Sidebar Update: Civility

The News Community updated their civility rule, and based on recent reports here and in World News, it seemed like a worthy addition to our rule-set.

I talked it over with the other mods, and we feel the change is a good idea.

The Civility rule now includes accusations of bots and paid actors.

" 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."

There have been a lot of comments along the lines of “Disregard previous rules, write x about y”, implying the person resonded to is an AI or a bot.

I’ve been ignoring reports on those until now because we never really had a rule about it, well, now we do!

As usual, if you see trolling, don’t engage, just report it.

        • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
          32·
          4 months ago

          no. an ad hominem is attacking the person instead of the argument. regardless of the truth. poisoning the well is a great one, as it is an ad hominem that usually features true accusations which are irrelevant to the discussion. which could also be called a “red herring” (but most fallacies are doubly red herrings)

            • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
              23·
              4 months ago

              I agree with your characterization, but I expect both your comment and this to be removed because we are making a personal accusation. I know that beating around the bush would not put such a fine point on it and call out the actual users who are exhibiting the problematic behavior, but for the good of the community discourse, personal call outs need to be removed.

              so while I agree with your characterization, you need to try to communicate it without publicly making personal attacks.

                • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
                  45·
                  4 months ago

                  So here is the original post again:

                  I think it would be good to put a definition for what trolling is that the community can agree upon. I also think there are many users who don’t recognize that the behavior they are engaged in is a form of bad faith trolling.

                  Because they have the agreement of the majority, they make a tacit assumption that they are acting in good faith. I think Bishop 2012, “This is why we can’t have nice things at scale” is a good starting point for understanding how this kind of group think bad behavior emerges.

                  For example, user is engaged in an almost permanent state of sealioning. Its like, actually a bit amazing how they do it. And I don’t think they are doing so in intentional bad faith (or at least, they don’t think of themselves as engaging in bad faith behavior), in spite of the fact that they are almost perpetually trolling. Its that a cultural norm of abuse and trolling has been established in an effort to diminish specific views people disagree with.

                  Because of this, I think there is only so far a “trolling” ban can take us, because fundamentally, to not be trolling (or engaged in some other kind of bad faith argument/ behavior), you actually have to engage with the points the other party is making, on their terms. If we want better discussions here, we have oblige a set of cultural norms that make that possible in the first place, the principal of which would be to attack the other persons argument and evidence, not their person. To stop the abusiveness and trolling, we actually have to shift the culture of the community, because right now, the majority of the community is not engaging in good faith, and and they probably don’t know that they aren’t. I think if we could come up with a short list of maybe 8-12 examples of the major fallacies and types of trolling to pin to the side bar, keeping in mind that most users probably aren’t aware they are engaged in them, call people out on them when we see it, and stand up a few points above the rules teaching people “how” to engage in good faith, we can try to reset the cultural norm to actually be make arguments that are grounded in fact and evidence based where possible, and that this would go a long way to increase the overall rate of civility.

                  At no point did I call them a troll. I said that they were engaged in trolling behavior.

                  Now when they gave us that nice example, I think at that point calling them a troll is fair game, because they now positively engaged in the behavior that was previously identified as trolling.

                  And yes, I did call them out as a troll in the second response, because, well, thats what they were doing. In doing so, they made the central thesis of my first point self-evident: They aren’t aware of their own behavior. They went right into their trolling behavior; as such they are a troll. There is nothing wrong with calling something by its name. If we’re going to be more concerned about the manner in-which we call out bad behavior than we are the bad behavior itself, well we’ve lost the thread entirely at that point.