EA - An update to our policies on revealing personal information on the Forum by Lizka

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An update to our policies on revealing personal information on the Forum, published by Lizka on February 7, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is an update from the moderation team that tries to clarify and formalize some norms around revealing personal information on the Forum. You can see the full Guide to Norms here. Please note that we might update these norms.The line between “private information” and “public information” and the line between “personal information” and “relevant information to the EA community” can get fuzzy. We expect that there will be judgement calls about where an incident lies on these spectrums. However, there are some broad principles and some clear-cut cases. We outline them here.TL;DR: personal information is sometimes ok to share, depending on how sensitive it is, how relevant it is to a discussion important for effective altruism, and how public the information is elsewhere. We may encode or remove some kinds of information.A few important notes:We think a very good norm is to check unverified rumors or claims before sharing them — especially if they might be damaging or if they relate to sensitive or stigmatized topics.If you’re not sure whether you should check something (or how to check), you can contact the moderation team to ask.If you think that some information should be removed, you should flag this to us. We will probably not remove information that no one has asked us to remove.(We don’t read everything on the Forum, and when we are reading, we’re not always thinking about everything through the lens of our policies.)Why we don’t just default to removing all private/personal information: we think there are cases when some personal information about people who are highly relevant to work in effective altruism is important to share (like discussions of potential conflicts of interest (COIs) or reasons for why someone in a position of power shouldn't be in that position). We also want to keep the potential for censorship from the moderation team low.The way we enforce these norms isn't about whether we think a specific comment is "overall correct" or helpful, etc.; we're trying to outline policies that will help us make these calls more objectively.How to ask for information to be removedThere are instructions on contacting the moderation team here. One easy way to get in touch with us is to email [email protected]. (Please share a link to the content that you believe shares overly personal information, explain what the information is, and consider explaining why you think it’s better to remove if you think it won’t be obvious to us.)Considerations, examples, and what we might doBroad principlesCertain kinds of information are much worse to share. In general, the more personal and further away from professional work the information is, the worse it is to share. We will err much more on the side of removing the following kinds of information (and if people override our decisions by reposting removed information or reverting our edits in these cases, we will take further action, like bans):Information about stigmatized but victimless characteristics, like sexual orientationInformation that poses a danger to the people discussed, like street addresses, or anything that sounds like a call to harassmentInformation that might well be inaccurate or is based on rumors and has the potential to seriously harm someone’s reputation, although this doesn’t mean that all such discussion is banned (note also that we think it is a good norm to check unverified rumors before sharing them)Relevance to EA is a key consideration.(How public or influential the figure is in EA will affect the relevance to EA of discussions about specific people.)How public the information is elsewhere is a factor.When...