Trust and Safety/Policy

Trust and Safety Actions are actions taken by Trust and Safety Responders, the Director of Trust and Safety or members of the Board of Directors acting in an official capacity for Miraheze Limited, pursuant to the Terms of Use of the service. All actions are designed to be preventative, limit damage to life and property as well as protect user’s safety.

Authority
Miraheze Limited holds full legal responsibility for enforcing the service’s Terms of Use, however, it is not reasonable for the Board of Directors of the company to reasonably exercise enforcement abilities on a day-to-day basis even in exceptional circumstances. The Board of Directors’ formed a Trust and Safety team to handle the day-to-day management of keeping the service safe, which is a team that has full authority to enforce the Terms of Use and act on behalf of Miraheze Limited as reasonably necessary to protect the interests of the company and ensure the safety of users. All members of the team are authorised by the Director of Trust and Safety, who is authorised by the Board of Directors to delegate these authorities.

Actions
When considering a Trust and Safety Action, all available on-wiki abilities are open to being considered to conclude minimal disruption with maximal effect. The guiding principle for Trust and Safety Actions is to provide the most effective cover to the company and users with the least amount of action being required – that a total service ban should only be considered in the most extreme cases. Examples of actions available to Trust and Safety Responders include but are not limited to: CheckUser information and Server-stored logs may be accessed in response to one of the above actions being enacted to retrieve and retain identifying information such as IP addresses and User Agents. All information collected and retained will be done in accordance with the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act 2018.
 * Full-Service Ban (a T&S ban, formerly a Terms of Use ban),
 * Partial Service Bans (targeting specific services e.g., Phabricator),
 * Ban on pre-defined rights/privileges,
 * Standard administrative actions (blocks, deletions, protections).

Process
All instances of a potential violation of Miraheze Limited’s Terms of Use, whether reported as a complaint or found by a Responder, will be subject to the following steps:
 * Initial Investigation by a Responder to determine whether a potential violation exists.
 * If a potential breach is not found, no further actions by a Responder will occur. It may be referred to a relevant community group, however.
 * Responder will conduct a thorough investigation, following key investigatory points proposed by the Director of Trust and Safety and following this, will make a recommendation of action.
 * The Responder will fill an Investigative Report form for the Director of Trust and Safety, who will then review the recommendations.
 * If the recommendation is not supported, the Director of Trust and Safety will either recommend the Responder collect further evidence or recommend no further action is taken.
 * If the recommendation is supported, the Responder will be tasked with enforcing the outcome.
 * All Investigative Reports are reviewed and are requestable to be viewed by the Board of Directors or anyone duly authorised to view them by contacting the Director of Trust and Safety who is responsible for maintaining all records.

Appeals
Trust and Safety actions are intentionally designed to be thorough and engaging multiple people to limit the severity of actions, the frequency of actions and to improve the confidence in all actions taken. However, the Trust and Safety team have established an appeals process for those occasions where things do not go quite right – in order to appeal a decision, the person directly involved must open an appeal based on one of the following grounds:


 * The decision was wrong to be handled by the Trust and Safety team,
 * The decisions concluded was based on incorrect information or based on the information available, there was no reasonable way to conclude any action taken would be appropriate,
 * There is new information that changes the material circumstances of the case.

The important thing to note from the above is, appeals must be based factually on an improper process being carried out or an ineffective investigation – appeals will not be accepted based on grounds of emotional or personal feelings. Once an appeal is received, Trust and Safety will follow an appeal proforma based on the reason of appeal to establish whether to accept the appeal, and what changes (if any) need to be made following the original investigation.