Legal Responsibilities for Xenforo

[Chris53]

On social media there are policies and government legislation and guidelines to prevent people from being harassed, victimised and bullied. Having NO “block” functionality exposes victims of abuse and puts victims at risk. “An “ignore” option does not stop the perpetrator from harassing, victimizing and bullying a person on your platform.
Moreover, it’s a legal matter in terms of actual and/or perceived discrimination and Human Rights. That is why we have an Anti-discrimination Commission and a Human Rights Commission.
If one was to make a complaint to either one of these agencies, it’s not just the offender who is in breach of the Acts, it’s ALSO the body that operates and manages the social media platform (ie yourselves), who would be held vicariously liable in the matter for not installing functionalities to block the offender to prevent the offense. The operator of the platform must demonstrate a “Duty of Care” not to place users at risk. I trust you can see the importance of the above.
I am a retired lawyer and your platform needs to have the legal functionalities to ensure the safety of those who use it. An “ignore” button does not offer that. Only a “block” feature does this. Please ensure you place the “block” functionality on your platforms, otherwise you are in breach of legislation AND you may be sued in a civil case.

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[Arantor]

Thing is, XF Ltd isn’t the operator of a platform except this one right here, specifically XenForo.com/community/ - you or I as forum owners using XenForo are the ones ultimately responsible, not XF Ltd, for what goes on, on our platforms.

The kind of speech you talk about would be the responsibility of the moderation team or admins on a site to remove, not on the vendor for tooling support.

 

[Mr Lucky]

Acts, it’s ALSO the body that operates and manages the social media platform (ie yourselves), who would be held vicariously liable in the matter for not installing functionalities to block the offender to prevent the offense. The operator of the platform must demonstrate a “Duty of Care” not to place users at risk.

Can you provide a link to any law or legal precedent in any jurisdiction to back this up?

Are we all breaking the law?

Surely any stalking or harassment can be dealt with by moderator actions such as banning.

 

[Mendalla]

The operator of the platform must demonstrate a “Duty of Care” not to place users at risk.

"Duty of Care" rarely requires specific system functions. I work in health care and while we must demonstrate "duty of care", that's usually done by reviewing processes, not looking for specific items. Making sure charts are properly completed, incidents are tracked, etc. but they don't tell us what EHR to use for that chart or what incident management system to use, just want us to show we have a mechanism for detecting, tracking, and handling issues.

Same here. Yes, "Block" could be part of demonstrating that "duty of care." But so could a process for handling concerns like @Mr Lucky describes. In fact, "Block" would be a band-aid for something like this, disrupting the harassment temporarily but not getting rid of the source. Banning the harasser on a timely basis with suitable monitoring (e.g. IP bans) to prevent their return is the longterm solution, IMHO, and what I would put forward to demonstrate "duty of care".

 

[Billious]

On social media there are policies and government legislation and guidelines to prevent people from being harassed, victimised and bullied. Having NO “block” functionality exposes victims of abuse and puts victims at risk. “An “ignore” option does not stop the perpetrator from harassing, victimizing and bullying a person on your platform.

Chris53 does raise the specter of ethical publishing and mechanising a 'Lord of the Flies' responsibility for participant decorum.

Not an un-discussed matter right from the dawn of text based chat rooms.

Who is responsible for the 'safe space' now is a sub-set of the wider public space where normative behavior is encouraged and that which is repulsive or injurious spurned.

Yes, snobbery, biases and bigotry will persist not unlike when two or more gather in someone's or something's name... not unlike outlawing the common cold, a nice social idea with zero practicality but looks good at election time.

 

[Alpha1]

Its a real issue. When it comes up its often ugly. It would be nice if XenForo would have considered that.
I guess this issue will become more of a topic once the EU and US implement new laws on hate speech and details of such are known.
Related suggestion:

Upgrade the ignore function to 'block' / Blocking Ignored Users

I think ignoring someone on a forum has never really worked from a users perspective. On vB you could still see the 'ignored' person had posted, and on XF when you ignore someone it doesn't prevent them from quoting you, seeing your threads, posting in them. Usually when someone 'ignores'...

xenforo.com

Better functionality to report and moderate illegal hate speech

As the first EU nation has now approved a bill to impose hefty multimillion fines on communities for not removing abusive content within 24 hours, we are in dire need of better functionality for content flagging, reporting and moderation. More information below. We need to have functionality to...

xenforo.com

 

[hippy]

Thanks.

 

[Paul B]

Only the site owner/administrator can deal with that.

We don't own or operate third party sites.

 

[hippy]

Only the site owner/administrator can deal with that.

We don't own or operate third party sites.

Thanks.
I will delete my post as no doubt it will be used to harass me more.