Free Expression and Moderation Reform

Because we are all citizens of a virtual world, we should have the right to express ourselves without the standard limitations of a traditional internet forum. To support true free expression within the forums, we need a formalized and consistent system for moderation. I propose that the Lindens officially accept Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:



Note that the right to freedom of speech or expression is not considered unlimited. In the U.S. states may still punish (but not prohibit) certain damaging types of expressions. Under international law restrictions on free speech must pass a strict three part test: they must be provided by law; pursue an aim recognized as legitimate; and they must be necessary for the accomplishment of that aim. Among the aims considered legitimate are protection of the rights and reputations of others (prevention of defamation) and the protection of national security and public order, health and morals.

Moderation reform would be required to allow all expression without restriction, punishing those whose expression is found to be defamatory or detrimental to public order. When a specific post is edited or a thread is locked, it should be marked with a concrete reason why, based on the above principles, and done with consistency.

What are your thoughts?

~Ulrika~

I think we should drop this and start talking about SecondLife again.

Just like you wouldn't start jumping up and start shouting insults at a professor at a seminar, you don't jump up and shout insults in certain areas of SecondLife.

I am the professor, son.

~Ulrika~

<3 Ulrika.

Why do you amuse me so?

edit: btw, keep your head down. I don't want you to be nailed.

Aw, c'mon, blaze. You recast the Erased One as Emma/nuel Goldstein/berg in your joust at the SL windmill, and Ulrika trots out Article 19 of the UDHR for hers.

If LL pots either one of you, I'm gonna declare the Revolution. You're both too much fun.

lol ulrika, the frailty in the system isn't in the rules, it's in the time-bandwidth, incomplete context/information and human (thus fallible) judgement of the moderators.

i for one am going to judge only AFTER we've seen the new rules running for a while

Precisely. Part of the moderation reform, would be a promise to include a concrete reason (for consistency and possible appeal) for locked threads, edited posts, and disciplined avatars.

Two days ago I received a formal warning for calling someone ... Well, I can't really say, as that's forbidden speech, so you'll have to check the SL History Wiki. Today I had a perfectly productive thread locked, because it had "outlived its arguable usefulness".

For what else do you need to wait around and see?

~Ulrika~

This thread is so crazy, lol, only Ulrika!
Professor ZugZug, point the way and I will follow! <3

I think your argument is flawed from the outset. We are not citizens of SL in the sense that we are citizens of a country. We are customers of a commercial service which reserves the right to refuse us service at any time and for any reason. We have no rights other than those listed in the TOS, except the right to take our business elsewhere.

Meh, I voted pretty much because I can't see what the big deal was... People make a comment - some get their knickers in a twist - someone gets a slap on the wrist.. you shake your hand and biz goes on as usual...

If someone chooses to be indignant because they got a slap on the wrist... thats their perogative, but this is nothing new under the sun.

My brothers 5 year old son scream high when someone tells him that he did something you dont.....

i suppose i *expect* inconsistency, so am really only hoping for less inconsistency and more backbone from LL. My concern is this: if you add more "process" into their jobs, it will only make it more time consuming for moderators, and thus would actually lead to less moderation and more inconsistency...

I don't expect lindens to get it right and be perfectly fair every time, just to use best-efforts. My experience with them has been not that they are unfair, but that they try SO hard to be fair that they never actually enact discipline on an offender.

p.s. I did see your post that spurred the warning, and while it made *me* smile, I am not surprised they acted that way coming as it was right in the wake of all the hubbub. But such a warning wasn't really much more than a request to keep things civil.

I think we should have a bit of empathy for the moderators and for LL's goals in regards to the purpose the forums are supposed to serve, and the impression the forums give to new users. As much time as I spend here, and as at home as it feels sometimes, this isn't my living room... it's LL's.

If I agreed that the forums are a place to which we are entitled to free expression, which I don't, I'd say a major problem is objective measurement of codified ideas like "consistent system" or "expression detrimental to public order".
It's like the banter in the General Forums lately questioning the definition of courtesy or tact -- The gray area is large enough, that no detail of rule will prevent forum moderation from being the judgment call of one or two presumably fair and reasonable people; which is what we have now. As such, consistency will always remain an issue of contention for at least some of the residents.

I'm also not sure what's envisioned here by "marked with a concrete reason why".
If it means a blow-by-blow descriptive narration of violations in a 200+ post thread, it's not practical from a labor-hours standpoint.
If it means identifying particular guilty phrases in a thread and attributing them to a rule, I doubt they'd do it in the name of not publicly singling out a poster for critism. Picture Jeska posting a closing thread referencing Post #42 by Jimmy Doolittle to Violation #4f. Or quoting a sentence which anyone can identify as being by Jimmy.
If it means much less than this, what would Jeska's locking post look like? "This thread is detrimental to public order for personal attacks, and as such will be closed" instead of "This thread contains personal attacks, and as such will be closed."?

I'm certain that I'm missing a reasonable medium point within these admittedly exagerated examples, but again, I'm very unclear of the vision behind the words.

Rule reforms suggested by chronic repeat offenders may have the purpose of allowing the repeat offender to continue to perform actions indentical in essence to those which are currently forbidden and which they have performed many times and wish to continue, while the same rule can can manipulated by a sufficiently clever rule-monger to be brought to bear against the ideological or commercial opponents of the maker of the proposed change.

Well , I have some comments about all this.

There was one poster who was particularily aggrivating who skirited the letter of the rules by all accounts, in uncountable posts.

This degenerated into flame wars and personal attacks with a huge number of other posters here. I disagreed with this individual in posts myself on occasion.

That person was removed from the fourms - and the entire battle resulted in these Strict rules. With the apperent Draconian Caveat of banning you from the entire game if you get out of line.

