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The Lemmy.World Terms of Service now in effect (legal.lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Hello World!

We've made some changes today, and we'd like to announce that our Code of Conduct is no longer in effect. We now have a new Terms of Service, in effect starting from today(October 19, 2023).

The "LAST REVISION DATE:" on the page also signifies when the page was last edited, and it is updated automatically. Details of specific edits may be viewed by following the "Page History" reference at the bottom of the page. All significant edits will also be announced to our users.

The new Terms of Service can be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/

In this post our community mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.

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[-] HardlightCereal@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

I see you removed the rules against transphobia and clarified that content can't be reported if it's not against the new rules. That sucks

[+] clueless_stoner@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

[deleted]

[-] fiat_lux@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago

For what I expect are similar reasons the list of forbidden image and text content gets so detailed:

5.0.6: No visual content depicting executions, murder, suicide, dismemberment, visible innards, excessive gore, or charred bodies. No content depicting, promoting or enabling animal abuse. No erotic or otherwise suggestive media or text content featuring depictions of rape, sexual assault, or non-consensual violence. All other violent content requires a NSFW tag.

I now know from this list that posting Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" would be problematic even though it wouldn't occur to me that medieval illustrations of fictional torture would break the rules. And I now no longer know whether this instance considers the usage of variously themed slurs as against the rules, especially in contexts where they're not direct personal user attacks.

What is socially acceptable obviously varies widely from culture to culture, and definitely instance to instance. The brief list from the previous version helped me to identify the overall culture of the instance to figure out if I would be welcome here. Now instead I'm just not sure if a sweet Aztec decorated human skull from c. 1350CE is allowed because it is half literal human remains, half turquoise, haematite and gold mosaic.

I appreciate that finding the balance here is very difficult. It may just be because it's late and I'm tired, but I feel less certain about what the expectations are with this version than I did the previous. I hope you will consider returning a bit more detail to section 5.

[-] leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 year ago

That statement is a bit like someone saying 'all lives matter' in response to people saying 'black lives matter' after another black person is gunned down.

[-] wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one -3 points 1 year ago

Did you guys talk to a lawyer before doing this? Cause I think a lawyer would explain to you exactly why.

You probably should have talked to a lawyer before trying to draft up a legal document.

[-] BendyLemmy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Should there also be entries to cover Ginger, Blonde, Black, or a million other specific labels which could be targeted?

Isn't singling out Transphobia a form of predjudice? Shouild we also add to the list a few thousand other terms which some people find 'edgy'?

[-] leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 year ago

There are very obviously groups of people who are targeted for violence, threats, harassment and abuse based solely on who they are. Ginger, blonde and black haired people don't experience this.

By making it explicit in a ToS or set of rules that attacking these groups of people is against the rules, the Admins could've made those users feel just a little bit safer and welcome on their server. Removing those explicit rules makes them, by contrast, feel unsafer and less welcome. That's one of things .world admin team have achieved with this change.

[-] Xylinna@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

This is an understandable concern and was certainly not the intent to make users feel unsafe or less welcome. We are going to look at adding something to cover this.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I'm not subscribed to lemmy.world but I got a proposal on a way to handle this. Here it is:

5.0.1: Before and when using the website, remember you will be interacting with actual, real people and communities. You cannot use Lemmy.World to attack other groups of people, regardless of their sex, sexuality and gender, ethnicity and race, country of origin and residence, religious affiliation or lack of, etc. Every one of our users has a right to browse and interact with the website and all of its contents free of treatment such as harassment, bullying, violation of privacy or threats of violence.

I believe that this should be enough to clarify to those most people that no, bigotry is not allowed in your instance.

[-] leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think that's good but protecting religion is questionable to me. I'm not saying its OK to attack people based on their religion but religion isn't a property of a person in the way their ethnicity or sexuality is, it's merely an opinion someone holds. If your wording is adopted, it'd be nice to see the difference between attacking who someone is and an opinion someone holds made clear.

Also needs to reference (dis)ability IMO.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

The groups listed as example (notice the "etc.") are up to the admins, I'm suggesting mostly how to word it. It's easy to include/exclude one if they so desire.

That said, I do think that "religious affiliation or lack of" should be included. It might boil down to opinions + a bunch of epistemic statements, but it's consistently a source of persecution.

If your wording is adopted, it’d be nice to see the difference between attacking who someone is and an opinion someone holds made clear.

Personally I believe that this is usually easy - you look at the target of the claim. For example:

"[religion] is full of bullshit" - probably attacking the opinions or epistemic claims, thus probably fine
"[religion] is full of arseholes" - unless contextualised otherwise, probably attacking the individuals there, thus probably not fine

This is also up to the admins here though, not me.

Also needs to reference (dis)ability IMO.

I understand where you're coming from with this, but note that complains about ableism, in social media, are often shielding abled people against criticism, not disabled people from prejudice. Stuff like:

[Alice] Bob! You're being a moron. Don't do this.
[Bob] Alice dis is ableism!

[-] leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

That's good to hear.

[-] Lemminary@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Should there also be entries to cover ... a million other specific labels

Is there significant and active discrimination happening to those "millions" of other specific labels where people show up dead on the news in the majority of countries and that exhibit targeted hatred online? Can you point out a single example for a ginger or a blonde being killed because of the color of their hair? Are there statistics about this from various countries?

singling out Transphobia a form of predjudice

No, that's very disingenuous and sounds like rhetoric someone would use to ease up the rules about transphobia. I'd argue that what you're doing is a form of semantic manipulation.