Moderation conflict involving c/vegan
Intro
We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.
Links
Actions in question
Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.
The comments have been restored.
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.
Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.
Removing some moderators of the vegan community
Removed moderators have been reinstated.
This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).
The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.
We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.
Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict
Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility
Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.
These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.
In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.
Community Responses
The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.
Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.
That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.
The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.
That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.
Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.
Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.
Conclusions
Regarding moderator actions
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.
Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.
While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.
We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.
TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.
Regarding censorship claims
Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.
Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".
We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.
While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".
To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT: Added org operations contact info
It is an endorsement of allowing discussion of a controversial topic that didn't break the posted rules.
Feeding a cat a vegan diet is animal abuse because it requires a workaround for their biology as an obligate carnivore instead of just feeding them what they have evolved to need. If a vegan can't properly feed a particular pet, they shouldn't have the pet.
But we should be able to discuss it unless the rules for the community are changed to prohibit that kind of discussion.
we do not consider feeding a cat vegan food as animal abuse, provided there are no health issues arising from this.
most of the research i've looked at seems to point out that there are various pitfalls, e.g. just feeding a cat vegetables will result in malnutrition. having synthetic additives for this can be one way to address that problem. just because something is sold as vegan cat food that doesn't necessarily imply that it's healthy for the cat, as some of the articles were pointing out that some of the cheaper ones were lacking the right ingredients.
as an example, "my cat now only gets potatoes and apples and nothing else" would be considered animal abuse.
additionally, if moderators were to remove arguments pointing out the risks of e.g. missing nutrients in a civil discussion and leaving the other side that just argues "vegan cat food works" without any arguments as is then we would also consider this animal abuse.
in this specific incident the conversation was certainly not civil, which is unfortunate, as this situation would likely have gone a very different way if it was.
Docking tails, snipping ears, and a bunch of stuff we do to dogs is abuse even if they don't have health issues down the road.
One issue with feeding cats a vegan diet is that cats hide their pain, so if the diet is causing pain due to a lack of nutrients that don't have obvious external signs like death, they could be suffering for their entire lives. We don't have long term studies about other health impacts from a lack of meat, and the primary focus has been keeping them from dying. It should be assumed that there are other negstive side effects we cannot see when at least one missing enzyme kills the cat.
Plus the only possible outcome is that some vegan is able to avoid feeding an obligate carnivore they voluntarily adopted the wrong diet.
I never said that it only requires harm down the road.
Cutting body parts off or even just cutting them without good medical reason (e.g. risk of death without amputation) is of course also animal abuse.
For hiding pain, you're attacking a strawman, because I already addressed that in my previous comment.
vaccine denial is also allowed when a sub has no rules against it?
By this logic, oxygenating a fish tank to provide the fish with oxygen is animal abuse. You are artificially adding the necessary oxygen into the water, after all.
Okay, so this is just factually wrong.
Putting oxygen in a tank is necessary for the health of the fish. Feeding a cat meat is necessary for the health of the cat.
It’s also a false equivalence.
There is no workaround for oxygenating fish tanks; we don’t find something that ‘might work as well as oxygen’ according to poorly done studies. We just give them oxygen, the thing they actually need to live.
I don't see the falsehood of the equivalence at all. Living things need certain atoms and molecules as inputs. Provide those, and the living thing lives. The rest is just vibes.
The problem here is they need specific molecules. A vegan diet does not give cats those correct necessary molecules.
A century ago you might've been right, but not anymore.
Any molecule found in meat can be found or made in other ways if we want. The body is complicated, but not that complicated.
It doesn’t work. No study shows it does, save for a few poorly-done ones paid for by vegan think-tanks, and even those are ambiguous. Maybe one day we will manage it, but right now we can’t.
Oh man, it's clearly more complicated than you realize.
You are more than welcome to explain your reasoning on any complication I missed.
And yes, nuance very much matters. That's the cause of this whole problem, the misunderstanding of the nuance of how scientific classification systems work. This whole argument is fundamentally no different from the "pluto is a planet" thing.
You seem to think we just add a little of nutrients X and vitamin Y and it's all sorted.
This is nothing like Pluto being a planet FFS. If you really think that a classification system of planets changing is the same as nutritional science then we are too far apart to have a conversation. One is a system we made to classify things, it's based on rules we made. We didn't make the rules on what a cat needs to survive or how easy it is to delivery needed nutrients.
In what way is it not sorted if all the necessary nutrients are provided?
This all stems from people using the classification of cats as obligate carnivores to justify an inappropriate claim. That's not what classification systems are for. It is definitely the same as misunderstanding how Pluto can get reclassified.
Because it's not just "eat vitamin X." Things like ability to digest and absorb, the amount of calories it takes to get that nutrients, what is even liked/disliked by cats. Sure, if you could give them vitamin injections and force feed them you could ensure it's done right, but that has other quality of life issues.
Classifying types of consumers is not the same as classifying planets. Classifying planets is based on whatever we want. Classifying types of consumers is based on what they need to live.
Absorption being a concern does not mean we cannot engineer a nutrient to be readily absorbed. Similarly, what flavors are liked/disliked is similarly based on specific molecules that can also be created if we so wish. No one is talking about injections, that's a strawman.
What they need to live is specific nutrients. Thinking about a hard requirement for how those nutrients are acquired is a misuse of the classification system. Ultimately, both of these classification systems were devised by us, and are fundamentally imperfect because of that.
If we took a carnivorous bacteria, I think you could see a little more easily how we could synthesize its diet if we wished. Would we then need to reclassify it as something other than an obligate carnivore just because we could synthesize its diet? Even though it would still have to stick to its diet anywhere in its natural habitat?
The classification system is not an absolute arbiter of truth. It is a communication tool. It is not perfect, and we very much can get around it. The rest is just, as I've said before, vibes.
I think we fundamentally disagree on some basic science concepts.