hey folks, we’ve got a couple big trust and safety updates coming today, including some changes to the community guidelines. we wanted to go over everything here for transparency about what we’re doing and why.
first off, the community guidelines. we’ve gotten a lot of questions and reports on content that, while we considered to be borderline but permitted, was absolutely in a gray area in the written community guidelines. we had internally developed a set of policies that we were applying to the small number of cases that came up, but had not publicly announced the policies we were applying because of some open questions we still had. this was a bad call, and moving forward we’re going to be more transparent about areas of uncertainty and indecision in our policy.
here’s a summary of the changes:
- we’ve added clarifications to the section regarding child sexual exploitation material, and how it pertains to non-realistic depictions of minors, in an attempt to provide clarity and consistency for enforcement.
- internally, we had been drawing the line at the prevailing legal definition of “realistic depictions,” which includes photographs/videos of actual human minors, or content difficult to distinguish from actual photographs/videos.
- policy around non-realistic depictions, such as lolicon/shotacon, has not yet been finalized. we don’t want to implement a policy that the majority of users would feel uncomfortable with. we are currently working to implement a system to allow us to get user input on this area of policy. until such time, please refrain from posting it; up to this point, we have been asking people posting it to remove it pending a final policy decision.
- we’ve added a new section clarifying and adding new rules around content warnings.
- previously, content warnings were only strongly recommended for posts containing potentially sensitive content. in most cases, this is still true. however, we are now requiring CWs for certain types of content.
- this policy change is accompanied by a technical change that prevents these CWs from showing up in unrelated tag pages. these posts will still show up on your dashboard (if you are following the poster), profile pages, and tag searches for any of the terms on the list.
- the full list of mandatory content warnings can be found on our support site. this page is also linked from the community guidelines.
- repeated failure to add mandatory content warnings, as well as attempts to circumvent the filtering system (such as by using numbers or symbols in place of letters), are considered bannable offenses. we don’t want to ban you so please be normal about this.
the tag page change is live now. our motivation in this change is not to censor any types of allowed content, but to prevent certain types of sensitive content from showing up in large, more general tags. while we may make changes to this list in the future, all changes will come with a notice, as well as a grace period for users to start adding CWs to their posts.
our goal is to provide a robust set of tools that allow everyone to customize their own experience to their level of comfort and safety. to support this, we are actively working on a system with which you will be able to completely hide posts that include CWs you never want to see and skip the clickthrough on CWs you do not need a warning for. these tools are being worked on in addition to general tag filtering tools. above all, we believe that you know your own preferences, limits, and triggers better than anyone else; our intent with these changes is to help you see the posts you want to see and none of what you don’t.
we also want to clarify that, thus far, we have not received any reports for content that, under the new rules, would require a mandatory content warning but did not already have one. we really appreciate that people are using the content warning system correctly, even before we had rules in place. the purpose of these rules isn’t to change anyone’s behavior, but to codify behavior we already saw, as well as to make our job moderating easier.
we are, as always, open to feedback on these policy and technical changes. this is a tricky, sensitive area to work in, and we’re making sure to act deliberately and with consideration. this is not a sudden decision; we have been thinking over these changes for well over a month now. (related: having weekly hours long conversations with your coworkers about lolicon kind of sucks and we would recommend against being in a position where that’s necessary.)
that’s all for now. please let us know if you have any questions or feedback and, as always, thanks for using cohost!
EDIT 10/7/22, 8:21am PDT:
In an attempt to reduce the amount of unconstructive nastiness and name calling in this comment thread, we are going to be removing comments (both "on our side" and not) that detract from actual conversation.
Please note: due to the sheer load, we will not be sending emails to users whose comments were removed. These removals will not be held against you in any future reports. This is a special situation for many reasons. If you have any questions, you can email us at support@cohost.org
