No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
I'm going to address the question in two halves: what is the point of moderation overall, and what legal consequences exist when moderation (or the lack thereof) go awry?
Mike Masnick of TechDirt has written extensively about why moderation must exist for any large-scale, publicly-available web platform, most notably in this article describing the "moderation learning curve". That article goes through the "evolution" of a supposed "anything goes!" platform that is compelled -- by economic forces, public sentiment, existing laws on CSAM, and more -- to do moderation. But even the very act of drawing a line in the sand will always be objectionable to someone somewhere, so it'll always be a thankless job. Even harder is applying a moderation policy consistently and even-handedly.
But we're getting a bit too philosophical. Why does a platform -- from the largest like Facebook to the smallest Lemmy community of four people -- do moderation? A few answers:
For the legal aspect, I can only write from a USA perspective; IANAL. Broadly speaking, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides that: 1) a web provider that hosts content authored/submitted by another person will not share in any civil liability incurred by that person, and 2) no web provider will have civil liability for their moderation decisions made in good faith. Together, this means only the original author of some defamatory post can be sued for that defamation, not the platform. And if the platform removes that defamatory post as part of moderation, the original author does not have a right to sue the platform. In short, this provides a lot of protection from civil lawsuits if they do moderate, or if they don't. But if they don't, the practical issues from earlier will still arise.
But federal law imposes additional obligations for web providers, with civil or criminal penalties if not properly dealt with, for specific types of content. Examples include content that enables sex trafficking, or is CSAM. Sex trafficking was specifically carved out from Section 230, and CSAM is a possession crime: its mere presence on a hard disk, however acquired, is unlawful.
Putting this all together, a Lemmy mod that deletes a post is performing moderation. They might do so because the post is irrelevant to the users or violates some rule. Whether the mods leave the post up or take it down, the broad civil immunity of Section 230 means the platform can't be sued for it, nor can the post's author sue the platform. So the post remaining in the modlog does not pose any new legal vulnerability. Rather, removing the post proves the value of having mods, so that other users don't even have to see it. Post removal intentionally curtails any complicity with a deleted post, as few will find the modlogs to be desirable reading. Those that really want that content can find it online with enough effort anyway.
The exception to leaving content in the modlog is if it might be CSAM or otherwise illegal content. In that case, the mods can scrub it from even the modlog and anywhere on the platform. This complexity is why anyone hosting a Fediverse instance hosting other people's content is advised to follow guides on how to do so. Here's another one.
TL;DR: the mods have a job to do, everyone wants a healthy community, and the law has only a small -- but exceedingly important -- handful of obligations.