We've gotten questions and comments throughout the past few years around when exactly people will face consequences for offsite conflict and how we define personal attacks, bullying, and harassment. Since we're updating the rules to clarify a few other things, we wanted to write a blog post expanding on how the site defines these terms a little as well.

We don't take involving the site in offsite conflicts lightly. Expecting people to follow our site rules any time they interact with another member of the community would be a serious violation of members' boundaries and privacy, create unsustainable stress on staff, and severely impact our ability to open up with others in the community - that's why our staff's default is to avoid inserting the site's authority into offsite disputes, even if those disputes get heated or people say things that feel blunt, rude, unfair, or hurtful.

However, it's also important to us that members feel safe in our community, which is why we do reserve the right to carry offsite conflict over to the site when they cross a line into personal attacks, bullying, and harassment.

Personal attacks

We define personal attacks as comments that use hate speech, dog whistles, or irrelevant details to attack another person. This might include (but is not limited to) things like:

• using slurs or hate speech;
• saying that you wouldn't expect an LGBTQIA+ person to understand 'family values';
• telling an immigrant that if they don't like a policy they should "go back to where [they] came from"; or
• saying or implying that a member's mental illness is the reason they disagree with you.

In the past, people have raised concerns about words like privileged or racist - while we understand that being called that can feel hurtful or uncomfortable, we do not see those words and others like them as personal attacks if they're relevant to the topic being discussed, and we will not discipline members for using them.

Bullying

When we talk about bullying, we're not just talking about people who don't get along. We encourage members to avoid contact with members they have conflict with by unfollowing, muting, and/or blocking them, and if a member says something offsite that many people found hurtful or offensive, it's not our job to mediate the conflicts that arise from that. What we're talking about here is a pattern of behavior (i.e., not just one incident) that involves one or more members targeting one or more other members for excessive criticism, manipulation, ostracization, or sabotage. That might include (but is not limited to) things like:

• subtweeting about innocuous comments;
• recruiting people to help ignore or berate them;
• bashing them in a large group DM;
• arguing with them every time they post on discord; or
• spreading lies about them.

It can also include regularly posting overtly hateful content about a specific identity where other members can see it: if you're making posts attacking lesbians every week, you don't need to single out a specific member for them to feel threatened and unsafe.

Harassment

When we talk about harassment, we're talking about a refusal to respect another member's boundaries. That might include (but is not limited to) things like:

• refusing to take "no" for an answer;
• tracking down and/or using another member's personal information (e.g., legal name, email, address, phone number) without their consent;
• finding a different way to contact another member to continue a conversation after they've clearly indicated that they're done talking about it (e.g., verbally saying so, blocking/soft-blocking/unfollowing); or
• pressuring them for contact that they've indicated that they're not comfortable with (e.g., meeting in person).

We hope that that clarifies things!