Correct, this is what precipitated the discussion internally, the civil disobedience part in particular. We don’t want people using the board to come up with ways to break the law.
No. You seemed to be advocating civil disobedience. Civil disobedience involves breaking the law. We’ve never allowed that type of discussion.
That said, the call to action rule was never very clear, and based on the comments here we didn’t make it any clearer. We’re giving it some more thought.
It doesn’t seem like it’s unclear at all. Neither the current rules nor the revised rules actually forbid what he did. He didn’t advocate for what to do. He asked for ideas about what could be done. Those are different things. And he never at any point set up a specific time and place, as you indicate would be against the rules.
It seems to me that the issue is that you guys are working backwards from what you want to forbid and then trying to come up with rules that would match. That shouldn’t be how rules are made. They should come from first principle, and then whatever happens happens.
If you go the other direction, then the inherent implication is that you just want to stop that specific act. And, remember, that specific act was a guy trying to fight for women’s rights. Forbidding his post harms women’s rights.
For this to be an acceptable downside, there must be some principle, beyond all of this, that makes that wrong. And it does not seem to be the old principle of “we just don’t want to get sued or in legal trouble.” The only other rule is “don’t be a jerk.” All of the other fules follow from those two principles.
And Roger’s post did neither one. How did it harm our board to be allowed to exist?
Another thought: I also think that “that’s the way we’ve always done it” is a poor argument.
There is no reason we should have to be shackled to decisions made in 1999. The world isn’t the same as it was then, and we’ve lived and learned. Lots of changes have been made. Appeal to tradition is a fallacy. We need to have reasons why things need to be the way they are.
So I go back to “what harm are we trying to prevent?” What is the bad thing that will happen if posts like Roger’s are allowed?
I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that the goal was to prevent that post, and we are backing into rules to do that. That’s just …a really weird take.
We have general principles against encouraging illegal activity. (Which civil disobedience IS, by definition.) We have a general principle against calls to action that, as Ed says, we are actively discussing. I believe the original goals were to avoid the board being used for scams, and also to avoid the board being sued. But i might be confused. At any rate, @Roger_That was clearly looking to encourage people to break the law (by commiting civil disobedience) and that was unambiguously against the published rules. I really don’t understand why that’s any confusion about that. (I agree with Ed that the rule about “calls to action” could use a little more clarity.)
Having been an active participant in Roger_That’s original thread, it seemed, to me, that:
- He didn’t, at least initially, really realize that civil disobedience is, by most definitions, a law-breaking activity
- He also seemed to want to draw a distinction between being willingly arrested for committing civil disobedience, and more “serious” law-breaking activities
I understand that he didn’t understand that at first, but many posters immediately pointed out out.
And while i also understand the moral distinction between being willing to accept punishment for breaking a law, and trying to get away with breaking a law, the rule is about “breaking the law”. And while I’m certainly sympathetic to people who have used civil disobedience to further human rights, in some technical sense, a lot of mad murderers expect to be caught and plan to accept the legal consequences of their actions. It’s not as if “accept legal consequences” is an automatic “morally okay” card.
I explained why, but I can try again. Because even now you went and discussed what the rules should be, and what you came up with did not forbid what he did. Thus, logically, your conclusion should be that his post isn’t a problem. Instead, the conclusion is that the rules you came up with are wrong. That inherently means you’re changing the rules to fit the problem.
And, to be fair, that’s not necessarily the wrong way to look at things. Sometimes you know something is harmful, and you need to figure out how to articulate the problem. But that opens you up to the question “is it really harmful?” And that is the part I haven’t seen: an argument for what the problem actually is.
Yes, there is a rule against advocating for illegal acts. But the reason that’s an issue is that there is the possibility of legal liability. Roger did not directly advocate for breaking the law. He asked for ideas on how someone might break the law. That does not seem to create any risk of legal harm.
So if the main reason for a rule does not apply, that should be a reason to change said rule, not a reason to make it even stronger. Rather than start from the position that Roger’s post was advocating for illegal activity and thus shouldn’t be allowed, go back and work out why the rules are the way they are.
Because, again, I see no sign that Roger’s post would have gotten anyone in trouble, or is harmful in any way. And ultimately all rules for behavior come stem from the first principles of harm avoidance (or mitigation) and fairness.
