Massive account suspensions

Question

Hundreds of Bioacoustics Stack Exchange users received the following private message that announced the suspension of their account:

Hello,

We’re writing from the Stack Exchange Community Management Team with respect to your account. As you are likely aware, during the “Commitment” phase of the Area 51 process, we require that proposals receive at least 100 committers who have 200 reputation across the network.

You may not be aware that we have certain network-wide policies that govern the voting systems on Stack Exchange. First among these is the principle: “Vote for the post, not the person.” Historically, we have interpreted this to mean that the posts you vote on should be discovered organically — not biased for or against any specific person. This policy captures a broad spectrum of behaviors. The following are examples of voting practices that violate Stack Exchange network policies:

Voting repeatedly for a user by discovering posts through their profile. Voting for posts you are directly linked to > elsewhere (e.g., in Slack or by email)

Deliberately voting in order to circumvent Stack Exchange system restrictions. For example, voting for a user’s posts only so that the user gains the privilege to comment.

Creating additional accounts (“sockpuppets”) to upvote one’s own posts.

Actively soliciting votes that do any of the above.

Recently, we discovered a series of votes between committers to the Bioacoustics Area 51 proposal that appeared to violate our network policies. In this specific case, with the votes in question removed, the Bioacoustics Area 51 proposal would not have launched when it did: these voting violations materially changed the outcome of the proposal.

We take this issue very seriously: attempts to circumvent the Area 51 process by voting for other specific users across the network is a violation of multiple core Stack Exchange policies.

As a result of your active participation in these voting practices, your account has been suspended network-wide for 7 days. While you’re suspended, your reputation will show as 1 but will be restored once the suspension ends. And, once the suspension ends, for the most part, you may return to the site and participate as normal.

However, Stack Exchange does not allow users who have been suspended in the year preceding an election to become moderators on the network. As a result, when we open nominations for the Bioacoustics election, you will no longer be eligible to nominate yourself in this election. Although this notice is quite serious, we hope this message does not discourage you from contributing to Bioacoustics Stack Exchange in the future — in compliance with our voting policies.

We appreciate and respect your enthusiasm for contributing to the Stack Exchange network. During the course of our investigation, we discovered a significant number of training and guidance materials for folks in your field to help them grow familiar with the Stack Exchange format. We commend this work and have very real respect for the time and energy you’ve put into building this site.

We look forward to your future contributions to the Stack Exchange network.

Thanks, Stack Exchange Community Management Team

I write this message on behalf of many of them in addition to just myself. We totally understand that SE sometimes has to suspend accounts but here it seems that SE has suddenly over-reacted. The way SE decided to suspend hundreds of users is quite obscure but I believe SE may have trusted the quality of their detection algorithm too much? SE did not providing any evidence or examples of how suspended users violated the CoC. By not giving users detailed knowledge on how they broke the rules, how are they supposed to course correct? Additionally, this mass suspension action, which has no mechanism for users to appeal, is unfriendly and we have lost many users who were using the site in good faith but are now turned off by this and leaving the site.

Organizing ourselves in our small community to promote and energize a Beta site does not mean we want to cheat. On one hand, 1) SE pushes us to vote as much as possible to reach the metric requirements, 2) SE awards us when we vote more (e.g. Vox Populi badge), and on the other hand, SE suspends our account WITHOUT ANY WARNING (at least as far as I am concerned) when we apparently upvote too often for the same persons. Many other reasons other than "cheating" can explain that, including the fact that 2 members may share common issues/knowledge that will logically lead to inter-votes. In any case, we don't vote for persons, we vote for the quality of individual posts.

I think that SE is at least as responsible as the Bioacoustics members for what it is going on, however, unfortunately, they put all the responsibilities on the members. A warning could be far more efficient than a direct suspension, which will discourage many of us. For instance, SE suspended 5 (and most active) editors out of 6 (https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&filter=all)! Last but not least, SE did this in the middle of a moderator election which they then cancelled...

As far as we are all concerned, I think this sudden "authoritarian" response is not respectful to the amount of work all of us have put in during the last few months. We would appreciate explicit evidence and documentation that warranted this behavior and how best to move forward in regaining users we have lost from this unfair action.

Answer 1

I want to start by highlighting a bit you quoted from the mod message users were sent:

We appreciate and respect your enthusiasm for contributing to the Stack Exchange network. During the course of our investigation, we discovered a significant number of training and guidance materials for folks in your field to help them grow familiar with the Stack Exchange format. We commend this work and have very real respect for the time and energy you’ve put into building this site.

We look forward to your future contributions to the Stack Exchange network.

