This is not a fact, it is a claim made by a witness of unknown reliability, refuted by two witnesses who I deem reliable.
Removing this as to avoid arguing about the Russia-Ukraine war in this thread.
So what if he didn’t understand… at first? That’s why people have conversations.
Now that I know which video was referenced, I can also say that it would be difficult to prove it was a war crime under Article 13. The Russian soldier is asked to explain how he is being treated and what he is doing in Ukraine. The defense that could be raised is this is an effort to inform the soldier’s family he is alive and well, and to also show that the Ukrainians have captured him and are holding him captive, not summarily executing him or etc. It certainly could also be argued it is propaganda, but it is not a slam dunk case. Also extremely unambiguously, there is no American crime whatsoever in sharing, possessing or etc this image, there is no GC implications for any entity not party to the war sharing it either, it is a freedom of speech matter and there is no restriction on sharing such images as a matter of domestic law, and it is outside the bounds of the GC treaties which only apply to belligerents party to the conflict.
I’ve had flags that turned into private conversations. Because my understanding is that a flag is really just a PM getting the attention of mods. The mod(s) will naturally respond back in kind, and so a private conversation results.
In no way am I or anyone else “choosing” to make the conversation private. The system just works that way, and for good reason. Reporting a problem should usually be private. It’s not necessary that Billy knows that Sandy, Jim, and Joe think his post was jerkish. The mods can intervene without it becoming an open argument between people in a thread.
If folks want to argue, instead of flagging, open a Pit thread.
Anyway, I’ve had those conversations in private. I’ve never taken a discussion to ATMB. If I ever did, it would only happen if things got so out of hand that I felt the mods weren’t willing or able to handle it themselves to my satisfaction and I needed to include the rest of the community.
It would take a lot to get that far, though. Because I assume, and I think most people would assume, the mods can usually handle things just fine. Taking it to ATMB right away instead of using the PMs as designed seems like a bad tactic.
So that’s why I think it’s totally unreasonable to criticize @gdave for maintaining a private conversation initially. Of course they did, anyone would naturally do that and should. It’s ridiculous to call that bad form; it’s perfectly good form.
I’m specifically criticizing his decision to besmirch Chronos but keep the details private so none of us could evaluate his claims, it is an incredibly unfair approach. The fact that he had lost access to the PM thread is mostly immaterial, he could have used plain words to explain specifically what moderation action had angered him and in what context. If the plain text of the PM conversation became an issue it could have then been addressed, but the approach of “I’m going to keep most of the details, which are known to me, secret, but I’m going to publicly insult and denigrate Chronos”, is not good form, sorry.
I don’t want to see gdave leave the forums, and I’m genuinely sympathetic to the fact he probably has a personal reason for being sensitive to this, but that isn’t carte blanche to do whatever you want.
I don’t think it’s bad firm for him to report a post and then have a private conversation with a kid about it. I think it’s bad form for him to launch an attack on Chronos in the way that he did in the OP to this thread.
Sure. But free speech isn’t the only virtue, and this is a private message board, not the public square.
This private message board does tend to lean more towards “free speech” and less towards “don’t be a jerk” than most other online communities i am part of. But i often see tension between those two goals, here and elsewhere.
I just went back and read through the flag report.
@gdave did not report the link as offensive, he reported it as a “war crime”.
Initially, @What_Exit removed the offending link. At no time did any moderator restore the link or even hint that they might restore the link.
@Chronos questioned whether it was a war crime. Instead of explaining why, @gdave said that it was unconscionable that he was getting nitpicky pushback from a mod. @Chronos continued to ask for clarification (because we’re not lawyers and we want to understand issues like this), and instead @gdave said that this was “bullshit” and that he was leaving the board.
@gdave’s part of the exchange was characterized as a “weird overreaction” during the subsequent mod exchange, and I agree with that.
Maybe I’m beating a dead horse (sorry) but there are lots of things that are evidence of a crime that don’t belong here. I gather that the guy who murdered a bunch of people in Buffalo streamed his actions on both Twitch and Discord. I expect both have digital copies, and i expect they will make those available to law enforcement, and they’ll be shown to the jury at the trial. But if those live streams showed up here I’d quash them immediately.
