Comment on Moderator abuse: Request for review and removal of Decoy321@lemmy.world

ieh@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• Grumpus_Maximus@thelemmy.club ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Thank you for taking the time to review this with the other admins.

  I understand the decision, even though I fundamentally disagree with it.

  What I am struggling with is the standard being applied here. You state that whether I am racist or ableist is “not up for debate,” which I appreciate. But at the same time, a moderator is permitted to publicly characterize my contributions as “racist shit” and impose a ban on that basis.

  That distinction matters to me. If you’re unwilling to characterize me as racist based on these posts, I don’t think a moderator should be casually assigning that characterization either.

  I’m also having difficulty reconciling the acknowledgement that these communities do not have formal rules covering some of this content with the conclusion that permanent bans for such content are nevertheless entirely appropriate based on “simple common sense.”

  This is a shitposting community. The entire genre involves absurd, provocative, offensive and intentionally tasteless humor. That obviously doesn’t mean absolutely anything must be permitted, but if particular categories of offensive humor are prohibited, I think those boundaries should be stated in the rules rather than discovered after the fact through bans.

  Otherwise, we’re effectively asking users to follow rules that aren’t written down and allowing individual moderators to decide where an invisible line is.

  That brings me to one clarification I’d genuinely appreciate:

  If I create and moderate my own community on Lemmy.world, am I permitted to establish community rules explicitly allowing provocative, offensive and tasteless shitposting, provided the content remains within Lemmy.world’s site-wide rules?

  For example, I would want to make it explicit that content isn’t removed merely because somebody finds it offensive, crude or in poor taste, while still enforcing whatever content Lemmy.world prohibits at the instance level.

  If that’s permitted, then I think creating a community with clearly defined expectations may simply be the better solution.

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  • ieh@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I actually misspoke in my previous reply.

    legal.lemmy.world/tos/#12-discrimination-against-…

    1.2 Discrimination against minority / at-risk groups

    Lemmy.World specifically forbids any sort of discrimination against queer groups on this site. Any form of racism, regardless of the user(s) that perpetrated it, is also forbidden. As already stated in Section 1, calls for violence against the aforementioned groups can result in a site-wide ban. We also reserve the right to report the offending user(s) to their local law enforcement unit responsible for hate crimes.

    I had had an earlier version pulled up, or at least one posted elsewhere. I had thought I’d remembered something like the above, but when I couldn’t find it, assumed I’d hallucinated it.

    I saw your new community. It seems clear to me that the moderator there is gonna be an alt user of yours, which as far as I’m aware, is generally fine. So if that is indeed true, you would be responsible for ensuring that racist material is not posted.

    Social media like Lemmy is not perfect or fast. We are all volunteers here, from admins to moderators. Moderators depend on community membes to report what they don’t see; admins depend on community members as well as moderators to point out problems. So just because not everything against the rules is removed does not mean it is not still against the rules.

    I had actually quickly scanned posts in your new community, and I didn’t see anything that lept out as racist to me. And indeed with your previous posts, it was only a few things that were problematic posts.

    But to again explicitely answer your question: You are not allowed to have rules for your community that violate the rules of lemmy.world. As to whether you might fly below the radar, as it were - well, your chances were better before you got my attention. :) But this is not a threat of any kind, it’s just acknowledgement that I’m more likely to notice your name around here, especially as you post a lot, and especially because the /c/shitposts posts have been taking up a bit of the queue in the “six hour” top posts, which is what I tend to browse most.

    So to also say: I personally don’t care one way or the other about shitposts. They aren’t my thing, but I’m happy to see a lot of things posted that aren’t my thing, that’s the nice thing about a place that has many communities. And I tend to browse the entire queue because I like encountering new things.

    But you’ve got to figure out how to not bring over and post stuff that is racist.

    You state that whether I am racist or ableist is “not up for debate,” which I appreciate. But at the same time, a moderator is permitted to publicly characterize my contributions as “racist shit” and impose a ban on that basis.

    I think you misunderstand slightly.

    It is not up for debate — that is not the debate we are having in this thread. It is not necessarily a settled debate, although I don’t think you are intending to be racist. But it really doesn’t matter. The reason I said that is because what DOES matter is that the POSTS you made were racist, and in one case I saw, ableist.

    Those posts are racist and the mod was absolutely justified in removing them and discouraging you from posting them again by use of the tempban, and when that didn’t work, the permaban.

    Could they have done things differently? Yes - a weaker response you would have preferred, or a stronger one you would have liked less - both would be in the range of what’s acceptable.

    As it stands, they did not remove other posts of yours that are racist, nor did they remove comments of yours that were attacks on others (slightly higher in that link I sent than the section I quoted addresses attacking other community members). So in that sense, while you didn’t get warned, your posts/comments were also not removed.

    The best solution, in my humble opinion, is to try your best to follow the site rules.

    Would I be allowed to post the posts that got me banned in my own shitposting community on lemmy world?

    I don’t have a clear feel for exactly what it takes for us to step in when a moderator is not enforcing the sitewide rules, but in theory, at some point, we would have a need to step in.

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    • Grumpus_Maximus@thelemmy.club ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Thanks, that clarifies the rules around my own community.

      I think we’re probably talking past each other slightly on the main issue.

      I genuinely do not care if a moderator needs to remove an individual meme. If an admin or moderator looks at something and decides it crosses a site-wide line, remove it. That’s not really what bothers me.

      What bothers me is treating the characterization of these posts as “unquestionably racist” and then using that characterization to justify escalating bans.

      The meme that resulted in the racism accusation came directly from Reddit and remains up there. I understand your point that Reddit’s moderation decisions don’t determine Lemmy.world’s rules. But Reddit also explicitly prohibits racist content, so its continued presence there is at least evidence that reasonable moderators can look at the same meme and not conclude that it is obviously racist.

