Require questions about the Holocaust to receive moderator approval before publishing

Question

If a low reputation user posts a question about the Holocaust, rather than being immediately posted, it should receive a notification telling the user that the question will remain visible (and editable) by that user, but will not be published until it’s approved by either the community or a diamond moderator.

The question should remain invisible even if the user edits it. That way, users won’t be able to circumvent the filter once it’s been triggered. In addition, users won’t receive any warning before the question is submitted. This will avoid people trying to misspell the word to circumvent the filter.

Update: I had a look at a sample of questions, based on which ones I flagged. It looks like a sizeable proportion lasted longer than 2 hours (if you define it as precisely 120 minutes). While the questions I flag may be a biased sample (for example, I can only flag questions which haven't already been deleted, and I'm more likely to flag questions which were posted when Australians are awake), I think that "virtually all ... within 2 hours" is an exaggeration.

12 questions that lasted less than 120 minutes: 6 minutes 16 minutes 28 minutes 54 minutes 55 minutes 1 hour, 6 minutes 1 hour, 6 minutes 1 hour, 10 minutes 1 hour, 10 minutes 1 hour, 13 minutes 1 hour, 33 minutes 1 hour, 40 minutes

14 questions that lasted more than 120 minutes: 2 hours, 10 minutes 2 hours, 42 minutes 2 hours, 43 minutes 2 hours, 52 minutes 2 hours, 57 minutes 3 hours, 31 minutes 3 hours, 32 minutes 3 hours, 50 minutes 5 hours, 32 minutes 5 hours, 57 minutes 6 hours, 8 minutes 6 hours, 28 minutes 6 hours, 33 minutes 8 hours, 20 minutes

While this is a limited sample, it already results in a total of 75 hours of Holocaust denial on skeptics.SE, with the average question lasting 172 minutes and a considerable number lasting for multiple hours.

Update 2 March 2019: In an answer to this question, fredsbend asks whether holocaust denial posts are a significant proportion of trolling posts. To examine this, I examined my flagging history, examining "helpful" rude/abusive flags, and looking only at questions. (This may not list some questions listed above, as I may have used custom flags on those questions). There are 18 such questions. Questions that explicitly mention the word "holocaust" make up half of such flags, and make up a narrow majority of questions that ended up being deleted. I have made a total of 294 flags overall, but that's including flags for comments, flags for answers, declined or retracted flags, flags about "[citation needed]" banners, and various other matters.

Mentions the word "holocaust", either in the title, the body, or with the tag holocaust (9 questions): https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/43439 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42754 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39608 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38322 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38317 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38264 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36478 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36336 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36103

About Nazi Germany, doesn't mention the word "holocaust", one question involves an individual primarily known for his role in the holocaust (2 questions): https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42900 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2260

About Jews, but not about Nazi Germany (2 questions): https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/37543
Are American media controlled mostly by Jews? (2015 edition) (marked as duplicate of an open question)

Not about Nazi Germany or Jews (5 questions):
Did the former prime minister of UK say this about the Koran? (still open)
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40792
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38415
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/20791
Did Adria Richards tweet "Black people CANNOT be racist..."? (still open)

Answer 1

This is a feature-request. It is worth understanding the status quo.

First, we should understand that genuine, good faith, questions about the Holocaust are not taboo here. We have many examples, including at least one that goes directly to the claims of holocaust deniers:

• Has the Holocaust been exaggerated?

That said, Skeptics.SE is not alone in the SE network of regularly (once or twice per month) receiving bad faith questions from Holocaust denialist trolls trying to advance their political positions.

I personally find Holocaust denialism rather offensive. I appreciate that many people find it deeply offensive and upsetting. I am keen to strike the right balance: we allow light to shine on the question, while not giving oxygen to the anti-semitic trolls.

Users with sufficient rep can see deleted questions about the Holocaust.

Some were deleted by mods. Some were automatically deleted by users flagging the questions. Some were deleted by automated systems, based on the users behaviour on this and other sites.

I looked at a sample. Virtually all of them were deleted within two hours of being posted. [NB: See update below.] Some within a few minutes.

This one was an exception. It took 48 hours to be deleted by a background process, even though it had an upvoted answer; I don't understand why it was deleted, but I imagine it was based on the OP's behaviour on other sites.

So, the critical question is: does a question once or twice a month surviving for less than a couple of hours give sufficient oxygen to the trolls to warrant adding a new feature to let mods decide whether a controversial question should be seen at all?

I'm leaning towards No, but this is a result of weighing up of several factors, and I completely understand some people would conclude the answer was Yes.

---

Update: There has been some criticism of the numbers in this answer - particularly the claim above "Virtually all of them were deleted within two hours."

