See crosspost(s) for more discussion:
This is the first big step in the process to develop comprehensive guidelines for the Fedecan non-profit and the various platforms.
While this will mostly involve converting tacit knowledge and experience into an explicit written form, we expect that this process will inevitably bring up some points of disagreement on the best way to deal with different issues. We ask everyone participating in these discussions to please contribute constructively and in good faith. We encourage you to bring up any concerns or issues you have with the proposed structure and drafted guidelines, so that we can work together to fix them early on. However, in order to keep a productive environment for those discussions, we will be pruning any comment chains that devolve into personal attacks, slap fights, etc.
To help ground your feedback, consider these thought experiments when evaluating a potential guideline:
- Veil of ignorance: Would it still feel fair to you if you switched places with someone else on the platform (ex. a new user, a moderator, an admin, a member of a vulnerable group, etc.)?
- Equal Applicability: These rules will be enforced uniformly on everyone. A poorly written rule that helps “your side” today, can easily harm “your side” in the future as circumstances change.
The full guidelines, including governance details like the annual review cycle, can be found on the website: https://fedecan.ca/en/guidelines/
We plan to structure the guidelines as follows:
Tier 1: Fedecan Rules
Internal Conduct
These rules apply to Fedecan team members (directors, officers, admins, and anyone with elevated access). They set expectations for how team members should act.
Universal Rules
These are the baseline rules that apply to every user on every Fedecan platform. They cover the things that are prohibited by Canadian law (threats, hate speech, CSAM, non-consensual intimate imagery) as well as universal policy rules (privacy/doxxing, harassment, fraud, content that could cause harm, labelling of sensitive content, etc.).
Tier 2: Platform-Specific
Each platform has different functionality and norms, so this is where we can be more specific with the rules. The threadiverse platforms (lemmy.ca, piefed.ca, sh.itjust.works) share similar rules around community creation, moderation, vote manipulation, and content labelling. Pixelfed has its own rules tailored to its platform.
Tier 3: Community-Level Rule Templates
These are optional templates that communities can link to, or use as a starting point for their own rules. The idea is that moderators can point users to a clearly written explanation of why a rule exists, and any relevant exceptions, rather than trying to fit everything into the sidebar. Additionally, if many communities are enforcing a particular rule in the same way, then users will have an easier time understanding and following them.
The post title standards template has been drafted, and we plan to add more as the need arises. I have a few others that are in the works, but they have some overlap with the other sections, so I thought that it would be better to let people discuss first.
That is fair feedback. I was actually intentional with how I wrote that section:
My intent with that paragraph was to point out that our guidelines and enforcement may differ from how other jurisdictions handle similar content. The best way I thought to describe that was that as a Canadian team, those decisions will be guided by the social/cultural/legal frameworks that we are most familiar with, one of which is the Charter.
While doing the research for this, I came across the guidelines of some other platforms that explicitly tie their rules to the Charter. However, I didn’t want to do that. While the Charter does offer protections that other parts of the world don’t have, there is also plenty of academic discussion and criticism about the Charter and its limitations. It is a product of the political moment when it was created, and while it can shape some aspects of how a modern online platform should be run, there are going to be gaps that we need to address ourselves.
A related example is our Tier 1 Rule 2. We start with how the Criminal Code defines an “identifiable group”, but extend it to any group that a reasonable person would recognize as a target of hatred. The list on the Criminal Code goes back decades, and it takes a lot of time and political will to update it. An online platform meanwhile will need to address issues around hate quickly, and so we will need to use our best judgment on when we need to act.
I would love to clarify the wording around the Charter (and any other sections) to address the concerns, if you have a moment to share more thoughts on what to work on :)
I like what you’ve said, I guess I was just off put by the language. “Shaped by” the charter is very different than “inspired by” the charter. My worry is that if you tie yourself too strongly to an established legal framework, you bind yourself to the biases and loopholes of that legal system. You lose the flexibility and adaptability that I feel is more important in this particular format and forum. Say the charter is altered or expanded upon by conservatives in a way that discriminates against or targets lgbtq lemmys, tankies, or any other minority group. Would you be then forced to follow suit? Maybe rewrite your rules to exclude that portion of law? Thats a slippery slope all on its own. Section 35 of the charter only came about ~40 years ago. Its not a perfect document.
I would much rather read about policies and practices inspired by the intention and language of the Canadian charter than ones shaped by the realities of its current day application.
Case in point. Abuses still happen today.