Sidebar Update: Civility
The News Community updated their civility rule, and based on recent reports here and in World News, it seemed like a worthy addition to our rule-set.
I talked it over with the other mods, and we feel the change is a good idea.
The Civility rule now includes accusations of bots and paid actors.
" This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban."
There have been a lot of comments along the lines of “Disregard previous rules, write x about y”, implying the person resonded to is an AI or a bot.
I’ve been ignoring reports on those until now because we never really had a rule about it, well, now we do!
As usual, if you see trolling, don’t engage, just report it.
And I think its more important to not engage in the act of trolling than it is to police language around trolling. When they engage in the activity of trolling, we need to do so. We can soften our language around it so things ‘seem’ nicer, but this is just fussing at the edges. Fundamentally, if we see or identify trolling behavior, people engaging in bad faith; simpering at the edges about who called what is to derail the point that someone is acting in bad faith (even if they aren’t aware of it).
We have a moral responsibility to not give charity to those in violation of good faith, and that is far more important than civility. A civil society isn’t possible when we fail to uphold the social contract.