The policy that this decision seems to exemplify appears to effectively give anyone the right to censor any information about themselves in posts or comments made by others, regardless of how that information was obtained or how public it is.
As mentioned in the policy, we do think that there are cases when some personal information is important to share, and we don’t think everyone should have the right to censor any information about themselves. We do consider how public the information is and “when information is easily accessible elsewhere, we will err on the side of keeping it”, but we also strongly consider how relevant the information is to EA. In this case, I felt that the name and website of the user are not relevant enough for effective altruism to justify keeping the information in the comment against the user’s wishes.
Note that the case for disclosing the information in this particular instance was pretty strong: J_J implied that temp_ was a creep for knowing J_J’s website, but it turns out that J_J had included a prominent link to their website in a comment posted just one day earlier. I do not want the Forum to be a place where people can make unfair accusations about others and retain a right to suppress evidence establishing the unfairness of those accusations.
I agree, but I think that in the edited comment it’s still clear that J_J had included a prominent link to their website in a comment posted just one day earlier. If that’s not the case I should have edited it differently (possibly writing [user’s website] in the black box). Do you think it should be clarified?
Thanks for the reply. I think the crux of our disagreement may be that I don’t regard “being relevant to EA” as a necessary condition for declining a request to remove personal information, unless that phrase is given a very broad interpretation that includes things like “keeping the EA Forum a place where people can’t make unfair accusations about others”.[1] Separately, if a user voluntarily discloses a piece of personal information, I think this should be beyond the scope of mod action, unless something happened in the intervening period that clearly justifies removing or encoding the information. People can still ask others not to share this info, but I think it should be up to each person to honor those requests, rather than being something enforceable by the admin team.
In this case, as you note, it was possible to remove the personal information while preserving the relevant evidence publicly, although I think the removal made it somewhat more difficult to appreciate what was really going on. But one can imagine other situations in which this cannot be done.
Thank you for the feedback,
As mentioned in the policy, we do think that there are cases when some personal information is important to share, and we don’t think everyone should have the right to censor any information about themselves.
We do consider how public the information is and “when information is easily accessible elsewhere, we will err on the side of keeping it”, but we also strongly consider how relevant the information is to EA.
In this case, I felt that the name and website of the user are not relevant enough for effective altruism to justify keeping the information in the comment against the user’s wishes.
I agree, but I think that in the edited comment it’s still clear that J_J had included a prominent link to their website in a comment posted just one day earlier. If that’s not the case I should have edited it differently (possibly writing [user’s website] in the black box). Do you think it should be clarified?
Thanks for the reply. I think the crux of our disagreement may be that I don’t regard “being relevant to EA” as a necessary condition for declining a request to remove personal information, unless that phrase is given a very broad interpretation that includes things like “keeping the EA Forum a place where people can’t make unfair accusations about others”.[1] Separately, if a user voluntarily discloses a piece of personal information, I think this should be beyond the scope of mod action, unless something happened in the intervening period that clearly justifies removing or encoding the information. People can still ask others not to share this info, but I think it should be up to each person to honor those requests, rather than being something enforceable by the admin team.
In this case, as you note, it was possible to remove the personal information while preserving the relevant evidence publicly, although I think the removal made it somewhat more difficult to appreciate what was really going on. But one can imagine other situations in which this cannot be done.