Fizz strives to create a safe environment for free expression for all of our community members. To do this, we rigorously enforce our Community Guidelines in service of keeping our platform open for positive discussion and connections. Enforcement is driven by the trained community moderators at each school. These community moderators are fellow students who voluntarily work to keep their communities safe, authentic, and fun by taking down and voting to remove content that violates Guidelines.
However, sometimes we need to do more to keep communities safe, especially when dealing with repeat violators. In these cases, we rely on a punishment system separate from our volunteer moderators. These punishments can take the form of mutes, and, in severe cases, account suspensions.
Read on for more details about both our community moderators and punishment. To file a punishment appeal, please fill out the form located at this link here. Please note that we rarely, if ever, reverse a punishment decision and do not actively monitor the appeals inbox.
Overall, we at Fizz believe safety is the core of our platform. Any content moderation or user penalization is strictly to uphold our belief in safety and not to retaliate or silence individuals. We believe in the power of community norms and consensus moderation. This is why we recruit moderators from active community members and why no one volunteer moderator can ever unilaterally remove a post. With this in mind, our approach to moderation and punishment is focused on two things: stopping offending content from reaching the feed and providing feedback to users on what’s appropriate for a given Fizz community.
We start by sourcing a large team of students at each school to moderate individual Fizz communities. These students are randomly selected from a pool of Fizz users that are active and have had a history of good behavior. All moderators are trained to be objective and only remove content that violates our Community Guidelines. These moderators are also regularly vetted by the Fizz team.
Moderators review all reports, and no single mod can remove a post without approval by other mods. Instead, decisions are made via a democratic voting system. In other words, if your post was removed, it means a majority of moderators agreed your content violated a community guideline. Moderators can never see another student’s identity and are not made aware of the other moderator identities.
Our punishment system, conversely, analyzes the holistic history of a user’s behavior to deliver the appropriate response ****to repeat offenders. Punishment decisions are separate from our Community Moderation voting system and no single individual can unilaterally punish a user. Punishments come in two forms: mutes, where users can’t post or comment but can still view content on the app, and bans, where a user cannot access any part of the app.
An example notification for a muted user
An example suspended user
A user will always receive a mute before they receive a suspension. Only users who have repeatedly been muted in a relatively short period of time are eligible for suspension. Mutes and suspensions will take the form of 1 hour, 3 hour, 6 hour, 1 day, and 1 week punishments. Severe, repeat offenders will be reviewed for an indefinite or even permanent mute or suspension.
Our punishment system analyzes the holistic history of a user’s behavior to deliver the appropriate response to repeat offenders. Remember, punishment decisions are separate from our Community Moderation voting system. In general, we consider four elements when determining a punishment: