I think we should hesitate to protect people from reputational damage caused by people posting true information about them. Perhaps thereâs a case to be made when the information is cherry-picked or biased, or thereâs no opportunity to hear a fair response. But goodness, if weâve learned anything from the last 18 months I hope it would include that sharing information about bad behaviour is sometimes a public good.
I would guess that most people engage in private behavior that would be reputationally damaging if the internet were to find out about it. Just because something is true doesnât mean you forfeit your rights to not have that information be made public.
I think people might reasonably (though wrongly) assume that forum mods are not monitoring accounts at this level of granularity, and thus believe that their voting behavior is private. Given this, I think mods should warn before publicly censoring. (Just as it would be better to inform your neighbor that you can see them doing something embarrassing through their window before calling the police or warning other people about thenâmaybe they just donât realize you can see, and telling them is all they need to not do the thing anymore, which, after all, is the goal.)
Frankly, I donât love that mods are monitoring accounts at this level of granularity. (For instance, knowing this would make me less inclined to put remotely sensitive info in a forum dm.)
Writing in a personal capacity; I havenât run this by other mods.
Hi, just responding to these parts of your comment:
I think people might reasonably (though wrongly) assume that forum mods are not monitoring accounts at this level of granularity, and thus believe that their voting behavior is private.
...
Frankly, I donât love that mods are monitoring accounts at this level of granularity. (For instance, knowing this would make me less inclined to put remotely sensitive info in a forum dm.)
We include some detail on what would lead moderators to look into a userâs voting activity, and what information we have access to, on our âGuide to norms on the Forumâ page:
Voting activity is generally private (even admins donât know who voted on what), but if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting (e.g. by mass-downvoting many of a different userâs comments and posts), we reserve the right to check what account is doing this. If we suspect that someone is using multiple accounts to vote on the same post, we also reserve the right to check whether the accounts are related, and check their voting history.
...
The following information is accessible to moderators but will only be used to identify behavior such as âsockpuppetâ accounts and mass downvoting, in situations where we have strong reason to believe that an account is used to get around a ban (or other restriction), or in the case of severe safety concerns. The moderators will not view or use this information for any other purpose.
The IP address a post/âcomment came from
The voting history of users
The identity of voters on any given post/âcomment
(In addition, note that moderators canât just go into a userâs account and check their voting history even when we do have reason to look into that user. We require one of the Forum engineers to run some queries on the back end to yield this information.)
Finally, to address your concern about direct messages on the Forum: like a regular user, a moderator cannot see into anyone elseâs messages.
Thanks for writing this! To clarify a few points even more:
moderators canât just go into a userâs account and check their voting history even when we do have reason to look into that user. We require one of the Forum engineers to run some queries on the back end to yield this information.
I confirm this, and just want to highlight that
this is pretty rare; we have a high bar before asking developers to look into patterns
usually, one developer looks into things, and shares anonymized data with moderators, who then decide whether it needs to be investigated more deeply
If so, a subset of moderators gets access to deanonymized data to make a decision and contact/âwarn/âban the user(s)
On
like a regular user, a moderator cannot see into anyone elseâs direct messages.
I confirm this, but I want to highlight that messages on the forum are not end-to-end encrypted and are, by default, sent via email as well (i.e. when you get a message on the forum you also get an email with the message). So forum developers and people who have or will have access to the recipientâs email inbox, or the forumâs email delivery service, can see the messages.
For very private communications, I would recommend using privacy-first end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal.
Thanks; this is helpful and reassuring, especially re: the DMs. I had read this section of the norms page, and it struck me that the âif we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around votingâ clause was doing a lot of work. I would appreciate more clarification about what would lead mods to believe something like this (and maybe some examples of how youâve come to have such beliefs). But this is not urgent, and thanks for the clarification youâve already provided.
Yeah, this is a reasonable thing to ask. So, the âif we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around votingâ clause is intentionally vague, I believe, because if we gave more detail on the kinds of checks/âalgorithms we have in place for flagging potential violations, then this could help would-be miscreants commit violations that slip past our checks.
(Iâm a bit sad that the framing here is adversarial, and that we canât give users like you more clarification, but I think this state of play is the reality of running an online forum.)
If it helps, though, the bar for looking into a userâs voting history is high. Like, on average I donât think we do this more than once or twice per month.
Thanks, this is also helpful! One thing to think about (and no need to tell me), is whether making the checks public could effectively disincentivize the bad behavior (like how warnings about speed cameras may as effectively disincentivize speeding as the cameras do themselves). But if there are easy workarounds, I can see why this wouldnât be viable.
