User Guidelines and or Rules

[clone1018]

Currently users are pretty unbound, we need to figure out if we want to support or prevent things like abusive usernames, pornographic avatars, spamming in the about me text, spamming with usernames, spamming with toots, etc.

[mvdkleijn]

Some suggestions:

• No spamming of any kind
• No commercial advertisements in disguise
• No usernames that are sensitive like "admin", "administrator", "info", "sales", etc.

[seanlinsley]

A good place to start: https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service

[clone1018]

@mvdkleijn Do the companies tipping on Gittip with their name/brand and URL to their website match the "No commercial advertisements in disguise"?

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @johnvpetersen on Twitter (wrt panhandling).

[chadwhitacre]

This just got real. @tkwidmer on Twitter:

Someone just registered for @gittip with the nazi eagle as their display photo. Is there any way to report stuff like that?

[tkwidmer]

this is the user https://www.gittip.com/Blear/

[Changaco]

Gittip is not hosting that image, GitHub is, so I suggest using GitHub's "Report Abuse" button.

The issue on the Gittip side is showing the avatar in the "New Participants" section of the homepage, which I assume is where @tkwidmer discovered it.

[johnvpetersen]

Why did I get this?

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 27, 2014, at 7:28 PM, Chad Whitacre notifications@github.com wrote:

This just got real. @twidx on Twitter:

Someone just registered for @gittip with the nazi eagle as their display photo. Is there any way to report stuff like that?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[chadwhitacre]

@johnvpetersen You are on this ticket because of this comment on Twitter three months ago:

https://twitter.com/johnvpetersen/status/433225386160164865

At the time I added a +1 for you here. Feel free to unsubscribe using the button in the sidebar in the GitHub UI:

[johnvpetersen]

OK.. Thanks for the context.

On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 7:36 AM, Chad Whitacre notifications@github.comwrote:

@johnvpetersen https://github.com/johnvpetersen You are on this ticket because of this comment on Twitter three months ago:

https://twitter.com/johnvpetersen/status/433225386160164865

At the time I added a +1 for you here. Feel free to unsubscribe using the button in the sidebar in the GitHub UI:

[image: screen shot 2014-04-28 at 7 35 51 am]https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/134455/2816408/47f94376-cec9-11e3-96f3-c9d260fed8af.png

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1425#issuecomment-41548331 .

[chadwhitacre]

So is Gittip willing to tolerate a "Nazi" community on Gittip? Why or why not? IRC

[strugee]

+1 for community guidelines of some sort. A Nazi avatar is unbelievably offensive at best, IMHO.

[pydanny]

I'm not willing to tolerate a Nazi community on gittip. If it's not gone in 24 hours, I'm leaving. IMO, the whole point of gittip to me has been is that it's been about people doing good, inspirational work. If they are allowed to stay, then gittip is meaningless. Might as well just put a PayPal button on everything I do and ask for donations.

[coolbreezechloe]

Rather than asking about a "Nazi" community maybe the question should be what kind of community in general would not be allowed and for what reason.

For example you may not allow communities that have as their core belief the idea that slavery is justified. You could say you do not accept such a community because we do not believe that any person can own another person and we do not want to promote or affiliate with such a group.

Do you not shop at a grocery store if you know the owner / manager believes differently than you on some key issue (abortion, taxes, guns, etc...)?

What is the purpose of a community in the context of gittip?

[sgillies]

I'd quit Gittip if it became a place for white suprematists to tip each other for brutal behavior. Don't want to be part of anything like this: http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2014/04/17/splc-report-nearly-100-murdered-by-stormfront-users/

[clone1018]

@pydanny I'm not sure we're going to come to a resolution within your 24 hour time frame. Drafting and editing an entire User Guidelines document takes some time, especially when all of your employees work on their own time.

[pydanny]

Then I'll suspend my account immediately and wait. If you come to what I think is the correct decision, then I'll reactivate. If not, I'm done with gittip.

[seanlinsley]

I'm not willing to tolerate a Nazi community on gittip. If it's not gone in 24 hours, I'm leaving.

@pydanny: there is no such community. There's only an inactive user with a controversial avatar:

[chadwhitacre]

I'm not willing to tolerate a Nazi community on gittip. If it's not gone in 24 hours, I'm leaving.

