Hello everyone! If you have not yet seen it, @ernest has handed over moderation to @Drusas @Entropywins @ Frog-Brawler (the tag system consistently messes up the link to FB’s username lol) and myself here in !politics.
First order of business is for you all to weigh in on the community guidelines that you would like to see here. As the mod team, we will weigh all suggestions and then add them to the side bar as magazine/community rules. I’m going to give about 48 hours for users to see this thread and add a comment or discuss.
Please know that the goal is not to create an echo chamber here in !politics, but we want to ensure that there is not an encroachment of rage bait and toxicity. It brings down the quality of the magazine and it discourages community engagement.
For the time being, the mod tools are pretty sparse, so I want to manage expectations about the scope of moderation we’re able to do right now. For now, our touch will be light. Expect increased functionality as time progresses, though. We have 3 weeks of reports on file, so please know we see them. Give us some time to establish how to handle those before you start to see any movement.
Yeah, I see your viewpoint on this.
The only reason why I’m still leaning towards the litmus test being on the news sites versus the author is because the legal teams at NYT are not going to permit “freedom of the press” to be the fig leaf covering a very poor piece of writing, even from opinion pieces.
I’m willing to see the counterexamples, but this is based on my experience as a journalist back in the day.
Having said that, I do think that a poor writer could communicate a lot of bad takes and still get printed. The issue really only comes up when a writer makes baseless claims - it now opens the door for lawsuits against the publisher.