While I strongly disagree with @nephros’ “step zero” assessment “This is a purely technical issue […]”, I do agree with his “step one” assessment:
The reason why the “step zero” assessments are fundamentally wrong:
To state that nobody is responsible for a technical system and its actions is always incorrect!
Someone employed it (Jolla), someone created it (Discourse Inc.), someone runs it (Discourse Inc. on behalf of Jolla), someone is legally responsible for it (mostly Jolla) etc.
Additionally for complex software: Someone configured it (or not). In this case it apparently Discourse’s default configuration was not altered (unfortunately), thus flagged posts are immediately hidden and automatically deleted after a while (which constitutes censoring).
To state that this is “simply […] the way this forum software works” is ignoring all this, belittles the issue as “something technical, nobody is really responsible for”, plus ignores that the Discourse forum software was deliberately created exactly this way for social control purposes.
Since this thread (and its sister thread) were started, a couple of new facts became obvious:
- Jolla does not run this Discourse instance, it is hosted by Discourse Inc.
- This apparently is why Jolla does not know well what the Discourse forum software does and how it its configured.
This has resulted in the awkward process of forum users testing the behaviour of and documenting it in this forum, with Jolla (represented by vige) later acknowledging the (then) obvious behaviour and trying to find explanations what considerations Discourse Inc. may have had when designing these “socially steering algorithms” (e.g., [1], [2], [3]).
This also has resulted in a couple of incorrect statements. E.g., “there is no censorship, because posts are just hidden but not deleted”, only to see them being automatically deleted some weeks later. And to discover that this automatism was designed deliberately, to provide moderators with time to intervene manually. But that does not work as intended, if moderators do not take an active role, i.e. check each flagged post manually. For details see Discourse’s documentation of the default behaviour (which I failed to find, because it is) in their “meta-forum”, which was discovered by KuroNeko. - Still Jolla might ask for configuration changes in their role as customer.
- Still it is Jolla who defines the policy for this Discourse instance (“the forum rules”), even though they initially simply copied the generic Discourse FAQ for that.
P.S.: Despite my criticism of your “step zero” assessments, thank you for your conclusions as “step one”, which was the only constructive reply in the whole thread so far AFAICS.
It is really unfortunate so see how quickly any discussion about the censorship issue is derailed: Here with the very first post and all subsequent ones (except yours). According to how the “deliberately imprecise rules” (as in “soft cushion to suffocate”; they are “guidelines” at most) are interpreted by vige (who likely has normative power on this) they all should be flagged, hidden and then auto-deleted … not seriously, I rather want the auto-deleting switched off and the “flag as you like and do it often” statements in the FAQ significantly toned down (… to be detailed in a follow-up post here).