Regarding bad-faith arguments in the privacy community

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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.

From now on, we are going to be strict about requiring all comments to be made in good faith.

We will consider the following questions when reviewing comments:

  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.

Two specific examples of behavior that has become increasingly problematic

  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” something is to promote something you have a 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 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 in any way. 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.

    This is not a GrapheneOS discussion forum, and the drama from their community is not automatically on-topic in ours. Please do not make new topics 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.

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Edit: undelete post.

I don’t know if this is coincidence but I came across this after posting on Reddit. Getting consistent down-votes on questions I truly just wanted information for. I appreciate that I found this and look forward to engaging with good faith individuals. I sincerely hope to find positive engagement that only further enhances my ability to tackle these issues. Best Wishes.

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@jonah well, while I fully understand the grounds of this decision, I have some reservations.

  1. Who will decide whats in good and bad faith?
  2. What will be done with content written in bad-faith?
  3. Will ALL negative comments be taken as bad-faith?
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  1. the moderators
  2. hidden + notice to the author to change it or deleted outright
  3. no, it always depends on the circumstances
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Other than the concerns raised by @bigdzi which I agree with, I have other concerns.

For consideration 1., I wonder if PG is trying to position themselves as platform Solely for Highly Technical discussions. It sems like enforcing proper citation for every comment/ post (For clear compliance of this “considertation”) to me, and I wonder how it can actually facilitate discussions by raising the bar for making comment/posting so high.

For consideration 2., we can always get stubborn (especially when we are shocked by something), and more so during a “heated” discussion. I wonder how long would PG mods observe before taking actions. And shutting down a heated up discussions rather than de-escalate / re-direct seems not a very good idea because it is actually not promoting discussions, not promoting/ demonstrating proper discussion manners (e.g. agree to disagree).

For 3 and 4., I don’t really think it is an issue, because if PG aims to “Promote” privacy as well as “Proper discussion manners / method”, than dismissing/ punishing this kind of kindda natural human behaviour is quite discouraging. As the bar is just so high for most people, I can say even many management-grade professionals might fail this part (just base on my workplace experience).

For 5., It seems covering hominem attacks against Moderators / PG, which I have to disagree. It’s prone to be abused by moderators, and it feels like the Mods are the “untouchables” rather than “moderators” (well, there’s no way community members and stop Mods from exercising their power, right?). Good Mods will usually be protected by the community members, and more importantly, if an untrue claim keep being raised, then just link back to your previous “clarifications”, or merge the threads and close it.

I am not saying the Mods will abuse the power, I am saying the “authorisation” of the possible abuse and how the community is preceived.

Overall, to me this trend is quite concerning.

I am not concerned about the disinformation or negativity of the forum as this is a forum, not a messenger, we (community members) can easily ignore those toxic threads and let them sink.

Sorry for failing to meet consideration 1 &3.

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Where does it say that will happen? Hint: The answer is nowhere. There are 5 questions we will consider when reviewing negative comments, and if none of them apply then obviously this policy would not apply.

Clearly answered:

This is only enforced if you state your opinions as if they are facts. If it is clear that you are merely sharing your personal experience or non-expert opinion, then I don’t think you should run into any issues.

If the conversation is able to be de-escalated or redirected, then clearly the “and demonstrated an unwillingness to learn or discuss the topic” part of the criteria would not apply, so the scenario you have imagined would not happen.

On the other hand, people stubbornly sticking with their arguments even though they are clearly in the wrong and have done nothing to defend their position is exactly the sort of conversation which will not be allowed, yes.

Correct. This is the definition of an ad hominem argument:

This fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone’s argument or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument.

I am clearly stating that ad hominem attacks are not allowed in our community. There is never a reason to attack another community member’s person, regardless of their status at Privacy Guides or within any other organization, instead of their actions or arguments. If you have an issue with a moderation decision, arguing against the decision is very obviously not forbidden by these rules. If you have some other issue with a moderator on a personal level, that is your problem you can keep to yourself really.

I see no reason whatsoever that someone’s status as a moderator should open them up to personal attacks, so I don’t understand your argument.

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