Rules in the social-democratic community

It is unlikely that any chat, forum, or other internet community can do without rules. Rules are needed to maintain a culture of communication, to prevent discussions from degenerating into bickering, talking about topics no one cares about, or advertising various goods and services. And this, of course, is not an exhaustive list of threats to constructive discussion on political topics. How can we keep this communication adequate and useful for the community? “The Logic of Progress” has experience in creating and moderating chats and comments, and below we will provide a list of rules we have developed over recent years (usually pinned in a prominent place).

CAREFULLY read the rules of conduct in the comments. These rules are needed to foster a high culture of communication and critique:

1. Discrimination against participants based on sex, age, race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity is prohibited. Expressions of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of xenophobia are prohibited. Humor on these topics is permitted provided that the sender’s humorous intent is sufficiently obvious without the goal of insulting anyone;
2. Threats, insults, and boorishness are prohibited;
3. Spam, shock content, and uncoordinated advertising of other communities or any goods are prohibited;
4. Flooding is prohibited. This includes messages unrelated to social democracy or political issues. Copypastas, long posts, and large reposts that do not fit into the logic of the conversation may be equated to flooding. Discussion of moderators’ decisions and rules is equated to flooding (all discussion should take place in private messages with the admin);
5. Foul language is discouraged. It is not punishable by a ban on its own, but it can serve as an aggravating factor;
6. The dissemination of fake news and false information can be punishable by a ban. Verify information before publishing it in the comments;
7. If you use demagogic techniques to prove your point of view (you can view their list here), you will receive a warning. In the event of repeated use of fraudulent techniques in a discussion, you may be banned;
8. If you are a supporter of the destruction of democracy, the suppression of civil liberties and rights, all of this will be granted specifically to you. Everyone gets what they wish for here: democrats get democracy, authoritarians get authoritarianism. Supporters of the destruction of the state and legality, which leads to the rule of the strong, will also have the opportunity to experience the realization of this right firsthand;
9. When expressing a point of view opposite to ours, try to be extremely correct and polite. If you do not respect us and our work, you will be treated accordingly. Also, if you call for actions against us or social democracy anywhere, you may be banned without explanation;
10. Decisions on punishments are made by the moderation team, taking into account the totality of all factors that are appropriate to consider – the person’s length of time in the community, respectful communication, and so on;
11. If a person responds to a provocation, the provocateur is punished first and foremost. Responses to a provocation can also be punishable, but with a much lower probability;
12. For unban inquiries, write in private messages to the administrator (Avel Rodionov). Violating the rules in the absence of online moderators complicates the unban process;
13. Attempts to bypass a ban or restrictions issued by the administration, and the creation of secondary accounts, are prohibited;
14. Voice messages are prohibited;
15. Only the chat administrator can pin messages;
16. It is discouraged to write more than two messages in a row. If you forgot to add something, it is better to edit your last message;
17. In this chat, it is forbidden to write on radical topics that are unsafe for chat participants from the standpoint of potential persecution (for example, calls for the partition of Russia). All such topics are discussed in a separate chat. To join it, write to the administrator. The use of anonymity measures to participate in the radical chat is mandatory.

Please note that due to the dangers of political conversations in Russia, if you want to protect yourself, we recommend participating even in the regular chat not from an account with your real last name, and also using a VPN and other anonymization tools.

Complete freedom of speech is granted to those who speak out without inappropriate emotions, falsifications, and demagoguery, basing their words on scientific sources, links to which they provide in confirmation.

If this does not suit you, there is another chat where there is no moderation. To join it, write in private messages to the administrator.

As we can see, there are many rules. Why are they needed? Most often, they serve four purposes: to keep adequate people from leaving the community, to protect against potential provocateurs, to shield the community from potential government penalties, and to improve the quality of discussions and direct them to benefit the community and enrich it intellectually.

Threats, boorishness, insults, discrimination, and the like are hurtful to people, causing them to leave the community or become afraid to express their opinions. For this reason, it is best to foster a friendly atmosphere. For some sensitive people, especially older generations, foul language can also be unpleasant.

Spam, flooding, and voice messages are prohibited because people often find them uninteresting or inconvenient to read or listen to. When people start flooding in a political community – discussing what someone ate for breakfast, talking about their relationships with the opposite sex, or simply writing messages that carry no meaning at all – people interested in politics stop reading such community, losing interest in it. Our community is political, and people mostly come here to read opinions on political topics. Therefore, communities where flooding is not prohibited often turn into a “talk shop” that no one cares about, losing their political meaning. And this is unacceptable for a political community.

The situation is more interesting regarding the ban on fake news, demagogic techniques, and provocations. Why are they prohibited? Firstly, so as not to waste the time of adequate people who want to achieve the truth on disputes. Time is very precious. Many members of the community write articles, are occupied with party work, and so on. If they are pelted with disinformation, forcing them to spend a large amount of time on analysis and refutation – this harms work and reduces the benefit that members bring to the community. This is unacceptable. Therefore, malicious spreaders of fake news should be neutralized.

