Hello everyone! If you have not yet seen it, @ernest has handed over moderation to @Drusas @Entropywins @ Frog-Brawler (the tag system consistently messes up the link to FB’s username lol) and myself here in !politics.
First order of business is for you all to weigh in on the community guidelines that you would like to see here. As the mod team, we will weigh all suggestions and then add them to the side bar as magazine/community rules. I’m going to give about 48 hours for users to see this thread and add a comment or discuss.
Please know that the goal is not to create an echo chamber here in !politics, but we want to ensure that there is not an encroachment of rage bait and toxicity. It brings down the quality of the magazine and it discourages community engagement.
For the time being, the mod tools are pretty sparse, so I want to manage expectations about the scope of moderation we’re able to do right now. For now, our touch will be light. Expect increased functionality as time progresses, though. We have 3 weeks of reports on file, so please know we see them. Give us some time to establish how to handle those before you start to see any movement.
I would like to see more discussion around handling misinformation. The lines between misinformation, trolling, and someone being genuinely incorrect (which is still misinformation) can be blurry.
However, I personally believe that spreading misinformation is more dangerous than regular trolling. Of course, it can require research to determine whether or not something is mis/disinformation. Obviously this is a complicated subject and other social media platforms haven’t even figured it out yet.
Thanks for bringing this up!
Do you think community engagement should be a response to misinformation or moderation be the response? I’ve already seen some trolls be answered with a flurry of factual links debunking misinformation claims, and it was glorious.
It’s so hard to say.
Something which is demonstrably factually incorrect, which tends to be more in the scientific domain than the political domain, I’m personally in favor of removing so that the misinformation doesn’t spread. However, I also see a lot of value in allowing it to remain and be corrected, especially when it’s not something that can harm people (e.g., “vaccines will make you autistic and kill you!”). But then, what if it remains and nobody bothers to correct it?
I’m looking right now, as another example, at a comment which is trying to factually state that both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden are pedophiles, with nothing to back this up. I would consider it trolling in that case, but there are definitely going to be instances where it’s harder to distinguish. And of course, there will always be the crazies who believe utter nonsense.
I’d like to know more about the community’s thoughts before we try to tackle that.
I appreciate you articulating all this!
This might me hard to implement… but could there be a community driven misinformation bank or facts FAQ managed by the moderators?
E.g. whenever a person repeats a clearly false narrative, instead of us participants going through the effort to describe who was indicted when or why bill XYZ doesn’t actually do Q, we can just refer to a corpus of rebuttals on the topic?
I’m interested in this idea, but I have to ask for community support on this project.
Is this something you’d like to take initiative on? waggles eyebrows convincingly