For the record, we don't have a Nazi community yet. We have one user with Nazi symbolism in their avatar.

[pcperini]

I would say that Gittip should not support a Nazi community, or any hate group. A good place to start when differentiating "hate groups" from otherwise disagreeable communities might be the FBI's definition of hate groups:

[Any group whose] primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against persons belonging to a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin which differs from that of the members of the organization.

[clone1018]

@pcperini Does having a Nazi Party symbol as your avatar fall under your "hate group" clause?

[chadwhitacre]

This is gosh darn tricky. I am trying to bring myself to @mention the user in question.

[ironfroggy]

Do not forget that in some jurisdictions the financial support of nazi related organizations could be illegal.

[chadwhitacre]

@ironfroggy Yes. I found this about Twitter complying with German law on the matter. Apparently Twitter has fine-grained blocking abilities and scoped their censorship in this case to Germany only.

[tarekziade]

Technically speaking, you'd simply be against some countries laws I think, because you'd provide a medium for ethnic/racial hatred. It's against the law in France, also in UK I think

[pydanny]

I guess gittip doesn't have a suspend feature. Or a 'flag' feature. :unamused:

[chadwhitacre]

@pydanny Nope. You're watching the development of such features as we speak. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

@chimeracoder on Twitter:

What about Freedom 0: the freedom to run a program for any purpose? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

We should remember that any community that we exclude from Gittip is still free to use our software to run their own funding platform.

[DavidTyler]

I think there's a good distinction between gittip the service and gittip the software. As a service, I think there's a lot more leeway to decide who you welcome and who you think is toxic to the community. I think that any group that advocates that there is a set of humanity strictly worse than another set of humanity is incompatible with the group of people that are currently invested in the success of gittip as a piece of OSS and as a service.

[chadwhitacre]

What are some parallels to inform our conversation here?

• Reddit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities
• Twitter. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/08/how-free-should-speech-be-on-twitter.html
• ???

[chadwhitacre]

http://about.deviantart.com/policy/etiquette/

[pydanny]

@whit537 At best those are rough parallels. @gittip is about the transference of money from one person to another person or cause. OTOH, Twitter and reddit are free-to-use services.

I think you need to blaze your own trail.

[chadwhitacre]

I'd quit Gittip if it became a place for white suprematists to tip each other for brutal behavior.

@sgillies What about PayPal? Presumably, white supremacists use PayPal to give money to each other. Do you avoid PayPal?

At best those are rough parallels. @gittip is about the transference of money from one person to another person or cause. OTOH, Twitter and reddit are free-to-use services.

@pydanny Gittip is a free-to-use service, no? Gittip is about moving money, yes. But it's also social, so that's a difference from PayPal.

[patcon]

@pydanny

Twitter and reddit are free-to-use services.

So is Gittip ;) We don't make any money from the usage of Gittip unless people support us on the platform.

I think you need to blaze your own trail.

@pydanny Respectfully disagree :) Blazing our own policy trail is something I personally have zero interest is doing. Policy can become all-consuming and bureaucratic, and I do not think Team Gittip can handle it with our limited resources.

However, if some new source of energy wanted to step up and draft the policy in the open, and then work to implement and manager the abuse reporting system feature, then that's another matter entirely.

[pydanny]

@whit537 The difference between PayPal and @gittip is that @gittip, AFAIK, is about inspiring others in a positive way via a social network. If @gittip loses that distinction, then why participate with @gittip? It just becomes another bit of social network noise.

[ironfroggy]

@patcon Policy may seem boring but it is also important and with any project you have to take the interesting and uninteresting bits together. It comes as a package deal.

[chadwhitacre]

@pydanny Okay, but insofar as Gittip is social, then we're back to Twitter and Reddit, no? I know you use Twitter. ;-) Yet Twitter also allows white supremacists on their platform.

What's the difference between Stormfront and Twitter?

[pydanny]

@whit537 twitter and reddit are not built and marketing under the premise of doing social good. AFAIK, @gittip is built and marketing under the premise of doing social good, hence why it's such a draw for community activists.

[pcperini]

@clone1018 No, not necessarily; my comment was about the hypothetical community, rather than the actual user. Though I would imagine Gittip could support a fairly comprehensive "offensive content" policy for handling these instances on a case-by-case basis, yeah?

