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update(blog)!: Bad-faith argument policy (#2754)

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Jonah Aragon 2024-09-09 02:22:52 -05:00
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---
date:
created: 2024-09-09
categories:
- Announcements
authors:
- jonah
tags:
- Privacy Guides
license: BY-SA
---
# Bad-Faith Arguments in the Privacy Community
The Privacy Guides community is one of the best privacy-related communities on the internet, and I think we have generally done a good job at promoting a positive and respectful environment where people can learn and grow.
Unfortunately, as a public forum we are not immune to the small minority of individuals who feel empowered to spread anger, hostility, and divisiveness by their anonymity and general lack of consequences on the internet.<!-- more -->
From now on, we are going to be strict about requiring all posts in our communities to be made in good faith.
We will consider the following questions when reviewing posts:
1. Is the poster presenting their criticism as informed or factual, when it's actually a matter of personal opinion, or worse, misinformation or false?
2. Has the poster failed to provide reasoning for their criticism, and demonstrated an unwillingness to learn or discuss the topic?
3. Is the poster writing something as if it is true and informed, when they're actually just speculating?
4. Is the poster simply spreading negativity instead of actually trying to improve something?
5. Is the poster engaging in ad hominem attacks against us or our community?
If these answer to any of these questions is yes, the post will be removed and the poster will be asked to revise their statement. We will suspend posters who repeatedly engage in bad faith arguments.
For almost everyone here, you won't see any negative impacts of this new policy. It is simply designed to allow us to remove the small number of people who occasionally join to spread unproductive negativity in the privacy space, at the expense of legitimate projects making the world a better place. Hopefully you will notice improvements in discussion quality overall.
---
To give an example, there are two specific behaviors we want to discourage with this new policy.
1. The constant use of words like "shilling," "fanboys," etc. to describe people who have a difference in opinion to your own is not acceptable.
To "[shill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill)" something is to promote something you have an employer relationship or some other actual conflict of interest with. To accuse someone in our community of being a planted shill without any evidence, simply because they like something that you dislike, is both a serious accusation and a bad-faith argument.
Even the use of terms like these informally to describe people who like a certain product more than others is disrespectful, and sows uncertainty and distrust within our community, so it will no longer be tolerated.
2. A very small portion of GrapheneOS community members continually attempt to derail any conversations mentioning GrapheneOS with irrelevant details and confrontational attitudes.
This is not a reflection on the GrapheneOS project itself, but unfortunately this has become a repeated situation with certain community members of this specific project more than anyone else, so we have to call it out.
Making unfounded accusations against Privacy Guides community members of harassment towards GrapheneOS simply because they presented their criticism of the project is not a good faith argument. Similarly, presenting unverified statements from the GrapheneOS community as factual has led to misinformation being spread in the past. It is critical to always differentiate between opinions/beliefs and factual information.
**Privacy Guides community spaces are not GrapheneOS discussion forums, and the drama from their community is not automatically on-topic in ours.** Please do not make new topics in our forum that simply link to drama posts from the GrapheneOS community. A good rule of thumb is that unless a post from GrapheneOS is specifically talking about GrapheneOS-specific, privacy-related functionality and not about other projects/software/etc., it is probably off-topic here.