Secondly, so as not to allow “brainwashing” through the spread of disinformation. If you allow “brainwashing” in your community, then at least some of it will start speaking in the phrases of falsifiers, which will harm the community and the social-democratic movement. We cannot allow this, as we set political goals for ourselves. Thirdly, as insurance against representatives of Russian special services. We already wrote that there is a noticeable amount of them, however, it is impossible to determine with precision who it is. In the same place, we wrote about the existence of a directive to misinform the opposition, to waste its time on considering disinformation, and if special service workers are present in our chats and communities, then some of their representatives will be engaged in this.

Fourthly, disinformation causes harm to readers. For example, in 2021 in California, a man killed his two children because he heard about some “serpent DNA” that was supposedly transmitted to them¹. Disinformation narratives also form a generally incorrect picture of the world, which forces a person to become a follower of destructive ideologies, about which we wrote in the article on brief theses. Racist disinformation narratives in some cases lead to ethnic massacres; for example, Harvard University associate professor of economics David Yanagizawa-Drott proved the influence of “Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines” on the genocide in Rwanda². The EUvsDisInfo portal, acting on behalf of the European Council, emphasizes: “Exposing Russian disinformation means fighting Russian aggression” and “countering the spread of disinformation also means protecting democracy and standing up to authoritarianism”³. This is exactly what our journal does.

We are told that some disinformation narratives cause little harm, so there is no point in controlling them. However, how can we know what harm, for example, the “serpent DNA” narrative will cause? At first glance, it is not obvious that it can serve as a motive for murder. It would be more reliable to block all disinformation (provided that the fact of disinformation is proven), especially since blocking disinformation will increase the quality of content in the chat. There are many chats whose admins do not care what information is fed to their participants, and who are calm about their audience being pumped with information garbage. We have an initial filter for information quality selection in our chat, however, those who are indiscriminate about the quality of information given to them can choose another chat.

Experience has also shown that there is quite a large number of people who will try to spend as much time as possible of admins and authors on disputes. They will try to nitpick at jokes, typos, invent positions for their opponent, and pelt the opponent with false statements so that they spend hours refuting them, and so on. As a result, hours are spent talking to such people (many of whom are unteachable anyway), which could have been spent on content creation and organizational work (and which are limited, given that admins and authors have jobs and personal lives). Some people come to the community exclusively with the aim of misinforming, but not with the aim of reasoned discussion, in the course of which the truth will be jointly revealed. Therefore, one of the rules states that if a person calls for a fight against our community anywhere (and not for a discussion, that is, their goal is precisely to prove their point of view, regardless of whether it is correct or not), we have the right to ban such a person.

Point 11 is needed because one of the methods for reducing the ranks of social democrats can be provoking them into violating chat rules, the results of which can lead to bans. That is, it turns out that one could launch a “bot” into the chat that will provoke everyone, and we will eventually ban it, but several members of our community who were provoked to a logical and righteous anger will be banned in the process. We must protect members of the community from such “tactics”.

Point 16 serves to exclude situations where chat participants receive a huge number of notifications in a row. When a phone is constantly vibrating because someone is writing 10-15 messages instead of expressing a thought in one message – this can be annoying.

However, we also provide the opportunity to see how a chat works where the above rules do not exist. So that those people with a semi-criminal mindset, who consider the presence of laws and rules an infringement on their freedoms, could appreciate their absence. Such a chat exists for us on the social network “VKontakte”, and in the end, it turned into an “underworld” where the banned were exiled, and spam, insults, flood attacks, and so on reigned supreme. As a rule, adequate people left that chat.

In some chats, we may also add a point that only people who identify themselves as social democrats can be there. This is done to minimize conflicts, create a more friendly atmosphere, and also so that people are united by a common goal – the desire to promote social-democratic ideas in Russia (this helps to direct communication toward common work on this, rather than discussions with representatives of other ideologies, which can be conducted in other spaces). Everything depends on the goal of a specific chat.

1. Doha Madani, Andrew Blankstein and Ben Collins. California dad killed his kids over QAnon and ‘serpent DNA’ conspiracy theories, feds claim // NBC News (www.nbcnews.com). August 12, 2021, 1:47 AM. [Electronic resource]. URL: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-dad-killed-his-kids-over-qanon-serpent-dna-conspiracy-n1276611 (Accessed: 06.01.2024).
2. D. Yanagizawa-Drott. Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide // University of Oxford (academic.oup.com). November 21, 2014. [Electronic resource]. URL: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/129/4/1947/1853091 (Accessed: 18.10.2022).
3. Learn. Tools for understanding and reacting to disinformation // EU vs Disinfo (euvsdisinfo.eu). [Electronic resource]. URL: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ru/learn-ru/ (Accessed: 06.01.2024).