There will be a new announcement soon to clarify.

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.

  • Serinus@lemmy.worldOPM
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    2 days ago

    I don’t understand what you’re trying to say or why. I’m generally not clicking random youtube videos.

    • OpenStars@piefed.social
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      18 hours ago

      Innuendo Studios has several fantastic videos - I dare say just about the main thing I even highly care about on YouTube these days, even though there are so very few of them. The Alt Right Playbook in particular is a wonderful series. This latest one seems so very highly related to the subject matter of this post, where extremists bury reasonable people behind an avalanche of false statements, each one of which must be rebutted properly, despite how the statements themselves did not have such care and attention put into them.

      Side-note: I love how PieFed and Tesseract both provide YouTube previews to help decide whether to click or not - speaking for myself it helps me decide!:-)

      Anyway, I’m sure you know all about the subject matter, but the language used in this linked video (or just search for Alt-Right Playbook and choose the latest one) I thought might be particularly helpful to have watched in drafting the next response of this announcement. The flat earth bit especially is off-putting to people bc it conjures up the vaccine disinformation issue that genuinely cost people’s literal, actual lives. Though I didn’t take from the announcement that this has suddenly become a place where such dis/misinformation was “welcomed”, and yet people reacted as if that is what it was saying… so I hoped the video would help bridge that gap between what was intended to be conveyed vs. was managed to be received by some, who seem to just be so very scared and anxious about so many things beyond their our control these days.

      • Serinus@lemmy.worldOPM
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        17 hours ago

        I’ll take a look. And yeah, the intention was the opposite, to poke pinholes into those crazy, reality-denying philosophies.