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.
Personally my big takeaway from the comments here is that either many people think administrating a large internet platform is a joke and happens on its own and you don't find 10+ legal notices in the PO box every week, or that - and I've read about this before - reading comprehension in the english-speaking world has fallen dramatically in recent years and people are genuinely unable to read paragraphs of text of non-trivial content and/or shifting subjects within same sentences, something you learn around 6th grade in school but sadly rarely need after school in modern times.
TOS's usually have a legal team go over them to prevent such eventualities. Lemmy as a whole does not really necessarily have this option and that's at least part of the problem here. The owners and administrators have to cover the eventualities of user interaction with the site. Since this is the case, the owners and admins are using at best a layman's understanding of the law (potentially), to cover themselves and at the same time not taking into account other factors (such as jury nullification not being a part of the laws of those jurisdictions at all).
While it is their right to do so as owners of the site, they may be in violation of the rights of other people and since they operate a site with multiple jurisdictions and that may be used by users in other countries, it is perfectly okay for the users to be upset about these changes and do with that information what they will, including making complaints about changes and discussions of changes.
Do things get better without discussion? Is that something you've experienced?