I understand that opinion. The impression I was getting was that people were criticizing the decision to keep the discussion to PMs at first, “making the discussion private”.
If the criticism is about being coy in regards to the details once it was taken to ATMB, that makes sense and I agree. It wasn’t clear to me that this was the particular issue.
Good.
That’s probably understandable, given what all has been posted (including by me.) In my mind it is of course perfectly fine to pursue a discussion for moderation in private. My point was more that if you want to have it discussed publicly, you should post in ATMB publicly with your concerns. What was maybe left unsaid–if you start a private conversation, and then for whatever reason want to address it publicly, and specifically to criticize the content of the private conversation, I think it is proper form to fully lay out what happened. Gdave’s original post from two months ago was a very vague thing that basically just says “Chronos is unfit to be a mod but I won’t say why specifically.” To me, that is not fair. If you want to press a claim like that, you should come in an emotional and intellectual place where you are able to fully disclose and discuss the reasons for making that claim.
I don’t think anyone is disagreeing with that, I certainly am not. My impression from reading gdave’s post is the legal element was important to him–he mentions it in both of his posts and my impression was the legal element was at least part of why he got so upset about it, i.e. that he perceived the board to be “ignoring” international war crimes law. In that context I simply do think it is appropriate to clarify what the law is–that doesn’t mean one way or another a specific thing should or shouldn’t be allowed on the boards.
I totally agree.
The criticism is not for having a private conversation on the issue. The criticism is for subsequently launching a hyperbolic attack on a mod’s ethics and character based on a biased recounting of that private conversation.
By OP’s own account, the initial substance of his report was that the video was illegal. He was factually wrong. The moderation decision therefore could only hinge on subjective ethical judgment, yet OP appears to be butthurt that the mods had the temerity to want to explore this. He is evidently upset about the tone with which @Chronos expressed his own opinion on the ethics as part of this process. That appears to be the foundation for his flounce even though the moderation decision went his way.
I think if you have strong feelings on an important ethical issue that affects Board moderation policy and you feel the mods are taking the wrong approach, it behooves you start an ATMB thread to discuss it and bring the substantive ethical issues into the open for all of us to discuss, not to get butthurt and flounce because you think a mod was not immediately deferential to your views in a private conversation. OP could certainly still start an ATMB thread to discuss the substantive ethical issues surrounding this type of video, or re-orient the current thread to those issues. It think that would be far more productive that trying to dissect the specifics of a prior private conversation.
puzzlegal said:
I don’t remember the exact words. But i believe @Chronos suggested it was morally virtuous for a journalist to expose war crimes, and that we shouldn’t censor such journalism
Morally virtuous, hero, pretty much the same. And there was no journalist involved nor a war crime. Hence, Chronos did not understand the situation.
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Well, we don’t even know that he understands now what the situation was. The fact that he thought the video was morally virtuous should have in no way been part of his judgement. It either broke a rule or it didn’t, and I don’t think a mods personal judgement should be a factor in that decision.
Me also. However, I don’t think that is going to happen, from either side. Paraphrases from mods don’t really help any.
This thread should probably just be closed as it appears we have all the info we are going to get, so people are just doing a bunch of wild guesses.
None of us know what was said, including you. The one mod to comment has said he doesn’t feel Chronos words matched up to the hero wording.
We don’t know that he thought that.
I quoted puzzlegal above. Morally virtuous sounds a bit like hero.
That’s pretty much a given. @chronos specifically said that he was “confused” and was asking for clarification. As he understood it, the person could possibly be considered a “hero” for documenting and exposing war crimes and not someone facilitating a war crime, as @gdave asserted.
@gdave did not give clarification. Instead he again asserted that the video itself was a “war crime” and that @chronos questioning it was “disgraceful bullshit”, and that he was leaving.
Can’t the mods send the poster a PM explaining this, and including a copy of the discussion up to the point at which the poster was removed from the thread?
Yes; but I once had to PM a moderator – can’t remember if it was you – to find out what had happened to a DM thread, because it had disappeared when I went to post my answer to such a question.
That did get straightened out – IIRC I even briefly got access to the DM thread again, along with the info that it was being taken private to the modloop. But I think it would avoid some of the problems associated with the way Discourse treats this if mods handled taking such a thread private as I suggested above.