My initial statement was from a quick and dirty analysis. Andrew has performed a more systematic one, based on the flags that he has raised, which suggests my claim is false. Only being questions that Andrew flagged is its own source of bias, so I wanted to do another analysis.

Today, I tried to do a systematic one based on all deleted answers, using the Stack Exchange Data Explorer. However, my assumption that I could see the deleted questions if I was logged into the Data Explorer as a mod was false.

So, instead I ran a query of the newest deleted questions that reference the holocaust and manually walked through it until I got bored, which turned out to be 16 questions. [Disclaimer: Not having a fixed target before collecting the data is a potential source of bias.]

I stopped the clock when the question was closed (if it was closed before it was deleted). I bolded the ones higher than 2 hours.

• 93 minutes
• 167 minutes
• 1 minute
• 172 minutes
• 2 minutes
• 211 minutes
• 2876 minutes [Exception mentioned in the initial claim.]
• 212 minutes
• 110 minutes
• 11 minutes
• 34 minutes
• 203 minutes
• 33 minutes
• 29 minutes
• Self Deleted, not trolling
• 43 minutes
• 61 minutes

Based on the number of bolded entries, I agree that Andrew's criticism of my "2 hours" claim is fair and correct; I thank him for challenging me on this. I withdraw the claim, and apologise for being misleading.

Answer 2

I'm starkly against giving any topic special treatment unless there's a good reason to do so. "It's a sensitive topic, denialism is offensive", etc. is special pleading, not a reason to do this.

Technical possibilities aside, I'd be in favor of this if targeting this topic (any topic, really) helped lower spam and trolling posts by a significant amount. We'd first need to know how much of our time is wasted on moderating these kinds of posts. tim was kind enough to take some time looking through his flagging history, just as Andrew Grimm (OP) did, and they discovered a fair amount of such questions, but we'd need to compare that to all or a random sampling of our trolling/spam posts that weren't automatically caught. If I was going to put a number on it, I'd say at least 10%, but more reasonably 20%. That is to say, 20% of our trolling/spam posts that aren't automatically caught need to be on a single topic before I would support topic specific auto-actions.

To get this data, I'm sure we'd have to depend on SE staff or the moderators. SE staff, being as clever as they are, may have already implemented such things on other sites. Perhaps they have their own protocol before implementing these things.

On a subjective note, as a regular and often daily reader of this site, I don't perceive that we get a lot of holocaust denial trolling ...

Answer 3

Seems to me that questions on that topic are the lesser problem, often being 'just' a tedious nuisance if well-intended, and really quickly shot down if on that level of easy recognisability that would be handled by regex, review queue or mod-action.

After all, this would be the site on SE to handle this. Holocaust denial is a widely held belief, hence notable and in need of address (if it's not a duplicate).

Questions shouldn't be seen as reflective of the belief system of the asker. They sometimes are, which in this case is really not good. But as the default position it seems quite wrong to assume so.

That said

Has the Holocaust been exaggerated?

seems like quite the evil frame to set up, including personal belief system of the unwelcome kind. Going by views it seems to have made HNQ at some time (would it be worse were they coming from Google?).

The most problematic point to observe are the answers given.

And how they are handled by the mods, the community, foreign SE visitors.

In the example above about 'exaggeration' it looks to me that it attracts really bad answers. We should ask ourselves here whether that handling of answers can be improved?

On historySE the issues with answers of that calibre are as per current meta not of large enough interest to the community at large and too many do not recognise perfidious argumentations.

That is a problem much bigger than a daily troll trying to push his dreck.

On SkepticsSE a flag of mine on an answer to another question that was going into the exact direction of 'this is denialism and distortion' was declined with:

declined - please leave politics out of skeptics –

So I just downvoted this answer, that still has a vote count of +2/-7, in other words a net-rep-gain. (The fact that the flag-declined-comment is somewhat nonsensical should be clear, at the latest evidenced by having this post, at all)

Both of these experiences leave me with a preliminary conclusion that this problem keeps boiling, on a systematic level.

This should not be read of an accusation of MetaSkeptics readers, but for educational reasons in general, the following links need to be read again, and again in many cases:

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum article on "Holocaust Denial and Distortion"
Ask Historians Reddit – ELI5 - Holocaust Denial
Wikipedia: Holocaust denial

Especially the 'softcore denialism' and 'distortion' aspects are already in dire need of downvotes (and even deletions) –– in answers. These downvotes are much too rare on these attempts in answers. This distortion can happen even inadvertently, and is consequently hard to spot for many if not most users here on SE.

In summary, I don't think the questions on this are a problem here and now.
But the answers –– and how they are handled, even here –– *are, way too often!**