I am thinking about creating an outpost in Lemmy for Reddit’s r/moderatepolitics subreddit. Briefly, the goal of the subreddit is to bring together a variety of viewpoints with rules that are mostly limited to not attacking other users and some operational rules (e.g. no editorialized headlines). These loose rules have allowed us to bring together voices from across the political spectrum for discussions that usually get stuck in echo chambers.
When I was looking through the Code of Conduct for the lemmy.ml instance, I noticed that it bans “oppressive” speech. That raised an immediate red flag for me. That term is so vague and broad as to leave an immense amount of discretionary power to an admin making a moderation decision. I know several of the admins on this instance are very left wing. Nothing wrong with that, but many on the left hold a rather expansive view of what oppressive speech is that includes even moderate or center-right discourse, never mind further right.
Is there any room to build this type of community on lemmy.ml? Or will we be forced to choose between our own instance or living with the threat of intervention that labels some elements of community discourse as oppressive?
The easiest one to point to is not acknowledging trans people’s gender identity. That doesn’t come up that often in practice, but it happens. More likely would be a discussion over, say, trans people in sports. Any discussion that includes voices from across the political spectrum would likely include statements that admins on this instance could deem oppressive.
Even on Reddit, we have had trouble. Currently we decided to put a moratorium on the entire trans topic because of intervention by Reddit admins. We felt that it was unfair for one side of a discussion to be walking on egg shells the whole time. It’s again a problem of the Reddit rules in the area being too vague.
We wouldn’t allow a transdebate community of course, as that would inevitably lead to “debates” over whether trans ppl should exist or not, like on the bigoted reddit alts.
But I could see maybe an asktrans community, where you could ask their opinions and how they feel about certain things like gendered sports, etc.
So basically people in the right started to not acknowledge trans people’s gender and your solution was to ban the discussion regarding trans people because otherwise people in the left would be mad that people in the right are being bigots? I don’t know, I think I would prefer to just not let the bigots talk, to be honest…
It’s an interesting example. There is no easy solution and no single right answer. It’s quite a hot topic at the moment so people should be able to discuss it. I would say “make a subreddit/topic just for this discussion. People who are genuinly confused / in disagreement can go into their box to go figure it out, and people who are offended can easily avoid it”.
Banning discussion of a whole subject is so dangerous. It’s maybe the worst thing you can do as a mod.
We would rather have let the discussion go forward. It’s a worthy discussion that needs discourse across political boundaries. There are so many misunderstandings by cis people, especially more conservative people. However, making it difficult for a lot of people to express their opinion was not going to lead to a true discussion with a wide variety of viewpoints. Also, those misunderstandings need to be posted to get rebuttals.
What’s the solution then? What I suggested or something different?
The solution you suggested wouldn’t work if admins (not community-level moderators) were constantly dipping in and censoring conservatives. Otherwise, we’d just let the conversation go ahead.
Is there any better solution though?
TBH I imagine the mod of c/transDebate would need to be more tolerant of conservative and other opinions. So would the users. But that’s the nature of debate. If you find it “oppressive” you leave that community/topic and never think about the subject again. Or else you can create a c/transDebateButNoConservativeOpinionsPlease.
Right, I’m thinking about issues with the instance-level admins, since the potential conflict is with the instance-level code of conduct.
Got it. like on reddit r/twoxchromosones reputedly has very specific and strict restrictions on speech. so does (probably) r/askhistorians and others. The mods (and users) want only certain kinds of discussions in certain subreddits / communities. Sounds completely reasonable.