As you're probably well aware, we receive frequent complaints about the content of your community. Most of the time, the reports are non-actionable -- saying negative things about someone isn't a violation of the Terms of Service, nor is documenting someone's behavior or linking to their other social media accounts.
Recently, however, we've seen a number of reports linking to comments that are closer to the line of being a Terms of Service violation, and we've seen more evidence that the community as a whole is encouraging off-community harassment. In particular, we've seen a number of comments to your community that:
* encourage people to contact the people being discussed, either on Dreamwidth or elsewhere, in order to harass them; * encourage people to contact the people being discussed in order to show them links to the discussion; * encourage people to find/identify other accounts of people they believe to be harassers; * accuse multiple accounts of being held by specific individuals the community dislikes; * discuss wanting people to kill themselves or encouraging suicide.
Discussing people's actions, even in a negative fashion, isn't a violation of the Terms of Service. Allowing an environment to flourish where community members incite each other to contact the people being discussed and harass them -- an environment where there's social reward for taking the discussion outside the wankgate community and allowing it to spill over elsewhere, or where that sort of harassment isn't immediately and swiftly discouraged -- is, however.
We'd like you to make it absolutely clear again to your members that off-community harassment isn't acceptable. This includes:
* Contacting someone who's been discussed on wankgate to let them know that they're being discussed on wankgate; * Contacting someone who's been discussed on wankgate to harass them about their actions, whether or not wankgate is mentioned; * Contacting other people in that person's life (friends, acquaintances, family, etc) to show them the discussion on wankgate.
Obviously, this is hard to police, since it's impossible to prove for certain that someone who's contacted a person is a regular wankgate participant and there's no way to block a specific commenter from participating in wankgate, but you can make it clear that it isn't acceptable behavior and delete any thread that discusses off-community contact. (For example, comment threads such as https://wankgate.dreamwidth.org/41207.html?thread=162735863#cmt162735863 should be deleted.)
We'd also like you to make it clear to your members that wankgate shouldn't be used to collaborate on "finding" other accounts that people believe belong to people the community dislikes. This includes keeping username lists, keeping lists of characteristics that a person's accounts tend to share, etc, since that leads to further harassment. (For example, comment threads such as https://wankgate.dreamwidth.org/41207.html?thread=162643959#cmt162643959 and https://wankgate.dreamwidth.org/40843.html?thread=162417291#cmt162417291 should be deleted.)
We do know that you moderate the community fairly closely, and we definitely appreciate that -- every time we've gotten reports of serious invasions of privacy in the community, for instance, those comments have been deleted very quickly. However, we are a bit concerned that the community standards have begun to slip towards encouraging and approving of off-community harassment, and we'd like you to make it clearer to your community members that it's not acceptable.
since you're too pussy to actually post it
As you're probably well aware, we receive frequent complaints about the content of your community. Most of the time, the reports are non-actionable -- saying negative things about someone isn't a violation of the Terms of Service, nor is documenting someone's behavior or linking to their other social media accounts.
Recently, however, we've seen a number of reports linking to comments that are closer to the line of being a Terms of Service violation, and we've seen more evidence that the community as a whole is encouraging off-community harassment. In particular, we've seen a number of comments to your community that:
* encourage people to contact the people being discussed, either on Dreamwidth or elsewhere, in order to harass them;
* encourage people to contact the people being discussed in order to show them links to the discussion;
* encourage people to find/identify other accounts of people they believe to be harassers;
* accuse multiple accounts of being held by specific individuals the community dislikes;
* discuss wanting people to kill themselves or encouraging suicide.
Discussing people's actions, even in a negative fashion, isn't a violation of the Terms of Service. Allowing an environment to flourish where community members incite each other to contact the people being discussed and harass them -- an environment where there's social reward for taking the discussion outside the wankgate community and allowing it to spill over elsewhere, or where that sort of harassment isn't immediately and swiftly discouraged -- is, however.
We'd like you to make it absolutely clear again to your members that off-community harassment isn't acceptable. This includes:
* Contacting someone who's been discussed on wankgate to let them know that they're being discussed on wankgate;
* Contacting someone who's been discussed on wankgate to harass them about their actions, whether or not wankgate is mentioned;
* Contacting other people in that person's life (friends, acquaintances, family, etc) to show them the discussion on wankgate.
Obviously, this is hard to police, since it's impossible to prove for certain that someone who's contacted a person is a regular wankgate participant and there's no way to block a specific commenter from participating in wankgate, but you can make it clear that it isn't acceptable behavior and delete any thread that discusses off-community contact. (For example, comment threads such as https://wankgate.dreamwidth.org/41207.html?thread=162735863#cmt162735863 should be deleted.)
We'd also like you to make it clear to your members that wankgate shouldn't be used to collaborate on "finding" other accounts that people believe belong to people the community dislikes. This includes keeping username lists, keeping lists of characteristics that a person's accounts tend to share, etc, since that leads to further harassment. (For example, comment threads such as https://wankgate.dreamwidth.org/41207.html?thread=162643959#cmt162643959 and https://wankgate.dreamwidth.org/40843.html?thread=162417291#cmt162417291 should be deleted.)
We do know that you moderate the community fairly closely, and we definitely appreciate that -- every time we've gotten reports of serious invasions of privacy in the community, for instance, those comments have been deleted very quickly. However, we are a bit concerned that the community standards have begun to slip towards encouraging and approving of off-community harassment, and we'd like you to make it clearer to your community members that it's not acceptable.
Best,
Denise