The Community Management Team fully appreciates the level of involvement and effort needed to get a new community off the ground, and to go through the Area 51 process. As mentioned in the mod message, we also appreciate that you put effort into getting new folks acquainted with the Stack Exchange platform and how it works. This situation is in no way ideal for any of the parties involved, and it gives us no pleasure to have to take such widespread enforcement action affecting such a big portion of the folks who’ve established themselves as a core part of this community.

We completely understand that this situation is frustrating, causes confusion, and is a heavy blow for this community. We also recognize that these actions may make parts of the community feel unappreciated, and that your efforts to establish a successful community may feel like they are going to waste. The actions undertaken by the Community Management Team in this instance were not taken lightly — in fact, the reason the election was canceled was precisely so we could take the time to fully investigate the circumstances surrounding the issues we’d found, so the results of that investigation could fully inform any actions we’d need to take.

Clarifying the moderator message

Given the confusion expressed by many of the users who’ve responded to messages they were sent, we would like to clarify one critical point with regards to the nature of the infringing voting behaviors. To clarify: the problematic votes were not cast on this site, but rather on other sites on the Stack Exchange network. It is not abnormal that, in the early stages of a new site, a lot of cross-voting takes place between the most engaged users — especially given the site’s success depends on that. What is abnormal and problematic, however, is to coordinate handing out votes with the explicit intention of meeting reputation-based privilege thresholds, in an attempt to aid the proposal’s progression through the Area 51 stages — and the evidence we’ve uncovered clearly demonstrates that this behavior took place.

One additional clarification - the number of users suspended does not number in the hundreds. In total, we took around 90 actions - around 70 suspensions, and 20 warnings.

The story – or, the parts we can share

We recognize that in the absence of complete information, it can be frustrating to understand what’s happening. We have an obligation to protect user privacy, but here’s the part of the story we can share.

Some time ago, multiple moderation teams across the Stack Exchange network brought an irregular voting issue to our attention. These irregular votes were disruptive to normal activities on their sites. It’s typical for moderators to call our attention to issues like this when they lack the tools to investigate fully on-site — such as when irregular voting spans many sites on the network. Moderators only have insight into voting patterns on their own sites. The need for a more wide-ranging investigation and the potential need for action across multiple sites necessarily involved the Community Management Team.

Once the investigation concluded, we issued suspensions where the number of involved votes was significant, and we issued warnings where the number of votes was minor. None of these actions was undertaken by automated systems, nor detected by automatic algorithms. To further ensure that the enforcement actions were correctly taken, we had multiple Community Managers from the team involved, cross-checking and validating each others’ work, up to and including the involvement of our VP of Community. We are confident in the outcome of this investigation, but because the number of involved users is high, it is possible that some users may have received a message erroneously — however, we expect this number (if any) to be very small.

The Community Management Team is fully aware of these actions’ potential impacts on this community’s health and chances of success, and we carefully weighed the balance of harms to find a sensible path forward. Given the evidence we uncovered during our investigation, we feel that the actions taken were proportional to the offense, and that we have followed typical moderation guidance on Stack Exchange.

Finally, a couple of notes: it is a general policy on the Stack Exchange to not debate individual user suspensions publicly on Meta, especially when the involved users are still suspended and cannot take part in the conversation. Additionally, while we understand the concerns surrounding transparency in this situation, pointing users who violated rules to the exact votes that broke the rules is not something we usually do. Unfortunately, this means follow-up questions to the effect of “can you show me the votes that caused my message/suspension?” are likely to stay unresponded-to, both in the moderator message and in public.

Where this community goes from here

We know that this can be overwhelming and could be demoralizing. But with all that being said, please remember that all is not lost. To highlight another bit of the quoted text you posted:

Although this notice is quite serious, we hope this message does not discourage you from contributing to Bioacoustics Stack Exchange in the future — in compliance with our voting policies.

This was written sincerely! We recognize some will be put off and driven away by this situation, but that is not the intention of our actions. The goal of any message or suspension is to provoke change; not to punish. Such actions exist to provide the gentlest appropriate correction that we believe can remit the situation, while remaining consistent with prior similar interventions (where they exist) and staying true to the spirit of the rules. Stack Exchange does not hold grudges, nor do we keep public records of suspensions — we know that past offenders can turn into healthy contributors to our communities, and, indeed, have instances where folks who’ve been suspended have later become moderators somewhere on the network. In one week’s time, we hope the vast majority of the users who were suspended do return to the site and continue to contribute, bearing this guidance in mind.

We still plan to hold an election to find your inaugural moderators — stay tuned for an announcement early next week — and we are confident this community can still be healthy and thrive. While the users suspended will not be able to run in this election, there are still many viable election candidates within the community who we hope will nominate themselves for the position. The success of this site rests in the outcome of that election, and at least 3 moderators are required for it to be considered a success — for that reason, we encourage anyone who is eligible to nominate for the position once the new election date is set and nominations are open.