community standards
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Facebook's Oversight Board will begin hearing cases before the US election
Faceboook has confirmed that it’s Oversight Board set up to rule on moderation disputes across the company’s platforms will begin to hear cases in mid-October, just ahead of the November US elections.
Jante Law and player psychology
Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn has been posting some really interesting things about psychology and the World of Warcraft lately. The other week she wrapped up a little survey (along with the folks at Dreambound) about personalities of players and how they correspond to the roles they play in game, and this week she's got a little analysis up about something called the Jante Law, developed by a Norwegian author for a novel back in the 1930s. You can read the whole idea on her page or over on Wikipedia, but basically it all boils down to one "rule" for overseeing each individual member of a community: "Don't think that you are more special than us."She applies the law to the WoW community at large, and says that without knowing it, comment trolls and those who attack people who differentiate themselves on the forums (including the folks who caused Ghostcrawler to rethink his role there) are following this law, and attacking those who stick their neck out as different. Personally, I don't know that the "haters" in the community give it that much thought -- most of the time when they do attack others, they do it to try and build themselves up rather than enforce any community standard ("You've won 1,000 AV matches? Big deal, I win in there all the time.").
Second Life community standards updated
There are several sets of rules for users of Second Life. The Terms of Service (TOS) and Community Standards (CS) which combined form your explicit service-contract with Linden Lab, and assorted implicit ones, like following any additional conditions the owner of whatever land-parcel that you are currently on may have chosen to impose. Well, the Linden Lab have updated the Community Standards for the first time in, well, perhaps forever. While the Lab has said that it has updated them in the past, the document has remained unaltered since at least 2005. What's new, however, isn't necessarily as interesting as what's missing.
Peering Inside: Massively abusive
At any time that a Second Life user feels that someone in their vicinity (or objects in their vicinity) violates Linden Lab's Terms of Service, or the Second Life Community Standards, that user can file an abuse report, which is then forwarded to Linden Lab's abuse team for processing via a request tracker. Each report, we are told, is examined and action taken where appropriate. Every account has a record which is to be assessed to determine ongoing abuse. An established resource and record of actions apparently exists to determine consistency of judgment. But that can't be the whole story.