Just because something is true doesnât mean you forfeit your rights to not have that information be made public.
I agree that not all true things should be made public, but I think when it specifically pertains to wrongdoing and someoneâs trustworthiness, the public interest can override the right to privacy. If you look into your neighbourâs window and you see them printing counterfeit currency, you go to the police first, rather than giving them an opportunity to simply hide their fraud better.
Maybe the crux is: I think forum users upvoting their own comments is more akin to them Facetuning dating app photos than printing counterfeit currency. Like, this is pretty innocuous behavior and if you just tell people not to do it, theyâll stop.
It seems like we disagree on how bad it is to self-vote (I donât think itâs anywhere near the level of âactual crimeâ, but I do think itâs pretty clearly dishonest and unfair, and for such a petty benefit itâs hard for me to feel sympathetic to the temptation).
But I donât think itâs the central point for me. If youâre simultaneously holding that:
this information isnât actually a big deal, but
releasing this publically would cause a lot of harm through reputational damage,
then thereâs a paternalistic subtext where people canât be trusted to come to the ârightâ conclusions from the facts. If this stuff really wasnât a big deal, then talking about it publically wouldnât be a big deal either. I donât think people should be shunned forever and excluded from any future employment because they misused multiple accounts on the forum. I do think they should be a little embarrassed, and I donât think that moving to protect them from that embarrassment is actually a kindness from a community-wide perspective.
I feel like this is getting really complicated and ultimately my point is very simple: prevent harmful behavior via the least harmful means. If you can get people to not vote for themselves by telling them not to, then just⊠do that. I have a really hard time imagining that someone who was warned about this would continue to do it; if they did, it would be reasonable to escalate. But if theyâre warned and then change their behavior, why do I need to know this happened? I just donât buy that it reflects some fundamental lack of integrity that we all need to know about (or something like this).
I think that posting that someone is banned and why they were banned is not mainly about punishing them. Itâs about helping people understand what the moderation team is doing, how rule-breaking is handled, and why someone no longer has access to the forum. For example, it helps us to understand if the moderation team are acting on inadequate information, or inconsistently between different people. The fact that publishing this information harms people is an unfortunate side effect, after the main effect of improving transparency and keeping people informed.
It doesnât even really feel right to call them harmed by the publication. If people are harmed by other people knowing they misuse the voting system, Iâd say they were mainly harmed by their own misuse of the system, not by someone reporting on it.
I just donât buy that it reflects some fundamental lack of integrity that we all need to know about
Then you neednât object to the moderation team talking about what they did!
Itâs about helping people understand what the moderation team is doing, how rule-breaking is handled, and why someone no longer has access to the forum.
Itâs unclear to me that naming names materially advances the first two goals. As to the third, the suspended user could have the option of having their name disclosed. Otherwise, I donât think weâre entitled to an explanation of why a particular poster isnât active anymore.
Thereâs also the interest in deterring everyone else from doing it (general deterrence), not just in getting these specific people to stop doing it (specific deterrence). While I have mixed feelings about publicly naming offenders, the penalty does need to sting enough to make the benefits of the offense not worth the risk of getting caught. A private warning with no real consequences might persuade the person violating the rules not to do it again, but double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.
âdouble-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.â
I just donât see this happening?
Separately, one objection I have to cracking down hard on self-voting is that I think this is not very harmful relative to other ways in which people donât vote how theyâre âsupposed to.â E.g., we know the correlation between upvotes and agree votes is incredibly high, and downvoting something solely because you disagree with it strikes me as more harmful to discourse on the forum than self-voting. I think the reason self-voting gets highlighted isnât because itâs especially harmful, itâs just because itâs especially catchable.
If the mods want to improve peopleâs voting behavior on the forum, I both wish theyâd target different voting behavior (ie, the agree/âupvoting correlation) and use different means to do it (ie, generating reports for people of their own voting correlations, whether they tend to upvote/âdownvote certain people, etc), rather than naming/âshaming people for self-voting.
I think itâs more that upvoting your own posts from an alt is (1) willful, intentional behavior (2) aimed at deceiving the community about the level of support of a comment (3) for the personâs own benefit. Presumably, most people who are doing it are employing some sort of means to evade detection, which adds another layer of deceptiveness. While I donât like downvoting-for-disagreement and the like either, that kind of behavior presumptively reflects a natural cognitive bias rather than any of the three characteristics listed above. It is for those reasons thatâin my viewâdownvoting-for-disagreement is generally not the proper subject of a sanctioning system,[1] while self-upvoting is.
