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.
EDIT 2 (2024-08-31):
We've posted a response, sorry for the delay.
Yeah, they're 100% in the wrong here. Cats aren't people, they can't consent to your personal code of ethics. They're meat-eaters by nature, and denying them of that is animal abuse. Good intentions don't override your pet's nutritional needs. Admins are right to remove any content that encourages animal abuse.
OK, so some counters:
All up, pets are absolutely subjected to human codes of ethics and values ... they're pets and subjecting them to our needs, desires and demands is exactly what owning a pet is all about (for better or worse).
If you have problems with that, I personally understand, but modifying their diet without wanting to sacrifice their health is very much the type of thing that pet ownership is generally all about. The lines being drawn here seem to me to not be about the specific issue of whether a vegan cat diet is feasible ... and merely talking about it a reasonable thing ... but about how one feels about vegans in general.
On which, accusing vegans of animal abuse is certainly a choice. From what I've seen, any conversation about this from a vegan was always starting from a position of caring about the dietary requirements of cats (which may be more than what some pet food manufacturers and pet owners do) and being informed about them. Whether that's what happened in the relevant incident, I'm not sure, but the bits I've seen certainly indicate that it could have been reasonable too.
Which all comes back to my original point ... what is moderation to bring to such a conversation and situation and what are its aims?
Remove posts that have a serious potential to seriously harm cats, by making newer vegans believe it's okay to feed cats a vegan diet?
The issue here is that nowadays these posts become information to others. That's what the internet has become. People no longer read something like this, and then first talk to 2-3 vets about it before deciding, they read that "Yo totally fine to torture your cats, k" and then do it.
As someone whose FwB works with pets professionally, it's difficult to be more wrong, but granted that's for my central european context. There are absolutely bad cat foods about, but even those are not truly dangerous for the cat involved. They might have a higher percentage of grain added, but you're right in that to a degree this is doable for a cat.
Note however that many pure-grain or high-grain foods will be explicitly marked as "Not meant as a sole food item" over here, and have to be: They're not a balanced nutritional diet. Even worse, some add sugar, and now we're getting into truly shitty territory that sadly isn't clamped down on hard enough, this gets added to make the food look and smell better to the owner, while being either irrelevant or usually bad for the cat (since they consume too many calories for the amount of nourishment they get). However, again, as a supplementary item it'd not be terminal or something.
And that's kinda the thing here:
It's not a binary choice. Just use high-quality cat food. It's that simple. Ask someone who works with this professionally for help. And yes, high quality food will be 50%+ meat. That's supposed to tell you something.
"As someone whose FwB" is a new one for me. Hey buddy listen my FwB's in the military kinda vibes