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.
I know people want to celebrate the perish of a bad guy (me included) but if that endangers existance of lemmy.world then I think it’s fair to take this celebration somewhere else.
On the ehtics pov I’m not quite conviced that celebrating death is entirely unethical. Some people are bad and society is better without them and these Dutch, Finnish and German laws might make sense locally but definitely don’t make much sense in a global context.
It doesn’t matter whether the laws make sense or not, they are the context the instance has to operate. Unfortunately many counties in Europe do not have robust freedom of speech provisions.
“Freedom of Speech” as glorified in the US means hate speech, racism, and discrimination. Be happy that your don’t have US style free speech. I am as a Canadian.
Oh, that’s “freeze peach.”
You mean fortunately, considering what a joke they are in the US? 😂
Yeah it also makes sense logically because the law as written assumes death to be inherently negative (see also assisted-suicide issues in many countries). But of course it makes sense for the law to assume this, as otherwise people would find loopholes.
I think many of european restriction laws make sense in local context to protect order. With so many countries and cultures squeezed into one area there’s incredible propaganda potential as we can see today. Europe definitely needs these laws but it should not extend to global spaces which are entirely different thing.
