violent crime.
Mods could still remove it though, not for instance ToS but community rules.
money laundring is not a violent crime.
So it sounds like the laws prohibit advocating blue collar crime, but advocating white collar crime is fine.
suggesting ‘crimes that have not yet happened’ - itself is not a violation
this was already covered. this is not a new change. if you write “someone should kill person XYZ” this is clearly a call for murder that we do not tolerate here. discussing jury nullification in the same context where murder or other violent crimes are suggested is what was clarified to be subject for moderator action.