Ive noticed that the forums seem quiet - maybe even lifeless. maybe in small part becuase no one wants to get banned from the entire game of Second life for making a mistake. Maybe im just over reading and the forums are quiet becuase the troll that was removed stirred up a lot of activity.

Now people want to argue for a much freer reign again. Well , if they do so , shouldnt the infamous troll be given a reprieve?

Seems to me that you cant have things both ways - if you want that person gone then the rules to prevent others from behaving that way have to stay.

Or else in 3 months or 6 months or whatever will be a new person with questionable motivations and methods who will skirt the freedom of expression and cuase a new clamoring for tighter moderation.

I remember disagreeing with he person who was banned of how i felt the forums were seperate from the game. He disagreed with me , argued they were one in the same and thought neg rates for forum behavior were a good thing.

In the end LL agreed with him - forums and the game are not seperate - banned from the forums equals automatically banned from the game.

I still think this is a mistake - Forums by their very nature lead to misunderstandings, are prone to Trolls and flaming, and becuase of the non immediacy of the conversations lack a true perspective of discourse often.

So I wonder to myself - someone was banned for extreme behaviour, new rules were put in place with some very sharp teeth. So bad that many are leery of how to act on the forums. Others who make what they think are benign comments are saying they are being reported or what not.

It sounds like the old addage -

Be careful what you ask for - you might just get it.

Rule reforms suggested by chronic repeat offenders who have gone largely unpunished in the past but who have recently been the recipients of disciplinary action may have the purpose of allowing the repeat offender to continue to perform actions indentical in essence to those which are forbidden and which they have performed many times and wish to continue, while the same rules can be manipulated by a sufficiently clever rule-monger to be brought to bear against the ideological or commercial opponents of the maker of the proposed change.

Actually..that sounds exactly like being a citizen of the U.S.

The moderation is actually pretty consistant. We can speak out against the ills of policy and those posts are left to be seen, although I am sure a mod would rather lock and delete it. The ones that are censored are the ones that have dwindled into personal attacks on individuals. You can say pretty much anything you want in these forums, you just have to know how to say it.

Ulrika, you may be singular, but you are not alone. It happened to me too

Forum moderators, please note that this post is not intended to petition a forum warning or any other such nonsense, but rather just to provide some supporting evidence concerning Ulrika's relevant (to SL) thread.

A new forum moderator issued me a formal warning. I asked specifically what the warning was for, and he told me, "you called someone an 'asshole' or told somebody to fuck off or something like that".

When I informed him that he was mistaken, and I wanted to see a specific quote of what he was referring to, he told me that he had already deleted it and didn't remember what it specifically said.

Well I remember!

It was along the lines of, "If a person does x, y, and z, then they can go fuck off". I never mentioned a specific person, nor a specific person's actions. It was a general statement illuminating my particular view of people's behavior in SL and my reaction to them.

Also, I didn't call anyone an "asshole". I prefer "douchebag".

I understood at the time that LL was handing out mass warnings to "send a message" to the class clowns before sending them to the principle's office. I was caught up in the mass scolding, when the moderators were doing their Ctrl + F for offensive words and shooting out PM's of warning with great fervor.

Now that this is all tied to in-world banning, I feel that I must keep my whoopie cushion in my back pocket, and away from anyone else's behind. It's awfully disheartening because social humor and witty banter is my major reason for playing SL as well as visiting the forums. I don't build, script, or go to escorts (more than 6.2 times a day on average), and I can have much more fun talking to friends on AIM these days.

So, what I am really trying to say is:

WORD UP, ULRIKA!

Trying to fill the void you have left.

Leave things as they are.

If you screw up and get warned/suspended/banned, take your lumps like an adult instead of trying to change the system to suit you.

If you have some fundamental issues with the way LL runs their forums, boycott by not using the forums, or even LL's product. (I know you love a good boycot.)

I do find it amusing that the same person that celebrated the 'victory' of someone being banned from the forums is now the person trying to have the rules eased up to suit themselves.

There is a perfect example of inconsistent moderation found in this thread:

/120/60/50647/1.html

Kris Ritter had her post edited by Jeska, which told Chris Wilde what he could go do with himself after having her herself referred to as having a case of diarrhea of the mouth. She had not addressed any posts to him in the thread, he just chimed in and said this to her unprovoked. Jeska left in Chris's original comment and posts where he continues to attack her as a troll. That does not make any sense - either both are offensive, or neither is. That is what is so annoying and frustrating about the forum "guidelines" - they are so subjective and arbitrary. Now that moderation on a whim can actually affect your ability to be in SL itself, there is no excuse for lack of consistency.

Sadly, Cristiano, consistency is actually too much to ask.
Each person is individually responsible for his/her own postings regardless of how other people may escape justice, or provoke.

Every teacher knows that if they are too concerned about fairness, and investigating every little incident to ensure it, their control will be paralysed and the class will spiral downhill.

You just punish what you think you saw. Even whole-class punishments (obviously unfair) can have their place. The purpose is to establish a climate where behaviour improves, and so punishments become progressively less necessary. So after a while the incidence of injustices also declines.

The kids forgive you afterwards, when they see the value of the results.

You are right, each person is responsible for their own posts. However, when you have a dispute, as you did here, to only edit out one gives the impression that what the other person said is perfectly fine. Jeska is too busy to look at the context and see that both of them are going back and forth with each other?

Kris is no angel by any means and she speaks her mind quite bluntly. However, looking at a reported post in isolation is not a good thing either. Context is important - there is no context that would necessarily soften what she said, but Chris was equally guilty, if not more so for attacking someone in the first place.

The efforts required to moderate these forums to squash all the type of speech they want to squash is going to have such diminishing returns that I predict the discussion forums will be removed or outsourced ultimately.