Ask HN: Best policies for community websites for handling questionable content?

5 points

11 years ago

Both reddit and voat have been accused of censorship for banning communities that contain questionable or illegal content, content that clearly goes against the ToS for those platforms. For alternative community-based websites, what does the HN community think are the more effective site-wide policies (cf. community-specific moderation policies) for encouraging community growth while preventing illegal or questionably legal content? Some examples - without advocation - to suggest some standards for the level of detail:

1) Any content that appears illegal must be removed within [x] hours by a community's mod else an admin can remove.

2) An admin should immediately remove any content reported or identified that appears to be illegal.

3) Any content that is reported to admins as potentially illegal is pushed to community mods for a determination and resolution that must occur within [x] hours else an admin can remove.

4) Any community that promotes or fosters an environment for posting [illegal content, discriminatory content, content against ToS] will be banned by the admins.

5) Authors (OP) of content that appears illegal will be banned.

6) Only admins can ban users.

7) [Community owners, mods] can be banned for any illegal content residing within their communities after [x] hours of being reported.

8) [Community owners, mods] are responsible for being familiar with the content-related laws in [website's country] and removing content in their communities that violate those laws within [x] hours.

9) Any community without a single owner cannot be [posted to, viewed] until a new owner takes over.

10) All communities with more than [number of posts, number of comments] must have a minimum of [x] mods.

11) All communities must have at least [x] mods that login and review all community content every [x] hours.

12) All formally received [legal notices, threats to take legal action] to remove content will be [publicly posted, forwarded to chillingeffects.org].