Historians.social is open to all who are interested in history.

Code of Conduct

Version: 1.4

Last updated: 2022-12-22

TLDR:

Historians Social has a zero-tolerance policy for racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and other forms of discriminatory and bigoted conduct.

Sexually graphic and violent imagery without specific historical context and discussion is not permitted on historians.social.

Harassment of other Fediverse users is not permitted on historians.social.

Harmful and false content (for example, “5G causes coronavirus” or “vaccines cause autism”) is not allowed, will be removed, and may result in an account suspension.

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  Sexual harassment is an instant ban.
  
  
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  Transphobic content is an instant ban.
  
  

We reserve the right to suspend your account at any time.

Updates to this Document

We may update this document from time to time for reasons including:

• clarifying terms,
• addressing new forms of harassment, or
• addressing harmful community behaviors.

In the event of any changes to this policy, we will notify you via an announcement posted through the Mastodon administration system.

Any changes to the Code of Conduct come into force immediately.

The Long Version

Moderation

Historians.social is a community run by humans for humans. All social media struggles with moderation. Moderators and site admins will use their best judgment to enforce these rules and policies fairly to create an open and safe space for frank and vigorous exchange.

Membership

Historians.social is open to all historians, history educators, history practitioners, museums, history organizations, people working in history-adjacent fields, people interested in history, history-related organizations, friends, and allies. Content posted on historians.social need not be entirely, or even majority, history-related.

Unacceptable Content

The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline:

Nudity that has not been: * Appropriately tagged, and * Masked behind a Content Warning.

The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline and may be removed entirely:

• Excessive advertising, and
• Uncurated news bots posting from third-party news sources.

The following types of content will be removed and may result in account suspension and revocation of access to the service:

• Any pornography and sexually explicit content, including artistic depictions,
• Any gore and/or extremely graphic violence, including artistic depictions, extremely graphic imagery, and posts advocating violence.
  
  
  • We welcome documentation of events, like clashes that break out at protests, but require the use of content warnings on that content,
  
  
• Racism or the advocation of racism,
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  Sexism or the advocation of sexism,
  
  
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  Content harmful to the public good, examples including:
  
  
  • “5G causes coronavirus”
  • “Vaccines cause autism” (or, for clarity, any other anti-vaccine content)
  
  
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  Xenophobic and/or violent nationalism.
  
  

The following types of content are explicitly disallowed and will result in permanent revocation of access to the service:

• Sexual harassment,
• Content discriminating against gender and sexual minorities, or advocation thereof,
• Content illegal in Germany and/or France, such as Holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism

Harassment

Any conduct intended to stalk or harass other users, impede other users from utilizing the service, degrade the performance of the service, or incite other users to perform any of the aforementioned actions, is also disallowed, and subject to punishment up to and including revocation of access to the service and/or referral to the appropriate law enforcement agency, at our discretion.

Harassment includes the following behaviors:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion,
• Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment,
• Deliberate misgendering or use of ‘dead’ or rejected names,
• Simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub” in a context that can be harassing, think before you post.) without consent or after a request to stop,
• Threats of violence,
• Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm,
• Deliberate intimidation,
• Stalking or following,
  
  
  • Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes,
  
  
• Sustained disruption of discussion,
• Unwelcome sexual attention,
• Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
• Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease,
• Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent,
• Publication of non-harassing private communication,
• Continuing to engage in conversation with a user that has specifically has requested for said engagement with that user to cease and desist may be considered harassment, regardless of platform-specific privacy tools employed,
• Aggregating, posting, and/or disseminating a person's demographic, personal, or private data without express permission (doxing or dropping dox),
• Inciting users to engage another user in continued interaction or discussion after a user has requested for said engagement with that user to cease and desist (brigading or dogpiling).

Historians.social will be attentive to and careful with the safety of marginalized people. As a result, we will not act on complaints regarding, but not limited to:

• ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia,’
• Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as ‘leave me alone,’ ‘go away,’ or ‘I’m not discussing this with you,’
• Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial, and
• Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a user of historians.social or notice someone else is being harassed, please report using the ‘Report’ feature in the application.

This Code of Conduct applies to historians.social, but if you are being harassed by a user of historians.social outside of the Service, we still want to know about it.

We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by historians.social members seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. Historians.social moderators reserve the right to exclude people from historians social based on their past behavior, including behavior outside of historians.social spaces and behavior towards people who are not users of historians.social.

Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

These provisions notwithstanding, the administration of the service reserves the right to revoke any user's access permissions, at any time, for any reason, except as limited by law.

Meta

We used and adapted the Code of Conduct of cloudisland.nz with permission. Rules based on hachyderm.io.

Service Level Objective (SLO)

We aim to review new account requests every 2-4 hours throughout the day but are likely to do less review during the United States overnight.

We aim to review all content reports ASAP, but ask that you give us at least 24 hours to respond, particularly overnight.

1. Be respectful.
2. No hate.
3. No harassment.
4. No content that is illegal in Germany and/or France, such as Holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism
5. No disinformation.
6. No fascism.
7. No violence.
8. No white supremacy.
9. No Spam.
10. No racism.
11. No homophobia.
12. No transphobia.
13. No conspiracy theories unless in historical context.
14. Safe Space: LGTBQIA+
15. Safe Space: neurodivergent (ADHD, Aspie, Autism, etc)
16. No hacking.
17. No pornography.
18. No impersonation accounts unless linked to an actual person visible to site admin.

1. mytter.jp: suspension