[sgillies]

@whit537 I'd just about deleted my comment because I know you're already aware, the problem is mostly hypothetical, and my comment wasn't actionable in any way, but I'll stick around and try to help.

I'll second what @pydanny says above and add that if money is more influential than 140 chars (walk, not talk) it seems like there's extra onus on @gittip to not be a platform for violent/criminal people and communities. I still don't have a very good actionable suggestion and apologize for that. Adopting standards of acceptable advertising and service from a very progressive city (instead of a web site) might be a good starting point.

And I do avoid PayPal. Not because it's worse than a credit card company, but because it's no better.

[chrisdev]

@whit537 i like this from the deviant art policy guidelines

"in all other respects your avatar must conform to 
the guidelines set above in regards to hate propaganda"

[tkwidmer]

Just as a small update: @whit537 - The user in question connected their account through github - I reported their github account for "abuse" which is currently the only way to flag a user on github. I read the github TOS and there isn't anything explicit. But I did recieve an email this morning from someone named Chris Rathjen who works for github and they are "Investigating the user."

As per somebody's comment earlier: I noticed the avatar on the " new participants column"

[patcon]

(Speaking for myself here, and only representing Gittip insofar as I am a contributor.)

We're not a traditional company, so we can best tackle these high-energy things when someone has a convergence of passion and capacity. (We need someone to draft the policy, build the moderation feature, and manage it in an ongoing fashion. That's not insignificant.)

To those who are saying a policy or abuse system should exist, we need you to offer your efforts to make it so -- opinions are appreciated and essential, but they only go so far. Gittip is not a traditional company where the approach of "you should do this or I the customer will be disappointed" makes as much sense. We need someone to step up here and say "I care about this issue, and will drive it forward".

There's this idea of a "blocker" in agile methodology, which is a thing/person/circumstance that prevents you from moving forward. On this issue, you're not blocked by us -- we're blocked by your absence :)

[chadwhitacre]

[E]very week, Facebook receives more than two million requests to remove material.

O.o

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113045/free-speech-internet-silicon-valley-making-rules

[chadwhitacre]

YouTube:

We encourage free speech and try to defend your right to express unpopular points of view, but we don't permit hate speech.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801939?hl=en

[chadwhitacre]

A few distinctions:

• There are money services, and then there are social networks.
• There are words/images, and then there's money.
• There's the homepage, and then there are subpages.
• There are individual users, and then there are communities.
• There are legal limits, and then there are moral limits.
• There's freedom of speech, and then there's prevention of violence.

[chadwhitacre]

Gittip is partly a money-moving service (like PayPal, etc.), and partly a social network (like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc.)

Gittip has some provision for words/images (which are more of the social network side), but is mostly about money (the money side). We've had an ongoing conversation about adding more content features to Gittip. So far we've said "no" because we don't have the bandwidth to execute such features well; this issue here strengthens that position—content policing gets more complicated if we have more content. Money policing is going to be complicated enough!

My point with the homepage/subpages distinction is that, even if we decide not to exclude certain users/communities from Gittip entirely, we may still want to keep them out of ... let's call them "global public streams."

It could also make sense to curate communities more closely than users.

Re: legal limits: When Turkey asks us to suspend an account that they believe is tied to a group disparaging Ataturk, what do we do? Suspend that account entirely? IP-block that specific account to users coming from Turkey? What if the owner of the account lives in Turkey? What if they don't? What if funders live in Turkey? What if they don't? What if they ask us, not to suspend an account, but to provide info on funders of that account? See also #375.

Re: moral limits. This is just a really deep rabbit hole. O.o

[chadwhitacre]

I remember in Hotel Rwanda that hate speech over FM radio played a significant role in inciting genocide. I heard a few days ago on BBC World Service that a similar pattern played out the other week in South Sudan. And on Gittip we're not just talking about words, we're talking about money.

[pydanny]

Has there been anymore progress on this issue?

[patcon]

Sorry @pydanny, but not that I'm aware of. Please please drop into IRC if you'd like to help move this forward :) We're friendly and very grateful for extra hands, and any help would be so appreciated

EDIT: Sorry, accidentally closed and submitted too soon :)