Hello World,

following feedback we have received in the last few days, both from users and moderators, we are making some changes to clarify our ToS.

Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance. We are not located in US, which means different laws apply. As written in our ToS, we’re primarily subject to Dutch, Finnish and German laws. Additionally, it is our discretion to further limit discussion that we don’t consider tolerable. There are plenty other websites out there hosted in US and promoting free speech on their platform. You should be aware that even free speech in US does not cover true threats of violence.

Having said that, we have seen a lot of comments removed referring to our ToS, which were not explicitly intended to be covered by our ToS. After discussion with some of our moderators we have determined there to be both an issue with the ambiguity of our ToS to some extent, but also lack of clarity on what we expect from our moderators.

We want to clarify that, when moderators believe certain parts of our ToS do not appropriately cover a specific situation, they are welcome to bring these issues up with our admin team for review, escalating the issue without taking action themselves when in doubt. We also allow for moderator discretion in a lot of cases, as we generally don’t review each individual report or moderator action unless they’re specifically brought to admin attention. This also means that content that may be permitted by ToS can at the same time be violating community rules and therefore result in moderator action. We have added a new section to our ToS to clarify what we expect from moderators.

We are generally aiming to avoid content organizing, glorifying or suggesting to harm people or animals, but we are limiting the scope of our ToS to build the minimum framework inside which we all can have discussions, leaving a broader area for moderators to decide what is and isn’t allowed in the communities they oversee. We trust the moderators judgement and in cases where we see a gross disagreement between moderatos and admins’ criteria we can have a conversation and reach an agreement, as in many cases the decision is case-specific and context matters.

We have previously asked moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification when this was suggested in context of murder or other violent crimes. Following a discussion in our team we want to clarify that we are no longer requesting moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification in the context of violent crimes when the crime in question already happened. We will still consider suggestions of jury nullification for crimes that have not (yet) happened as advocation for violence, which is violating our terms of service.

As always, if you stumble across content that appears to be violating our site or community rules, please use Lemmys report functionality. Especially when threads are very active, moderators will not be able to go through every single comment for review. Reporting content and providing accurate reasons for reports will help moderators deal with problematic content in a reasonable amount of time.

  • @NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    724 months ago

    Hmm, maybe a change of scenery is needed. .this place is getting stupid. I haven’t seen a single comment actually advocating for violence, mostly just people who aren’t sad that this happened. Your mods have also demonstrated a lack of impartial judgemental in the past, and it’s starting to show.

    • @ZeroCool@slrpnk.net
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      404 months ago

      I haven’t seen a single comment actually advocating for violence

      It’s almost as if the mods are doing their jobs…

    • @OpenStars@discuss.online
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      64 months ago

      I haven’t seen a single comment actually advocating for violence

      Re-read the OP, particularly the third paragraph but also definitely the sixth - it covers exactly this topic.

    • @GBU_28@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      There’s posts all over with CEO faces and names and pretty transparent text related to the “adjuster” finding them.

      I get the motivation but it is pretty clear they are saying “hey go kill these specific people”

      And countless comments, even in this post saying “all X deserve to die”

      Now before people assume me an apologist, my preferred solution would be letting Bernie, AOC, and Warren off the leash to criminalize the profiteering rampant in our society, while nationalizing all basics such as basic shelter, healthcare, education, advocacy, and nutrition.

      A society is measured by it’s poorest/weakest.

    • Chozo
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      1044 months ago

      I haven’t seen a single comment actually advocating for violence

      Probably because they’ve been removed by the mods.

    • Cornpop
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      -94 months ago

      Agree. And I’d we can get more free speech I think it’s time to relocate things.

    • Flying Squid
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      474 months ago

      I doubt that’s true, but if it is, you can see plenty of them in the Lemmy.world modlog over the past few days. It is a public modlog.

  • @Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    624 months ago

    My takeaway? It seems like the admins tried making it a banned topic, but the pushback was so great that they eventually said “Ok, ok, murder is bad. Going forward, no murder…but just this once.”

  • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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    4 months ago

    At what point is supporting the prosecution of this assassin advocating for violence? The social murder done by the CEO is so many orders of magnitude greater, and the state will do violence to the killer to defend the industry’s right to do social violence.

    Nobody was having this conversation when people rightly cheered the deposing of Assad. Guess what? That involved violence, a lot of it. That was state-backed violence too though, so I guess we’re all just fine with it.

    The state calls its own violence “law” and that of the people “crime”.

    I guess lemmy.world is happy to just go along with whatever the state wants. It’s just insulting that you pretend it’s about “violence” and you expect people to believe you.

  • @SeattleRain@lemmy.world
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    -54 months ago

    Too late, I’m already out the door. You assume no one understands the nuances of hosting in a country without free speech laws as liberal as the US.

    The truth is most people do. Your moderators’ histrionic response was so obviously from a place of emotion, and can recall numerous times your mods have allowed speech that was similar but didn’t act because they weren’t personally offended.

    I think you fail to understand that your audience is international. That you let your moderators power trip not from an abundance of caution but because it’s more convenient for you.

    • DarkThoughts
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      -34 months ago

      You assume no one understands the nuances of hosting in a country without free speech laws as liberal as the US.

      Or they may just don’t care. I’ve seen countless of people who not just justify the murder, but also think it should be an inspiration for what should be happen. How people can’t wait to see rich people get murdered. How this should be the new norm and how to fix the system. Which I find extra funny when the same country just elected a person of the same making as the guy who got shot (and now people try to claim that everyone’s on board with justifying the murder, including maggats).

      • @OpenStars@discuss.online
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        14 months ago

        Don’t underestimate the amount of disinformation propaganda pushing even in such a small platform as here, potentially by people radicalized elsewhere but have now decided to bring it here. Not everyone is a bot (nobody here that I know of even, I’m just bringing up the infamous phrase), yet not everyone may be fully cognizant of the reasons behind their own beliefs either.

      • @Sonicdemon86@lemmy.world
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        54 months ago

        Over half of America didn’t vote as they see that both democrats and republicans take money from the rich and use it to make the middle class disappear. If it was easier to vote and we got rid of first past the pole, more people would vote. But alas both sides want first past the post as it keeps them in power. So only small minority that did vote did this, and most of America didn’t want either side. But what you gonna do when both sides don’t want you to live. Yes one side is extremely worse, but it is hard to see that when prices go up and your family might die due to higher ups not caring about the help.

        • DarkThoughts
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          14 months ago

          No, I’m sorry, but this is straight up Russian disinformation and non voters are even dumber than those voting for Trump, since they automatically enable the bad actors, which is how you end up with despots like Putin btw who pushes for this exact kind of “both sides are the same” & “you can’t trust either side / truth” type bullshit. Voting starts not at the presidential level, but at the local one. You can vote everyone in & out, and if there’s truly no candidate to your liking (even though you should AT THE VERY LEAST vote for the lesser evil in any case) go into politics yourself. In a democracy, the voters are the ones who are responsible for making changes. But of course, if you elect people like Trump (not just Trump himself), then yes, you end up with a broken system that gets more and more dismantled - until it is gone and you truly don’t need to bother voting anymore. And that’s the point where you’re at now, thanks to people’s wrong vote, or lack of a vote. Both cases are responsible for this, dooming not just the US, but the rest of the world, thanks to Trumps (anti) climate policies.

    • Chozo
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      244 months ago

      I think you fail to understand that your audience is international.

      I think you fail to understand that being international means that your American-centric views take a backseat for once in your life.

        • xapr [he/him]
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          4 months ago

          Look through this list and sort by monthly active users (MAU): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

          The server location info doesn’t seem 100% accurate, but it should still help. I would suggest either the instance I use, lemmy.sdf.org (run by an American, technology-oriented non-profit org), or perhaps lemmy.zip, which also looks good - I started looking into it but haven’t fully vetted it yet.

          By the way, I don’t think that being in a larger instance has much benefit, by the way. In fact, I tried one of the larger ones and found that it suffered performance-wise, so I went back. You can get pretty much everything from every other Lemmy instance, especially one that doesn’t block and is not blocked by other instances (lemmy.sdf.org also applies here).

