Feddit UK

alright, since i'm first up to comment, i'll start with an easy one

tiananmen square massacre denial should probably be banned or removed on sight.

i'm making this suggestion because there is a... particular... audience and demographic in the fediverse that for some reason, has issues with accepting this. i will not name this audience, because this same audience also likes to brigade posters that dare to stick their head up above the trenches and point out that actually, some of their takes might be verifiably wrong. i hope that not naming them reduces my chance of being detected, and then drawing targeted fire. one of us had to be the person to point it out, so i guess it's my turn.

by all means, debate casualty figures, sure. debate why there were protests, sure, that's not the thing i have issue. but if a poster is trying to sincerely argue that nothing happened, in my opinion, it's a strong indiciation that the poster is acting in bad faith

how to implement this as a rule? maybe i would go with "no denial of historically verified massacres"? it sounds obvious really, but if you don't spell it out, people can and will say "ahh but the mods didn't say i can't! 🥴"

i dunno how you want to go about it exactly, but yeah.

Key thing I think is no transphobia (or racism against GRT) For some reason they are the two things that still seem acceptable in UK online spaces and it's just depressing.

This is going to sound annoyingly vague, but I'd like to see some kind of rule on inflammatory comments/posts. By inflammatory, I mean they don't add to the discussion, but are just there to rile people up. An example would be this from the recent Rowling thread.

I'm not saying that these should be removed on sight, but if this is all a user does then they should probably be banned.

Hard to be black and white about it but I think you have to be transparent about whatever you do, i.e. offer a proper reason for every ban or run the risk of becoming the cliché power-tripping Reddit mod.

Also I'm always hesitant about any auto-word-filtering, it tends to treat users a bit like children. Trolls who really want to use slurs will find a way around them, and sometimes you want to refer to a particular word without having to asterisk it out like you're afraid of the internet police. You can refer to a bad word without invoking its meaning, we're all grown-ups here. That said I have no idea how easy that is to enforce, might be a lot less effort all round to just auto-remove the slurs!

Outside of what is genuinely illegal I think it is better that speech considered to be objectionable by the community remains visible so that our collective attitude towards those things are also visible. What I mean is I would rather see bigots hounded and debated than just banned... I don't think defaulting to the ban hammer is the way outside of specific safe spaces.

I think we should only really step in when people are being flat-out hateful, like actual nazi type crap

Do not antagonise other instances/communities

I'm proposing this because a lot of the drama within Lemmy has been caused by the diversity of different communities. Personally I'd like the option to see the entire federated universe, but if members of this instance act inappropriately in another instance it seems to all too quickly lead to defederation.

Personally hate speech should not be allowed. By hate speech I mean anything that promotes discrimination, hostility, or violence towards individuals or groups. I'm sure someone can word it better.

Also we should naturally not allow breaking of the law. No, i don't mean Piracy which is debatable, but clear cut things like discussions related to say cases that are currently in court.

Everything else is fair game. even though i may disagree with it. The community through vote based regulation will need to manage the rest.

Illegal stuff should be a hard rule. By that I mean calls to action and explicit hate speech should be aggressively removed. It puts the instance at risk.

Auto-filtering might be useful for catching especially egregious words. They're easy to bypass but I guess it should deter some trolling. But it could be tedious if it is overly sensitive. Is it going to block people posting or commenting? Does it let you know you've been caught?

I'm really not sure how well policing "political" topics would go. It's political by nature, so I think even coming up with rules will end up devolving into political discussion. It's probably easier to just say "no hate speech".

I believe that free speech shows people's true colours and allows you to see who to block and who to listen to.

We should listen to all opinions even if they're wrong and stupid.

I think its better to leave something up even if its offensive so long as its not spam.

I think any rule put in place will be challenged by people hoping to spread hate speech so there should be a degree of leeway with the context of something. In a similar vein I'm against outright banning certain words but instead banning particular uses.

Scone should be pronounced scone. Scon is unacceptable.

Please do not go down the line that I have just experienced from worldnews@lemmy.ml

Someone asked the question regarding a slur "the river to the sea" that is being bandied about by some. They could not understand why it is considered antisemitic. I gave an explanation and a link to a newspaper article. This got me a 2 month ban for being antisemitic.

My post questioning this here.

Just show some common sense when instigating bans. At the very least respond when someone questions a ban. And finally be prepared to accept a mistake has been made.

Personally, I think only nasty personal attacks on others and actual illegal speech. I don't like censorship, I think censoring opinions just pushes people to echo chambers. You may not agree with GC people, for instance, but deleting their comments just end up with people like Graham Linehan, stuck in their own echo chambers getting more and more extreme.