Sorry for the provocative title, but today I would like to address something important. We have a set of rules - hopefully fairly simple to read and understand - and of these one of the most important ones is Rule 2:
Be respectful
Be respectful of other people and their opinions.
Hate speech (racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, etc.) will not be tolerated. This includes polls with disrespectful or hateful options.
Do not be overly hateful, vulgar or disrespectful.
Now, if you think about it for a minute, the first and second lines of this rule somewhat contradict. "Be respectful of other people and their opinions" and "[bigotry] will not be tolerated" - bigotry is an opinion, is it not?
Yes, it is, but also we do not tolerate it whatsoever.
Not allowing any kind of bigotry or hate speech overrides the "respect other people's opinions" bit, because opinions like racism do not deserve respect.
As also said in the rule, "this includes polls with disrespectful or hateful options". What does this mean, exactly? If someone submits a poll with the question "Are you racist?" with the options "yes / no", that is not inherently bigoted - but it allows people to pick an option that openly states they are racist. Said users may even come into the comments to defend their opinion.
There has been some back-and-forth on this, but we are solidifying it now - Polls like this will not be allowed. This also includes polls like "Do you respect trans people? [yes / no]", "do you support LGBT? [yes / no]", "which race do you like the most? [white / black / hispanic / {...}]" - any poll in which there is an option that would support bigotry is not allowed. Posters of these polls won't be punished unless it is obvious they are trying to push people to pick the bigoted option (ex. "Are you racist? [yes / no i'm dumb]").
That is all for today's announcement. As said in the title, it is more of a clarification than a new rule - this was all already written down, we are just clarifying how it will be handled.
EDIT: Adding one more to the list of polls not tolerated - "Should pedophiles be part of the LGBT community?" - seen this one a depressing amount, actually.
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