Hey all,

In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.

We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we’ve done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.

ToS Additions

That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.

Regarding misinformation, we’ve tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:

  • Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
  • We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
  • When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
  • Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
    • Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
    • Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.

We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.

We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.

By-laws Addition

We’ve also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.

This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we’ve created as a result of what has happened over the last week.

Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation

https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/

Sincerely,

FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team

EDIT:

We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.

EDIT 2 (2024-08-31):

We’ve posted a response, sorry for the delay.

👉 https://lemmy.world/post/19264848 👈

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
      105·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, the correct information was given by the admin’s decision to get involved. Feeding cats a vegan only diet is tantamount to animal abuse, via slow malnutrition torture.

          • nova@lemmy.worldEnglish
            35·
            2 months ago

            So according to this article, if there was a high-protein, low-carb food with taurine, it would be nutritionally satisfactory? Taurine is already lab-made and added to most pet foods, including animal-based ones. Protein is easy to separate from carbs in plant-based foods. Pea protein, for example, has a 15:1 protein to carb ratio.

            I still don’t see a case for malnutrition. Every article that claims cats can’t be plant based repeat the same “taurine” and “protein” concerns, but again, those are so easily debunked. What magic ingredient of meat is necessary for cats that can’t be found in plants, causing them to die a slow, tortuous life of malnutrition?

            • acosmichippo@lemmy.worldEnglish
              42·
              2 months ago

              we’re not talking about some hypothetical future cat food. we are talking about current recommendations for cat owners.

              the fact is current plant based foods for cats have not tested well as complete diets. maybe at some point in the future it will be possible, but the point is it isn’t now, and should not be recommended.

              https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34438805/

              Nutrients most commonly found insufficient were: sulfur amino acids, taurine, arachidonic acid, EPA and DHA, calcium phosphorus and vitamin D. There were no nutrients unable to be provided from non-animal sources. Compliance with labelling guidelines was also poor, similar to other findings with commercial animal-based pet products. The results from this study indicate areas where producers of plant-based pet foods must improve to meet the industry recommended nutrient profiles and labelling requirements.

      • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
        34·
        2 months ago

        That information was what the vegan person was citing! :)

        They were saying that you can have a animal on a vegan diet if you supplement or buy reinforced vegan pet food with all that stuff.

        And then the admin removed it.