          Edit: lemmy.zip seems to be subject to the laws of the UK, according to their code of conduct.

          • Blaze (he/him)
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            24 months ago

            https://legal.lemmy.zip/docs/terms_of_service/

            The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the United Kingdom and the European Union.

            https://discuss.online/ is US based and just defederated hexbear

            By the way, I don’t think that being in a larger instance has much benefit, by the way.

            Content accessibility can be an issue due to the way instances only fetch remote communities if a local user is subscribed. Also, having a larger userbase usually means that the instance has been around long enough to show some good track record for the instance

            • xapr [he/him]
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              4 months ago

              Thanks, I edited the post and noted that lemmy.zip was UK-based after I originally posted.

              https://discuss.online/ is US based and just defederated hexbear

              That’s a negative for me. I don’t want anyone blocking instances on my behalf unless those instances are doing blatantly illegal stuff.

              Content accessibility can be an issue due to the way instances only fetch remote communities if a local user is subscribed. Also, having a larger userbase usually means that the instance has been around long enough to show some good track record for the instance

              Yeah, that’s true. I did use some of the great Lemmy community directory sites to find some communities that weren’t already subscribed from my instance. I understand that better community discoverability is planned for upcoming Lemmy versions.

              • Blaze (he/him)
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                24 months ago

                That’s a negative for me. I don’t want anyone blocking instances on my behalf unless those instances are doing blatantly illegal stuff.

                In that case, there’s https://lemmy.today/ . Their blocklist is empty, and they’re from Oregon.

                We prefer to recommend https://discuss.online/ for new joiners, so that they don’t have to stumble upon hexbear from their very first minutes on the platform. For more advanced users, it’s a different story.

                • xapr [he/him]
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                  04 months ago

                  I still prefer lemmy.sdf.org. They also have an empty blocklist (from what I can tell - the version of Lemmy they’re on I don’t think splits it off into a separate tab), they’re also from Oregon from what I recall, have 2.5x more monthly active users than lemmy.today, and they’re a non-profit that’s larger than and longer than only their Lemmy instance.

                  Again, I don’t get the hexbear issue. I wish someone could explain to me what the problem actually is.

        • @OpenStars@discuss.online
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          74 months ago

          If the last criteria is defederation from hexbear.net, then there is strong hope for Discuss.Online. Though I don’t know if they would want to host a political community that would involve such controversial topics. They probably would be welcoming to like an AskUSA one.

          • @Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            34 months ago

            I’m on dbzer0 which is federated with hexbear and I honestly haven’t noticed anything bad from there. I always heard horor stories about it before I signed up here but it has actually been remarkably tame. I mean, they’re obviously leftist but I’ve seen far far worse tankie shit from just lemmy.ml.

            • @OpenStars@discuss.online
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              4 months ago

              They can be fun to talk with. They can also be extremely harassing, though tbf more for people who don’t know what !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net is all about - i.e. who have not read its sidebar text. And yet, many apps (like Voyager, and the basic mobile browser web UI) do not show that? Like porn, it’s mainly only bad if you stumble upon it unawares - e.g. while at work - and would have to opt-out of it. Which, if Lemmy was that way, then many people would have to simply cease checking Lemmy while at work on those devices.

              Many of the users on lemmy.ml who are seen harassing people the most outside of the actual Hexbear communities are self-admittedly alts of Hexbear accounts. Consent means nothing to them, apparently, so when hexbear.net was defederated from Lemmy.World a year ago, they simply shifted over to an account that wasn’t blocked. Like an incel who will never cease telling you what a “nice man” he is, they simply WILL NOT stop.

              Which is all the more sad considering how many legitimately nice conversations go on daily inside of the many other Hexbear communities. But those conversations aren’t why Lemmy.World and so many other instances chose to defederate from them. In the post whose link I sent earlier are a bunch of other links where each instance makes its own determination and offers links to exact posts and comments that they felt justified their decision to defederate, if you want to read through some examples. Tbf many have since been deleted by their creators, though that should tell you something right there, about the transparency and integrity of Hexbear users who when blamed don’t always retort with the truth so much as do whatever they hope will work so as to be able to dunk on people (and thus when caught, lie, even the instance admins, to other instance admins even!?!?!? which I also put a link to that event as well in that post).

