Social Media Community Moderation Policy

Introduction

Pivot Legal Society (“Pivot”) is a human rights organization located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) on unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Pivot’s mandate is to use the law to address the root causes of poverty, inequity, and social exclusion. Our work is focused in four policy areas: police accountability, drug policy, homelessness, and sex workers’ rights.

Policy

Pivot’s social media presence (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts) serves to support, defend, and promote the interests of people who experience violence and marginalization due to poverty, inequality, and discrimination.

Poor and homeless people, sex workers, and people who use drugs, particularly those who experience oppression in multiple ways, are susceptible to intense harassment and violence both online and offline. Pivot will not tolerate posts or comments that are hateful, racist, xenophobic, poor-bashing, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, or sexist. We will delete comments and block users as necessary. We will be especially stringent on moderating dehumanizing and stigmatizing language used to talk about individuals and communities experiencing marginalization.

Pivot also sees its role as one that holds governments and government actors accountable for harmful laws, policies, and practices. We are a non-partisan organization and do not endorse any particular political party or politician. We may remove messages that support or oppose political parties or candidates.

Criteria

Your comment may be subject to deletion if it:

  • harasses other users;
  • intentionally misleads other users by providing false information;
  • contains hateful or stigmatizing messaging;
  • contains spam or advertising; or
  • campaigns for political parties or candidates.

Community Moderation Methods

We will moderate our social channels for hateful comments, spam, advertising, and comments that are irrelevant to Pivot’s work and the communities Pivot serves. In doing so, we may use any of the following methods when confronted with contributions which meet the above criteria:

  • hiding or deleting comments; and
  • blocking individuals.

Pivot is committed to meaningful accountability and learning. We are a small team and are not always able to respond immediately to critiques and questions. While we welcome critique to keep pushing our work forward, we will not tolerate comments that contain hate speech, threats of harm to individuals or groups, dehumanizing and discriminatory language, or blatant misinformation.

Contact

If you have questions, comments, or concerns about our social media community practices, please contact [email protected].