Thanks. I bailed pretty early on those because they seemed like they would go nowhere. Time to catch up.
So, it seems pretty clear that those posts were improper, according to that rule. Maybe that rule should be reconsidered or modified. But it’s the rule. And “how can we best commit civil disobedience” is completely parallel with “how can i best obtain weed/build a bong” which were forbidden topics until cannabis became legal in many states. You may not like the underlying rule, but it’s been applied consistently.
Just curious, did it ever occur to you that getting feedback before you announce a rule change might be a way to not need to make things clearer after you change the rule?
And overturn a tradition rooted in nearly 25 years of board culture?
The only real difference I see in the rules in the OP is under the abortion paragraph. People have always solicited medical and legal advice here and people, professional or not, have always answered. Usually starting out with IANAL or IANAMD. Other than when @handy, I think, was forbidden to post in medical threads I didn’t think that was ever modded.
Am I totally missing something else? Or is the main problem mods see @Roger_That as calling for action but some posters don’t?
People - we are (almost all) very angry at the events going on regarding the Supreme courts decisions and more conservative state legislatures. That’s completely understandable. We all want to do something to try to make the world better / protect the rights that are being abridged.
But let’s not be angry at @Ed_Zotti and the mods. They’ve already stated (well, most of the mods anyway) that they are completely sympathetic, but they are 1) enforcing the rules that protect the community from legal responsibility 2) actually working on updating and reconsidering how those rules can and should apply and 3) aren’t exactly tossing out major warnings or bans - they are noting and closing things and even suggesting alternatives until such time the rules are modified.
These political issues are going to have years of repercussions sadly, spending a few weeks to get a better idea of how the board should handle both it’s culture while mitigating it’s legal risks is not a huge ask.
BUT, I do strongly support @crowmanyclouds’s point, a thread saying that Zotti/The Mods are attempting to revise the Call to Action rules and soliciting input would have been a thousand times better and less infuriating than a statement of intent that didn’t leave the situation much more clear at all.
I -DO- acknowledge it at least wasn’t one where the rule was posted, pinned, but closed, so we are all here talking about how it could improve.
It is probably worth mentioning on a board supposedly dedicated to Fighting Ignorance that there is no realistic legal threat or liability to the board or its ownership for the sort of content being considered here being posted. Reddit and Facebook are basically used almost daily to plan and coordinate crimes and virtually nothing has been done legally to those companies.
It’s fine to just throw your hands up and say “we’re afraid of anything even a highly fictional imagination could possibly associate with a lawsuit”, but it has little to do with reality.
It is probably worth mentioning that a threat doesn’t have to be realistic, or even have a good possibility of successfully prevailing, to have to waste time and money countering said threat, thus endangering the existence of this forum. Reddit and Facebook can afford to slap back at such threats.
Can the owners of this venture?
Indeed; I think a lot of us understand that the SDMB has been allowed to continue to operate largely because we’ve not been big enough, expensive enough, or annoying enough to show up on ownership’s radar (the Reader, then the Sun-Times, and now WBEZ). The moment any of that changes – including someone threatening legal action because of content here, and, thus, ownership’s legal team having to pay attention to us – all bets are off.
Are you thinking of civil lawsuits? I know at least two posters were banned for talking about legal action against the SDMB. As far as I know, nothing came of either.
As for criminal charges, I really don’t know if the government has ever charged any of the biggies, like Facebook or twitter, over people planning illegal things on their platform. They sure used a lot of FB posts and tweets to prosecute the Jan. 6th crowd, but no action against the platforms that I know of.
On the third hand, you are right about keeping a low profile for the board. The mods have been pretty good at doing this for 20+ years, I don’t know that we need any radical changes in board rules. Like Martin_Hyde, I think the odds of any government agency caring about what gets posted here are slim to none, but who knows? Maybe Ed_Zotti could speak a bit about the legal concerns as they are currently.
When did this board become a democracy?
I have no big issue with the new rule, but a clarification would be good.
Where did I suggest that? TPTB could have opened and closed this thread at it’s conception, they didn’t, therefore it would seem that they’re asking for . . . something.