LBP Union Trust and Safety Initiative: Peacekeepers & Moderation
Updated: Jan 24
What's the first thing you think of when you think of a Discord server moderator? Although it's a bit of a far cry of a comparison, the first role that often comes to mind is a police officer or security guard. Moderators have power, and that power comes with responsibility. How can we cultivate a safe and healthy community atmosphere while also safeguarding it from threats and unwanted behavior? How can we accomplish this mission while also maintaining a community that is fun to be in?
This post is a little longer than normal, but it's very important for anyone interested in how we plan to help our community. Anyone can make a difference, and we encourage you to! It may be helpful if you start with our article about the Community Wellness Initiative.
This post will cover the mission of the LBP Union Peacekeepers, moderators of our Discord server and eventually our forum. We'll talk about what guides our moderation process and how we can make sure we keep people safe while also maintaining a community that people feel comfortable to be in. We'll also talk about how Pathfinders can eventually be promoted to Peacekeepers. Let's talk about the LBP Union Trust and Safety Initiative and how you can take part in helping our community.
The Importance of Safety
Over the past few years, Discord has garnered a challenging reputation to shake off. The instant messaging and voice chat service came under fire in 2019 after being slow to remove mature underage content on its platform. Discord has also been known to have been used by sexual predators for malicious activity.
However, Discord's Trust and Safety team provides a great deal of tools and makes a great effort to deal with malevolent users on its platform. Although they do the best that they can, there is only so much that they can do on a platform as large as Discord. This is why it's so important for Discord server moderators to do what they can to look out for members of their servers. Users like you also need to be aware of what you can do to help as well.
It's also important to consider that there are limits to what we can provide as individuals and teams. Serious situations need to be handled by the police or emergency services. Our role is to report malicious activity and support each other when we find ourselves in trouble. Additionally, we need to inform one another about the best resources to take advantage of and how to best prevent dangerous situations.
The Role of Peacekeepers
Peacekeepers are the LBP Union Discord Server's moderation staff, but what is their mission? They aim to help keep people safe, but how?
It's easy for us to jump to a creative imagining of police officers hunting down criminals and putting them behind bars, but that's not our objective. Our mission is to prevent dangerous situations from occurring, inform members of our community to empower them with the knowledge they need to stay safe, report serious problems when necessary to Discord Trust and Safety or higher authorities, and support our community in difficult times.
Prevent
Peacekeepers work hard to prevent problems before they happen. This is a role very similar to the objective of LBP Union Pathfinders. In fact, Peacekeepers ought to use the same community-first strategies as Pathfinders to accomplish this goal.
There are two elements of prevention. Firstly, we cultivate a better server culture by promoting a positive server atmosphere. When discussion is dominated by sexism, racism, bullying, or other kinds of behaviors, our community atmosphere deteriorates. When these kinds of behaviors are tolerated, we run into trouble.
However, things aren't always this simple. The second element of prevention is monitoring the system. We need to make sure that we pay attention to what's going on in our community so that we don't let potential problems fly under the radar. If something seems wrong, we talk about it and try to come up with a solution.
Inform
It isn't just up to us to keep our community safe. We are few, but the LittleBigPlanet community is many. We can empower community members like you with knowledge you can pass on to others to help keep them safe. Strategies and information about how to keep yourself and others safe on the Internet are critical skills needed for navigating our digital world.
This is already an objective of the Pathfinder program, but it is also an important step in maintaining the mission of the LBP Union Peacekeepers. By helping people learn where to turn to when they or someone they know experiences a problem, we can better keep people safe.
Report
When incidents occur, we are not the ones responsible for fixing the whole situation. We do what we can, but the rest, if necessary, is up to the proper authorities. It's also important to communicate to our community that less serious problems in our server be reported to our team so that we can handle them accordingly.