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gedaliyah @lemmy.world
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A few words about Bots and Civility

Given the state of technology, politics, and social media, we all share fears about interacting with bots, or having our social media manipulated. We know that this is happening on other platforms that are driven by engagement/profit models. However, Lemmy is about people – like you! While this platform is not immune to bots, we have several layers of protections in place to remove bots and trolls as quickly as possible.

Some of these operations are performed automatically at a server level, and you likely never see them at all. Some rely on the reporting system and the common sense of our userbase – that’s you again! If you believe that another user is a bot, please report it and our mod team will investigate. Please keep in mind that real people really do have radically different points of view. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a bot or troll. Do not abuse the report system.

We encourage the expression and discussion of different points of view, as long as the discussion is civil and in good faith. It is not a civil form of disagreement to call another user a bot or paid actor in posts or comments. It is a personal attack, which is a violation of our first rule. We have updated the language of the rule in our sidebar to reflect this. Our first priority is for the safety of our users to express their ideas. Thanks!

  1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

53 comments

  • If you believe that another user is a bot, please report it and our mod team will investigate. Please keep in mind that real people really do have radically different points of view. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a bot or troll. Do not abuse the report system.

    What about users who clearly aren't literal bots, but seem clearly to be posting in bad faith? I feel like there's going to be a huge grey area between "this needs mod intervention" and "there's nothing hinky about this user's posting"

    I completely get the reason for the rule, as it's not a real productive accusation and there's no way to know. I'm one of the people that talk about the shills a lot, but I actually make a deliberate effort (probably without universal success) to draw a distinction between "there are shills here" versus "I think you are being dishonest in some way, and here is why" versus "you are a shill".

    Banning the third sounds pretty sensible. Are the first two statements still allowed? Or are those considered uncivil also?

    It is blatantly obvious to me that particular users on Lemmy are being some kind of dishonest about their motives. So like an example: Swearing that you want the Democrats to win the election, and you're bringing up bad things about Biden as constructive criticism / so he can fix it and thus not lose the election, but also publishing objectively false disinformation about the Democrats on a very regular, like absurdly regular basis. There are a lot of users who have that weird type of disconnect or other reasons to specifically think they are propaganda accounts of some description. I think it significantly distorts the discussion here in a way which is very much not a good thing.

    I actually don't see it being super common that people jump to the accusation of someone being a shill as soon as there's a disagreement. I do think there's such a clear presence of some kind of shilling effort that it's, more or less, universally accepted that it's happening and distorting the discourse. Are we still allowed to talk about it?

    Again, while I completely get the reasons for the rule... I feel like a lot of this stuff is hard for mods to be the ones to make mod-action decisions about because it's impossible for anyone with any level of powers to know which users are being honest about who they are. Upvote bots and things are one thing, but I actually don't see that happening all that much (maybe because the mods are on it any time it happens). Just someone making a real account and posting propaganda 10x per day, though... are we saying the mods are going to let that happen (because it's not a bot account) and we the normal users are not allowed to call out those users as doing anything, if in our opinion they're doing it for purposes of propaganda?

    • I banned some of the most obvious and prolific shills from my instance and there was a small but noticeable drop in server CPU load. Their posts are not the cause, it's all the comments on their posts and the votes on all of that. Those are being discarded instead of processed.

      Their effect should not be underestimated.

      • Is this Beehaw?

        I remember seeing the defederation from Lemmy.world announcement, saying (as I remember it) that as much as they weren’t happy about taking that step, the flood of unwanted garbage was getting too overwhelming for any other realistic approach. I thought to myself, whoa that’s weird. Then I hung out on Lemmy.world for a while and said oooh this is what they were talking about, this is fuckin unpleasant.

        Dude the tankies when I first joined Lemmy I thought were awesome; I went in and argued with them about the Ukraine war. I actually learned a bunch of stuff although not exactly what they were attempting to teach me. This relentless tide of single comments always on the same handful of talking points is something entirely different.

    • Most of what you describe would be a case by case basis. This post applies specifically to calling another user a bot or a shill. Pointing out intellectual dishonesty or hypocrisy can be a part of normal discourse and can be done in a way that respects the civility of the conversation. Some of what you describe could be in violation of other community rules, depending on the details.

      The best thing to do if you're unsure about a particular situation is to report it, and mods will review it. You can always message one of us about a situation if you are not sure or require additional clarification. People are allowed to disagree with one another, even vehemently, as long as they do so within the rules of the community.

      • Hm

        Last question I guess; do you feel that misinformation or propaganda is any kind of issue on Lemmy right now? Like if you look at the posts and comments, does the overall conversation “look right” to you in that regard?

    • You are the reason this rule is necessary.

      • Caution, I’m gonna take this way too seriously and write a big super-serious response:

        I would be curious how far you have to go back in my history to find an example of me actually calling someone a bot or paid actor. I would bet that you get sick of the process before finding one. You will probably find me calling someone out on dishonesty or accuse them of being a propaganda account of some description, but even that I think you’d have to go back a couple weeks at least.

        I’m actually very careful in what I say about this issue as regards any specific user I’m talking to, for exactly the reasons laid out in the post - because it’s not productive to the conversation to get in a personal pissing match with any specific user or accuse them of things that there’s no way to prove or disprove anyway. I am human and get irritated and post inflammatory or personal attacks that I should not - and in particular I am extremely irritated that this platform seems overrun with propaganda which is distorting the conversation - but at least 90% of the time, I engage with the bad faith accounts purely on the merits of their arguments (which seems like a more productive way anyway). And, the other 10%, unless I’m really in a bad mood about something I will make some level of effort to measure my words about it a little.

        Like I say I won’t claim to get it perfectly right. And I like the narrowly-applied version of the rule which is described in the post. I am just very curious about the exact location of any applications of it that might go outside of that narrow wording, though, hence my questions and me giving some context for them. Because yes, I am curious how much of what I say might be a problem that the application of this rule might become the necessary solution to.

      • Attack the argument, not the person.

        Pretty sure that's a Rule 1 ban for you there.

  • Good idea to make it official, I'll float the idea of applying it to Politics and World News as well.

    • Do you mean float it with the users, or float it with the other moderators?

      • Other moderators. We already know how the users feel, lots of reports on it even though it doesn't technically break the current rules.

53 comments