              TLDR: I get it, it is not literally every single comment, user, and/or community that does it, but it is there, if you spend more time looking. There are exact links there if you want help finding them.

            • @OpenStars@discuss.online
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              04 months ago

              Woah.

              Ofc it won’t stop alts from leaking through - nothing can stop that - but in fighting against spam, every little bit helps.

              img

              Will you now be using it as your primary instance recommendation on Reddit? There is perhaps literally nothing better for that, so this is fantastic news that may help even the non-USA parts of the Fediverse by allowing the bringing in of more users who will feel safer to talk than they would have before, due to harassment for having a USA centrist (which let’s be real translates into a global and especially from the EU perspective, right-leaning) viewpoint. Comics, memes, hardware, woodworking or more techie Maker stuff and so many other hobbies, I hope to see more discussions about them all, with this helping people on Reddit to now be less resistant to joining.

              🎉🥳💐🎇

      • @SeattleRain@lemmy.world
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        94 months ago

        It’s an American story, effecting 100’s of millions of Americans directly. So no, not this this time. See a therapist to work out all this reflexive anti Americaism

        • Chozo
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          24 months ago

          It’s an American story, effecting 100’s of millions of Americans directly.

          And it’s not an American server. So live with it. You’re not entitled to do whatever you want in whatever space you want just because you’re American and have feelings about something.

      • @SeattleRain@lemmy.world
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        114 months ago

        Being happy that a man responsible for the deaths of thousands is an “American Centric View” now.

        And don’t call yourself “world” if you cannot reasonably accommodate a wide rage of views. Call yourself “Dutch” and make your limitations clear.

        You world sycophants want the benefits of being the authoritative instance without the responsibility.

      • @hono4kami@pawb.social
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        34 months ago

        The USDefaultism is already strong back in reddit, but sadly it seems to be worse on Lemmy. Tired of seeing folks from US acting like they’re the main characters, kinda puts me off using this platform

    • Jesus
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      4 months ago

      Some of the mods have always been on top of removing posts promoting / glorifying violence against others. Other mods have not. This is a hodgepodge mix of unpaid volunteers, helping on a platform that has very very rudimentary administrative/ moderation tools with very poor systems of notifications and reporting.

      If you think the are opportunities for things to run smoother, I would recommend helping out or evangelizing for more people to help out if you’re too busy.

      Simply being mad at the admins doesn’t help - especially when they’re trying navigate nuance and a janky platform with good intent.

    • Flying Squid
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      104 months ago

      Nice of you to not give a shit about the potential for other people to get into legal trouble so you can get angry on the internet. Enjoy your new instance.

      • Blaze (he/him)
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        04 months ago

        As a side-note, based on the amount of hate speech some instances still allow, it seems like there isn’t really any threat to this kind of discourse online on a platform that small.

        • Flying Squid
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          64 months ago

          You mean .world? I don’t think it’s your call or my call or anyone else’s call when it comes to whether or not other people should risk legal trouble for the benefit of internet bitching.

        • Flying Squid
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          134 months ago

          How would I know? And why do you think other people should risk it on your behalf even if it hasn’t happened yet? You have to follow the laws of the country your server is in or you put yourself at risk. That’s just how the world works.

          Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else who isn’t actually paying for and maintaining the .world server should be telling them that they should risk themselves for us. That is really not our call.

            • Flying Squid
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              74 months ago

              Again, it is not your call or my call or anyone else’s call about who should put themselves at legal risk, especially when Lemmy is just people fucking around on the internet. “It hasn’t happened before” is not going to convince someone who is already not willing to take that risk to go ahead and take it. For one thing, there’s always a first time when it comes to a law.

              • @intresteph@discuss.online
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                44 months ago

                You’re never going to stop us from celebrating the death of a murderer. And by doing so, you side with the insurance companies. You sound like a pig in plain clothes.

