Intro
We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.
Links
Actions in question
Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.
The comments have been restored.
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.
Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.
Removing some moderators of the vegan community
Removed moderators have been reinstated.
This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).
The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.
We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.
Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict
Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility
Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.
These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.
In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.
Community Responses
The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.
Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.
That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.
The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.
That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.
Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.
Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.
Conclusions
Regarding moderator actions
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.
Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.
While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.
We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.
TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.
Regarding censorship claims
Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.
Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".
We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.
While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".
To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT: Added org operations contact info
I'm reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said "Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it".
If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don't axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.
As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don't have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.
Never fire someone for an accident unless the accident was a symptom of willful negligence. Fire them for being unqualified or incompetent, sure, but not for an honest mistake. Training someone to avoid that mistake in the future will be far less expensive than replacing them, and they're going to be far less likely to make mistakes like it ever again.
Mistakes create opportunities for growth โค๏ธ
The idea that it's dangerous to raise children on a vegan diet is unequivocally false, and misinformation. Every major health authority has made statements affirming that a properly implemented plant-based diet is entirely nutritionally adequate for all stages of life. Literally the only supplement that's strictly necessary in the majority of cases is b12 - which is something that everyone should be supplementing with anyway. Aside from that it's easier to get adequate nutrition from plant-based diets than it is on the Standard American Diet.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/
https://bitesizevegan.org/the-crime-of-raising-vegan-kids-when-diet-is-deadly/
The question is not about what is possible, it is about what is common. Also, I am not saying the SAD is good or even better than vegan. Anyone trying to eat well is likely to make some of the same good choices, such as reducing refined sugars, dropping a portion of their ultra processed foods, and monitoring and meeting their protein needs. Being unable to hit your protein needs on a vegan diet is something an incautious person may experience, but supplementing protein or increasing protein components in your meals is manageable.
That all said, it takes extra work. Most people don't have the spare effort to cook at home for every meal, people are time and money poor and stressed beyond all reasonable limits, so we need to try to make some sort of plan that can actually be followed, not just some ideal. Is vegan possible? With effort and education it seems that some people can manage it, so at least some portion of people could do that. On the flip side if someone eats fish and chicken as their meat rather than beef have they not made progress from a bunch of ways? Definitely fewer carbon emissions. I don't claim to know the answer for what we should do but saying "do this perfect thing" seems counterproductive.
I don't blame you for not knowing any better, there's a lot of persistent myths and outright lies about veganism, plant-based lifestyles, and nutrition. But you are spreading misinformation again, about protein. Our society's obsession with protein has little to do with science, and a lot to do with marketing. In the first place the vast majority of people do not need nearly as much protein as they think they do. It's so easy to get adequate protein even on a plant-based diet, that as long as you're at least mostly eating real food and getting enough calories, you are getting enough protein without even having to worry about it.
Even the whole "plants don't have complete proteins" is a myth. Just about all plants have all essential amino acids. What the protein combining myth points to is that the amino acid ratios in plants are a little bit different than the ratios in our muscle tissues, with some plants being low in a key amino, and other plants being high in that amino but also low in another. Getting what we need is as easy as being sure to eat a variety of plants. A person does not even need to make sure they're eating rice and beans in the same meal - they could do just as well by either eating a larger helping of one or the other, and/or eating one and then the other at another time or day.
The big takeaway here is to consider that maybe your perspective on plant-based lifestyles is being informed in the same way as if someone who only ever ran Windows started trying to tell you what it's like to use Linux. Maybe it's worth checking out the perspectives of people who actually have experience with the thing and know what they're talking about.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DMwf_9wqWY0&pp=ygUqZXZlcnl0aGluZyB5b3Uga25vdyBhYm91dCBwcm90ZWluIGlzIHdyb25n
I understand that everyone has different circumstances that make a plant-based transition easier or harder, or maybe even entirely unfeasible, and that's okay. We're okay as long as we're doing what we can with what we have.
On the other hand consider trying to shift your perspective on it. I commented in another thread about the remarkable benefits of going plant-based for my depression, and the thing to understand here is that going plant-based can have near-miraculous benefits for a wide range of things like that. So consider the possibility that a lot of what might be making it hard to switch is that the consumption of animal products is keeping everyone in suppressed, unmotivated, lethargic, or even outright depressed states of mind.
It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but instead of seeing a plant-based transition as a burden, consider that working through the challenges might be just the medicine that a person needs to reach a state of mind where, say, things like home cooking begin to feel possible again.
Again I want to be clear - I know there are circumstances where it's not realistically possible for a person to go fully vegan, and not realistically possible for a person to do their own cooking. We should be seeking ways to fix that on a societal level. However what I'm telling you is that what everyone thinks is possible is being perceived through the lens of lifestyles that are making everything that much harder - working through that tough transition to being fully plant-based expands the range of what we think is possible. Life becomes significantly more doable on plants.
Oh, and for both health and ethics there is no meaningful difference between which particular animals you choose to eat. For example you're still progressing heart disease regardless of whether you're consuming 29 grams of saturated fat, or "only" 23 grams. And a chicken is every bit as capable of contemplating their own suffering as a cow is.