      That doesn’t prove Reddit got it right. But it does make me uncomfortable with the idea that Decoy’s interpretation is simply an objective fact rather than a moderator making a subjective judgment about an offensive joke.

      That’s really the distinction I’m trying to make.

      If the standard is:

      “We think this joke crosses our line, so we’re removing it.”

      Fine. I can live with that.

      If the standard becomes:

      “This is unquestionably racist content; therefore we’re justified in treating you as someone who repeatedly posts racist material and escalating from temporary to permanent bans.”

      I think that requires a much stronger basis, particularly when the content is ambiguous enough to remain acceptable on another major platform with similar prohibitions against racism.

      As for the comments you characterized as attacks or harassment, I would also ask that their context be considered. The comments you’re referring to were responses to people attacking or insulting me first. That doesn’t necessarily make every response of mine appropriate, and I’m perfectly willing to accept criticism for going too far in a response. But there’s an important difference between someone initiating harassment and someone responding -perhaps too aggressively -to hostility directed at them.

      And regarding my earlier comment about Reddit provocateurs: My point is - practical outcome of @Decoy321@lemmy.world style of moderation is indistinguishable from what a Reddit agent would do.

      piefed.world/c/shitposts was barely active when I started contributing to it. I then contributed hundreds of posts and substantially increased its activity. Permanently banning only people actually supplying that content has effectively stopped those contributions and pushed that activity elsewhere.

      That’s exactly the outcome somebody trying to keep users on Reddit rather than building competing communities would want.

      I’m pointing out that the effect of the moderation is remarkably aligned with that outcome: discourage prolific contributors, reduce activity in an alternative community, and make Reddit the easier place to find and share this type of content.

      Ultimately, I’m not asking for immunity from moderation. I’m asking for some proportionality.

      If one meme out of dozens or hundreds crosses a line I didn’t recognize, remove the meme and tell me why. I can adjust what I post going forward.

      That’s very different from assuming malicious intent, applying labels to the content as though there can be no reasonable disagreement about them, and eventually permanently banning someone who was otherwise actively contributing to the community.

      As for c/shitposts, I understand your answer: I can set a much more permissive standard for offensive/tasteless humor, but Lemmy.world’s site-wide rules remain the ceiling. That’s fair, and I’ll operate the community accordingly.

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      • ieh@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Malicious intent is not required. If a cop catches you speeding, they might let you off with a warning. If they catch you speeding again, they are probably writing a ticket. Or perhaps they wrote you a ticket for your tail light being out and gave you a pass on the speeding the first time, but the second time your tail light was still out so they wrote you the ticket for both. For this anaology to work, it requires a small town with a couple of cops so that one might remember you like that.

        The site rules specify that racism is not allowed. You posted objective racism. No judgement that I can see what made upon your character. The moderator would have assumed that you knew it was racist, and so removed it. Giving a seven day ban is not unreasonable; even if I thought it was so, it is well within the range of actions that would require no sanctions from the admins.

        The question of your intent doesn’t arise, in the same way that the cop doesn’t really probably care why the person was speeding. Sure, some edge cases, but most speeders pulled over just decided to go fast.

        So you keep taking personal offense where none was offered. The moderators addressed the content posted correctly and said nothing about you as a person. You are “someone who has posted racist content” simply because you have literally posted racist content.

        Posting lots of content that breaks the rules does not justify breaking the rules in the same way that driving the speed limit most of the time doesn’t give you a free pass to speed occasionally.

        And I will say it again:The opinions of anyone on reddit do not matter here. You will absolutely see rule-breaking content on every single platform.

        If you are unable to determine what is racist, one thing you can do is run it through AI. AI sucks for many reasons, but this is one area in which it can excel.

        For example, I uploaded the image of the twitter conversation that was “Protect Black Men” / “From what employment” and asked:

        Is this image racist? My friend says it’s not, but I’m not sure. If it is, can you tell me why it is? And if it isn’t, can you tell me why it isn’t?

        I phrased it that way so it wouldn’t prejudice the answer towards it being racist. Here’s the reply:

        The reply in the screenshot is widely recognized as racist because its entire comedic premise relies directly on a racial stereotype.

        Here is how both sides of that argument break down:

        Why it is considered racist

        • Reliance on negative stereotypes: The response (“From what employment”) plays directly on the centuries-old, derogatory trope that Black men are lazy, chronically unemployed, or actively avoid work.

        • Dismissal of serious social concerns: The original post (“Protect Black Men”) is a common expression addressing physical safety, mental health, and systemic challenges. Turning it into a punchline about joblessness trivializes those issues by substituting a racial trope for meaningful context.

        • Mechanism of the joke: For the punchline to make sense to the reader, the reader must connect “Black men” with “avoiding work.” Without the underlying racial stereotype, the joke loses its setup and punchline entirely.

        Why someone might argue it isn’t

        • The “just edgy humor” defense: People defending posts like this often frame them as standard internet sarcasm, shock humor, or generic trolling rather than genuine, deeply held racial animus.

        • Grammatical or wordplay framing: An argument is sometimes made that the replier is simply subverting the serious tone of standard social media slogans with irreverence, treating it as an equal-opportunity jab rather than targeted discrimination.

        Even if intended merely as an irreverent quip, the mechanism of the joke depends entirely on an anti-Black trope to deliver its punchline.

        So even if you don’t think it’s racist, AI correctly identified that it was.

        So the simple situation here is that posting images that break site terms will get the post removed, and can result in temporary or permanent bans from a community. If the behaviour was egregious enough and got attention from the admins, it could result in an instance ban from lemmy.world.

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