I think it's overall healthy for the community to continue to challenge us on issues of trust & safety, and really anything. But where it breaks down is when the community is using an individual person as an example. I haven't looked into this case in particular, but if I did, I wouldn't share any of the details with you. We just can't. It's disrespectful, begs further conflict, is often outside our privacy terms. The problem then with focusing on any individual case is that what you witnessed and what we witnessed are very different and we won't share our side.

However, I can generally talk about policy and the experience I've had here. That experience was that nearly everything I looked at at Medium required a serious audit and rethinking.

The one place where that hasn't been true is Trust & Safety. I mean, we're tough on ourselves and I'm sure there are things to do better or revisit. But this group has been by far the most rock solid system within Medium.

When I first got here, I would take reports that came to me from the community and go back and investigate (read: double check) their work and I always came away impressed with the depth behind policy and implementation. Sure, when we get flooded we sometimes have to make decisions at high volume, but this group is also very good at correcting any of their mistakes.

Often the accusations that come our way end up being about some sort of political partisanship. That always makes me bristle because we think we have values that supersede partisanship and that it's not our job to align ourselves with any party. If one party (or members of one party) stray from our values then that's on them. (Supposedly we are based in a representative democracy where this responsibility is actually law.)

There's also not really anything radical about our values. Most violations end up being a violation of either thoughtfulness or respect.