Wander, 28 days ago

#MastoAdmin #Moderation approaches:
How to deal with accusations and rumors based on outside drama?

This is a tricky one.
Suppose a user is accused of something that is generally frowned upon or worse. However, this has supposedly happened irl, not in your instance, and also the user has a good track record of being active and generating content that doesn't violate the rules at your instance or other instances. There is also no threat to your userbase (as opposed to, for example, in the case of a doxxer).

What is the best approach?:

1- Suspend the user
2- Kick them out (allow them to migrate away, although this just pushes the problem back to the options below)
3- Let them stay and any disagreeing remote instances suspend the user on their side
4- Let them stay and any disagreeing remote instances suspend your whole instance

IMHO, the only sustainable option is option 3, unless it carries a realistic threat to other users. It's not feasible for small instances to be part-time detectives and unless the content posted itself is problematic or there are other reasons, service mentality should prevail if we don't want to push users to super large instances that don't care.

Any concerned remote users or instances are of course free to block on their side.

A whole instance block is not warranted since the instance itself is not spammy or allowing any problematic content, but merely decides not being capable of making a fair assessment of off-platform rumors.

Am I off track?