Skip to main content
Meta Stack Exchange

Timeline for Questions about the new minimum age for diamond moderators

Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0

15 events
when toggle format what by license comment
Dec 7, 2020 at 15:59 comment added Shog9 Here's the thing, @Cat: there are no lawyers in this discussion. You're doing your best to relay information, just like Tim did for two years with the licensing stuff, but at the end of the day no one's words here carry any more weight on legal matters than anyone else's. The lawyers aren't gonna get involved, and none of this matters except in terms of how folks see the company's actions - IOW, it's a social problem. Folks' senses of fairness and propriety don't generally hinge on whether something is legal; that's the tail, not the dog.
Dec 7, 2020 at 15:51 comment added Shog9 Probably more helpful to think of the mod agreement as more like a EULA than a contract, Mari-Lou: moderator access to the software is gated based on their acceptance of the agreement, just as you might find with Microsoft Word or Google Cloud Console. And just as with many EULAs, the company reserves the right to change the terms at any time within the agreement itself; if a moderator doesn't like the new terms, they're free to give up the software. Does that make it right? No, EULAs are notoriously one-sided. But they are a pervasive fixture of our society none the less.
Dec 7, 2020 at 15:02 comment added Catija Staff You seem to be under the impression that we didn't talk to our lawyers about this - we did. They explicitly said that this is not a change to the mod agreement and does not require mods to accept it again. If you have an issue with it, feel free to reach out to them but, by your own admission, you are not a lawyer - so please accept that you are wrong.
Dec 7, 2020 at 14:58 comment added Mari-Lou A Слава Україні A checkbox, which has to be checked, stating the signee is at least 18 years old is, to a layperson, a clause. There is probably a proper legal term for a checkbox added after the first agreement was signed, but I don't know what it is.
Dec 7, 2020 at 14:53 comment added Catija Staff We aren't adding a clause to the contract. The contract is unchanged. What we added was a checkbox where they confirm that they are 18 or older. Nothing about the moderator agreement itself requires that a moderator be 18 or older, we're just using that page for mods to confirm that they are - and going forward they already will have when they nominated themselves.
Dec 7, 2020 at 14:30 history edited Mari-Lou A Слава Україні CC BY-SA 4.0
added 1106 characters in body
Dec 7, 2020 at 14:08 comment added Mari-Lou A Слава Україні You're going to have to update the moderator agreement. You claim it's unnecessary, and I am not a lawyer, but adding a new clause, however small, is updating a contract (as I understand it).
Dec 5, 2020 at 21:34 comment added Catija Staff The staffers who knew were not aware of the legal concerns of this oversight. I'm not really sure why you're concerned about what happened in the past - there is zero concern about what happened in the past, as I go to great effort to say. This is explicitly and strictly a forward-facing concern and about preventing future issues.
Dec 5, 2020 at 21:32 comment added Mari-Lou A Слава Україні @Catija Furthermore, the damage has been done. There have been minors who had access to PII. Is the company liable for something that they did not know, for something that happened four, five or ten years ago? Can they be sued? And whose fault is it? The users who ultimately lied about their age? Or that there was no age limit to nominating oneself to moderate a community?
Dec 5, 2020 at 21:32 comment added Mari-Lou A Слава Україні In other words, until recently there was no official policy, but many staffers already knew and were comfortable with the fact that an undisclosed number of established moderators were minors. Then why penalise communities and any (if there are still any) minors who have proven to be valid contributors and moderators when the fault, and the omission, clearly lies with the company?
Dec 5, 2020 at 21:09 comment added Catija Staff As I stated elsewhere - parts of the company were unaware that we allowed minors to be moderators, so there was an assumption that we had a policy when we did not. In response to that discovery, we acted to rectify that situation - but we did so in a measured way; building in support features, discussing it with the existing moderators and rolling it out in public after several months of work, not mere days. Legally, underage people can not be held to contracts, so they should not have been allowed to accept them in the first place but there's no way to "grandfather" people in this case.
Dec 5, 2020 at 20:56 comment added Mari-Lou A Слава Україні @Catija was the company at risk of breaking the law before December 2020? Or is it only recently? Is having to remove an underaged moderator, elected months or years ago by their community, against any contract or ethics? Is it written in the contract that was agreed by both parties that moderators must be at least 18 years old?
Dec 5, 2020 at 19:50 comment added Catija Staff ... Um... mods aren't "legally" elected, they're elected based on the rules at the time. This isn't some sort of governmental election. Moderators under 18 can not legally be held to the moderator agreement, which means that SE/SO is legally at risk of breaking the laws of PII access compliance by granting access to people who can not be legally held to protect that information. No wrongdoing is necessary. I understand it's not fair and it's frustrating but you making this about some form of ageism is completely inaccurate.
Dec 5, 2020 at 19:23 history edited Mari-Lou A Слава Україні CC BY-SA 4.0
brackets
Dec 5, 2020 at 19:05 history answered Mari-Lou A Слава Україні CC BY-SA 4.0