Hey all,
In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.
We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we’ve done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.
ToS Additions
That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.
Regarding misinformation, we’ve tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:
- Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
- We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
- When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
- Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
- Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
- Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.
We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.
We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.
By-laws Addition
We’ve also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.
This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we’ve created as a result of what has happened over the last week.
Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.
https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation
https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT:
We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.
How so?
Even if we ignore the brutal abuse and murder that is done to animals raised for food, or the pandemic inevitability that comes from animal agriculture; or their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, destruction of natural habitats for expansions of ranches, or illnesses like asthma that cafos cause to local communities; or the physical and psychological harm that occurs to animal ag and slaughterhouse workers, many of whom are either immigrants or minors - any one of which should be reason alone to seek an end to animal-consumption ways of life - diets that are high in animal products and low in plants are directly harmful to human health.
That’s essentially what keto, paleo, and carnivore are - high fat, high animal consumption, and low or no carb (and since most plants are high carb, that usually means low-plants as well). In the first case, low-carb diets don’t even meet all nutritional needs without supplementation. In addition these diets are all about increasing the very foods that cause our top causes of death like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc, while reducing or eliminating all the foods that are known to be most protective against these lifestyle diseases.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-try-the-keto-diet
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2021.702802/full
https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day
Here’s about half a billion instances or so of harm to living beings every day.
Let alone the tens of billions living each day in conditions that would be considered “abuse” if I told you I kept my dog in a similar situation.