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Comments on Codidact's policy regarding posts, user names and profiles with political content

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Codidact's policy regarding posts, user names and profiles with political content

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Does Codidact have any policy against using political content in posts, user names or user profiles?

I'm not talking about questions about political content, which should obviously be fine given that it's on-topic at the site where it's posted.

But I'm rather referring to the promotional kind, such as speaking for or against a certain candidate or party, or naming your user after a well-known politician, or posting political propaganda in your user profile.

This has been something of a hot potato Someplace Else, so it will eventually pop up here too. Some examples:

  • There was an example of the CEO posting a long blong-like post on SO.meta propagating against Donald Trump.
  • There are examples of users (and spammers) using their profile to express various political views, including criticism against dictatorships (possibly leading to a network ban of the site in that country).
  • There is always the case where someone decides to pick a tasteless user name from some well-known dictator, past or present.

The current Code of Conduct and "be nice" doesn't seem very helpful here. Expressing political opinions isn't necessarily rude. Is there a policy for what user names or user profiles can contain and does it cover situations like these?

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SE relevant example (2 comments)
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+10
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User names are less personal space than your profile description, and more in-your-face to other users. User names should therefore be more restricted than your personal profile description.

User names have a purpose, which is to be a short handle to identify you across Codidact. They are not there for you to make personal, political, religious, or other statements with. Using the name of a well known historical figure should not be allowed (unless it's really your name too), because this comes with inevitable political baggage.

A name that mocks another user's name should not be allowed.

User names that appear to be chosen only to make it difficult for others should also not be allowed. Examples might be all blanks, a bunch of blanks followed by a dot, special characters that cause the browser to display weird stuff, etc. Those are all you trying to be "special" somehow at the expense of everyone else here. That's not what user names are for.

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Caveat: real names (5 comments)
Caveat: real names
Peter Taylor‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

People should probably be allowed to use their real name, even if it coincides with a historical figure. I personally know a César, and although it's not so common for Spanish names to include two given names (outside a handful of specific common pairs), I wouldn't be surprised if there are living people whose parents named them Julio César. More contemporaneously, there are plenty of living people (particularly from Latin America) named Lenin.

Lundin‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

Peter Taylor‭ I think moderators should be able to use common sense here, just as we expect users to pick user names using common sense. If I was a user and my name was Lenin, I would surely be aware of the historical figure and pick a more explicit name, Julio Lenin or whatever applies. Also I suspect that the accent aigu might be present? That is, Lénin, or...?

Peter Taylor‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

Lenín, so potentially overlookable.

Lundin‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

Peter Taylor‭ Either way, I think such users can get a friendly nudge to pick another user name. On less tolerant platforms such names might just get outright rejected/banned. But then of course almost everything means something bad in some other language or context, so it has to be within reason.

Peter Mortensen‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

It is the same origin, but the spelling is different in English for the first example: Julius Caesar. And there is also the acute accent difference. Shouldn't that be enough to disambiguate?