                • Flying Squid
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                  44 months ago

                  Good thing I’m not trying to stop you from doing that. And even if I was, there are how many hundreds or even thousands of other places on the internet where you could do that? So why are you so concerned about one specific Fediverse server?

  • @Baron1avAB0rn@lemmy.world
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    904 months ago

    Broseph, I can’t have sympathy. The income inequality won’t let me. People aren’t cheering the unaliving necessarily, but the fact that one of these people actually answered for their crimes, in whatever form that took. Because courts weren’t gonna make him.

  • @greencactus@lemmy.world
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    104 months ago

    I really like your post and the changes! Obviously it is a very divisive and polarized event. In my opinion, the lines you have drawn help in creating a productive discussion environment. I am very happy to have an admin team who can deal so well with this situation - thank you for your work and this post! I sincerely appreciate it.

  • @inv3r510n@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’m gonna have to switch instances because of all the terrible shit the US does, free speech is the one thing we truly get right.

    And I just want to let you know what free speech is when it comes to violence:

    • yelling fire in a crowded theatre when there is none: not protected

    • celebrating the death of a CEO who deserved it: protected (the deserved it is irrelevant to speech, but fuck that guy)

    • saying you wish other unnamed CEOs will be killed next: protected unless there’s evidence of planning and ability to carry out murdering a specific CEO

    • saying you wish a specific famous person be killed, such as Elon musk: grey area, depends on if there’s evidence of planning and ability to carry out. Public figures are a higher bar to reach than the lay people.

    • saying you wish to kill your neighbor John who’s not famous: not protected regardless of planning or ability, it’s assault

    • saying you want to kill any person and having evidence of planning and a method to do so: not protected

    • saying you wish for a whole group to die: protected if there’s no evidence of planning and ability to carry it out. One could theoretically march around with signs that say death to fags and that’s totally legal. Example: Westboro Baptist Church picketing funerals with signs such as that.

    Edit: also jury nullification is not violence. You’re going with the assumption that the assassin is guilty of a crime. Is it really a crime to murder a mass social murderer? Clearly us Americans aren’t too bent out of shape that this CEO is now resting in piss.

    Edit 2: would it be murder to kill Hitler after he started gassing Jews? Is it not because Hitler had an ideology that Jews were subhuman and to be exterminated? What’s different about this CEO? Sure he didn’t target specific groups like Hitler did. But his ideology is money above all, and he didn’t care how many lives he took to make that money. Why is this any different? This is the industrialization of death. This is a genocide against undesirables. Hitler killed disabled people (and LGBTQ) first before moving onto the Jews. Most of America is just numbers on a spreadsheet and when we become too expensive and cut into profits too much we become socially murdered. It’s not a crime when the rich do it to us (for profit!!!) but it’s a crime when we fight back? You Europeans are clueless!

  • Crunk
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    44 months ago

    Me who just reads the news feeds I sub to and not noticing EU Drama, or that I’m on a Non-US Hosted Website all this time. LOL

    So you mean to tell me this is not a Motorhead Fansite??? Well color me red

  • @UmeU@lemmy.world
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    144 months ago

    So discussion of jury nullification is ok as a general topic. If someone mentions JN in the context of a crime that has not yet been committed then that’s not ok. If the crime has already been committed then that’s ok. If the crime is not violent in nature then we can discuss JN, and if we are just having a general conversation about JN that’s ok too.

    Specifically, the concern is that talking about JN in the context of some hypothetical violent crime that has not yet been committed could be interpreted as advocating for violence.

    This sounds pretty stupid so far, but my question is then, why wrap the ToS around specifically jury nullification? Why not just reiterate the ‘no advocating for violence’ policy.

    If someone is advocating for violence, then adding on some point about jury nullification is irrelevant, they are already breaking the rule.

  • @Gammelfisch@lemmy.world
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    134 months ago

    The Netherlands, Finland and Germany are OK with me. As long as the MAGATs, Russia and China have nothing to do with Lemmy, I will carry on.

  • @Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    324 months ago

    Divisive topic and comment section, but IMO that feels like a fair change. No stance on this topic will ever not be divisive, but I think this is probably the most impartial stance that could be taken