Iâve suggested to the mods before that sanctions should sometimes be more carefully tailored to the offense, so Iâd be open to the view that consequences like permanently denying the violatorâs ability to vote and their ability to use alts might be more tailored to the offense than public disclosure. Those are the specific functions which they have demonstrated an inability to handle responsibly. Neither function is so fundamental to the ability to use the Forum that the mods should feel obliged to expend their time deciding if the violator has rehabilitated themselves enough to restore those privileges.
There could be circumstances in which soft-norm violative behavior was so extreme that sanctions should be considered. However, unlike âdonât multi-voteâ (which is a bright-line rule for which the violator should be perfectly aware that they are violating the rules), these norms are less clearcutâso privately reaching out to the person would be the appropriate first action in a case like that.
I think we should hesitate to protect people from reputational damage caused by people posting true information about them. Perhaps thereâs a case to be made when the information is cherry-picked or biased, or thereâs no opportunity to hear a fair response. But goodness, if weâve learned anything from the last 18 months I hope it would include that sharing information about bad behaviour is sometimes a public good.
I would guess that most people engage in private behavior that would be reputationally damaging if the internet were to find out about it. Just because something is true doesnât mean you forfeit your rights to not have that information be made public.
I think people might reasonably (though wrongly) assume that forum mods are not monitoring accounts at this level of granularity, and thus believe that their voting behavior is private. Given this, I think mods should warn before publicly censoring. (Just as it would be better to inform your neighbor that you can see them doing something embarrassing through their window before calling the police or warning other people about thenâmaybe they just donât realize you can see, and telling them is all they need to not do the thing anymore, which, after all, is the goal.)
Frankly, I donât love that mods are monitoring accounts at this level of granularity. (For instance, knowing this would make me less inclined to put remotely sensitive info in a forum dm.)
Writing in a personal capacity; I havenât run this by other mods.
Hi, just responding to these parts of your comment:
We include some detail on what would lead moderators to look into a userâs voting activity, and what information we have access to, on our âGuide to norms on the Forumâ page:
(In addition, note that moderators canât just go into a userâs account and check their voting history even when we do have reason to look into that user. We require one of the Forum engineers to run some queries on the back end to yield this information.)
Finally, to address your concern about direct messages on the Forum: like a regular user, a moderator cannot see into anyone elseâs messages.
Hope this is helpful :)
Also writing in a personal capacity.
Thanks for writing this! To clarify a few points even more:
I confirm this, and just want to highlight that
this is pretty rare; we have a high bar before asking developers to look into patterns
usually, one developer looks into things, and shares anonymized data with moderators, who then decide whether it needs to be investigated more deeply
If so, a subset of moderators gets access to deanonymized data to make a decision and contact/âwarn/âban the user(s)
On
I confirm this, but I want to highlight that messages on the forum are not end-to-end encrypted and are, by default, sent via email as well (i.e. when you get a message on the forum you also get an email with the message). So forum developers and people who have or will have access to the recipientâs email inbox, or the forumâs email delivery service, can see the messages.
For very private communications, I would recommend using privacy-first end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal.
Thanks; this is helpful and reassuring, especially re: the DMs. I had read this section of the norms page, and it struck me that the âif we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around votingâ clause was doing a lot of work. I would appreciate more clarification about what would lead mods to believe something like this (and maybe some examples of how youâve come to have such beliefs). But this is not urgent, and thanks for the clarification youâve already provided.
Yeah, this is a reasonable thing to ask. So, the âif we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around votingâ clause is intentionally vague, I believe, because if we gave more detail on the kinds of checks/âalgorithms we have in place for flagging potential violations, then this could help would-be miscreants commit violations that slip past our checks.
(Iâm a bit sad that the framing here is adversarial, and that we canât give users like you more clarification, but I think this state of play is the reality of running an online forum.)
If it helps, though, the bar for looking into a userâs voting history is high. Like, on average I donât think we do this more than once or twice per month.
Thanks, this is also helpful! One thing to think about (and no need to tell me), is whether making the checks public could effectively disincentivize the bad behavior (like how warnings about speed cameras may as effectively disincentivize speeding as the cameras do themselves). But if there are easy workarounds, I can see why this wouldnât be viable.
I agree that not all true things should be made public, but I think when it specifically pertains to wrongdoing and someoneâs trustworthiness, the public interest can override the right to privacy. If you look into your neighbourâs window and you see them printing counterfeit currency, you go to the police first, rather than giving them an opportunity to simply hide their fraud better.
Maybe the crux is: I think forum users upvoting their own comments is more akin to them Facetuning dating app photos than printing counterfeit currency. Like, this is pretty innocuous behavior and if you just tell people not to do it, theyâll stop.
