Thanks, community health team. I’m wondering if it’d be helpful for the CHT +/- forum mods to develop guidelines regarding standards of evidence for sensitive forum posts, e.g.: under what circumstances (if any) should mods censor a post/parts of a post for making insufficiently substantiated and potentially harmful allegations? Perhaps the answer is “under no circumstances,” but even this would be worth clarifying, I think, so readers know never to expect this and understand the rationale for never doing so.
The forum does have guidance on infohazards, and I assume a post that contained serious infohazards would be censored. Given there are presumably limitations on harmful true things people might say, it seems prima facie plausible that there should be limitations on harmful potentially false things people might say, but I’m not sure when/whether/how that’s right, and it seems worth devoting some serious thought to this. (Sorry if this guidance does exist somewhere, or if this would be outside the purview of what the CHT does, but thanks for considering it.)
We think a very good norm is to check unverified rumors or claims before sharing them — especially if they might be damaging or if they relate to sensitive or stigmatized topics.
If you’re not sure whether you should check something (or how to check), you can contact the moderation team to ask.
If you think that some information should be removed, you should flag this to us. We will probably not remove information that no one has asked us to remove.
(We don’t read everything on the Forum, and when we are reading, we’re not always thinking about everything through the lens of our policies.)
Why we don’t just default to removing all private/personal information: we think there are cases when some personal information about people who are highly relevant to work in effective altruism is important to share (like discussions of potential conflicts of interest (COIs) or reasons for why someone in a position of power shouldn’t be in that position). We also want to keep the potential for censorship from the moderation team low.
The way we enforce these norms isn’t about whether we think a specific comment is “overall correct” or helpful, etc.; we’re trying to outline policies that will help us make these calls more objectively.
(I recognize that the above isn’t really granular enough to help with answering the questions in front of us right now, for instance, “Was it okay for Ben to include Alice’s allegations?” Or, “Is Kat’s ‘Sharing Information on Ben Pace’ section acceptable?” Thanks for raising this point for the moderators, it will be discussed. (My immediate take: I can see a couple of reasons for why it might be hard to operationalize, and to enforce, a set of policies here. But, as you say, this does seem important enough to warrant some thought.))
Thanks, community health team. I’m wondering if it’d be helpful for the CHT +/- forum mods to develop guidelines regarding standards of evidence for sensitive forum posts, e.g.: under what circumstances (if any) should mods censor a post/parts of a post for making insufficiently substantiated and potentially harmful allegations? Perhaps the answer is “under no circumstances,” but even this would be worth clarifying, I think, so readers know never to expect this and understand the rationale for never doing so.
The forum does have guidance on infohazards, and I assume a post that contained serious infohazards would be censored. Given there are presumably limitations on harmful true things people might say, it seems prima facie plausible that there should be limitations on harmful potentially false things people might say, but I’m not sure when/whether/how that’s right, and it seems worth devoting some serious thought to this. (Sorry if this guidance does exist somewhere, or if this would be outside the purview of what the CHT does, but thanks for considering it.)
Writing in a personal capacity.
“An update to our policies on revealing personal information on the Forum” covers some of what you’re asking about, I think, although the framing there is more about revealing private vs public info than about “How substantiated is substantiated enough?” The most relevant part:
(I recognize that the above isn’t really granular enough to help with answering the questions in front of us right now, for instance, “Was it okay for Ben to include Alice’s allegations?” Or, “Is Kat’s ‘Sharing Information on Ben Pace’ section acceptable?” Thanks for raising this point for the moderators, it will be discussed. (My immediate take: I can see a couple of reasons for why it might be hard to operationalize, and to enforce, a set of policies here. But, as you say, this does seem important enough to warrant some thought.))