It seems like we disagree on how bad it is to self-vote (I donât think itâs anywhere near the level of âactual crimeâ, but I do think itâs pretty clearly dishonest and unfair, and for such a petty benefit itâs hard for me to feel sympathetic to the temptation).
But I donât think itâs the central point for me. If youâre simultaneously holding that:
this information isnât actually a big deal, but
releasing this publically would cause a lot of harm through reputational damage,
then thereâs a paternalistic subtext where people canât be trusted to come to the ârightâ conclusions from the facts. If this stuff really wasnât a big deal, then talking about it publically wouldnât be a big deal either. I donât think people should be shunned forever and excluded from any future employment because they misused multiple accounts on the forum. I do think they should be a little embarrassed, and I donât think that moving to protect them from that embarrassment is actually a kindness from a community-wide perspective.
I feel like this is getting really complicated and ultimately my point is very simple: prevent harmful behavior via the least harmful means. If you can get people to not vote for themselves by telling them not to, then just⊠do that. I have a really hard time imagining that someone who was warned about this would continue to do it; if they did, it would be reasonable to escalate. But if theyâre warned and then change their behavior, why do I need to know this happened? I just donât buy that it reflects some fundamental lack of integrity that we all need to know about (or something like this).
I think that posting that someone is banned and why they were banned is not mainly about punishing them. Itâs about helping people understand what the moderation team is doing, how rule-breaking is handled, and why someone no longer has access to the forum. For example, it helps us to understand if the moderation team are acting on inadequate information, or inconsistently between different people. The fact that publishing this information harms people is an unfortunate side effect, after the main effect of improving transparency and keeping people informed.
It doesnât even really feel right to call them harmed by the publication. If people are harmed by other people knowing they misuse the voting system, Iâd say they were mainly harmed by their own misuse of the system, not by someone reporting on it.
Then you neednât object to the moderation team talking about what they did!
Itâs unclear to me that naming names materially advances the first two goals. As to the third, the suspended user could have the option of having their name disclosed. Otherwise, I donât think weâre entitled to an explanation of why a particular poster isnât active anymore.
Thereâs also the interest in deterring everyone else from doing it (general deterrence), not just in getting these specific people to stop doing it (specific deterrence). While I have mixed feelings about publicly naming offenders, the penalty does need to sting enough to make the benefits of the offense not worth the risk of getting caught. A private warning with no real consequences might persuade the person violating the rules not to do it again, but double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.
âdouble-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.â
I just donât see this happening?
Separately, one objection I have to cracking down hard on self-voting is that I think this is not very harmful relative to other ways in which people donât vote how theyâre âsupposed to.â E.g., we know the correlation between upvotes and agree votes is incredibly high, and downvoting something solely because you disagree with it strikes me as more harmful to discourse on the forum than self-voting. I think the reason self-voting gets highlighted isnât because itâs especially harmful, itâs just because itâs especially catchable.
If the mods want to improve peopleâs voting behavior on the forum, I both wish theyâd target different voting behavior (ie, the agree/âupvoting correlation) and use different means to do it (ie, generating reports for people of their own voting correlations, whether they tend to upvote/âdownvote certain people, etc), rather than naming/âshaming people for self-voting.
I think itâs more that upvoting your own posts from an alt is (1) willful, intentional behavior (2) aimed at deceiving the community about the level of support of a comment (3) for the personâs own benefit. Presumably, most people who are doing it are employing some sort of means to evade detection, which adds another layer of deceptiveness. While I donât like downvoting-for-disagreement and the like either, that kind of behavior presumptively reflects a natural cognitive bias rather than any of the three characteristics listed above. It is for those reasons thatâin my viewâdownvoting-for-disagreement is generally not the proper subject of a sanctioning system,[1] while self-upvoting is.
Iâve suggested to the mods before that sanctions should sometimes be more carefully tailored to the offense, so Iâd be open to the view that consequences like permanently denying the violatorâs ability to vote and their ability to use alts might be more tailored to the offense than public disclosure. Those are the specific functions which they have demonstrated an inability to handle responsibly. Neither function is so fundamental to the ability to use the Forum that the mods should feel obliged to expend their time deciding if the violator has rehabilitated themselves enough to restore those privileges.
There could be circumstances in which soft-norm violative behavior was so extreme that sanctions should be considered. However, unlike âdonât multi-voteâ (which is a bright-line rule for which the violator should be perfectly aware that they are violating the rules), these norms are less clearcutâso privately reaching out to the person would be the appropriate first action in a case like that.