“Sovereign Citizen” requests

[Ben Fairless]

Hi all,

I’m curious to know if you see requests from people who identify with the “sovereign citizen” movement.

If so, how do you handle them (if at all)?

Cheers,

Ben

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Ben Fairless

OpenAustralia Foundation

openaustralia | planningalerts | righttoknow | theyvoteforyou | morph

[Oliver Lineham]

Yes, we get a lot of these - a few for many years, then it really exploded from 2020 with the growth in popularity of conspiracy theories.

Keeping our service non-partisan is quite important to me. I don't want to moderate requests just because I think they're weird or come from a position I disagree with.

The moderation rule I've found most useful, and which can be used on some sovcit stuff, is: requests must not be primarily about publicising opinions in the request, rather than a genuine good faith attempt to obtain information. Having a long rant with a token request at the end is not OK. I think some people notice our relatively high Google rankings and decide this is a good platform to promote their views.

The other good rule is about not asking for your own personal information, as a lot of sovcit stuff comes from their theories about identity or that the government is holding money in their name etc.

But some requests are virtually impossible to glean any meaning from at all, especially with the scattered punctuation (they seem to think colons have some legal magic). I feel sorry for the officials who have to try to find something to respond to in those ones.

Oliver

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[Gareth Rees]

I'm not sure we get that many of these, but we get plenty of this kind of thing on other themes.

For us it's basically the same approach as Oliver. Try to be non-partisan; tolerate a broad spectrum of genuine asks for recorded info; we're not a rant publishing platform, so we'll hide/redact/ban where there's no real info request.

We are thinking more about how we might incorporate better tooling to allow freedom of speech but limit freedom of reach where we're seeing questionable use, but haven't got any concrete policies in place at this time, and it's a bit more aimed at extensive misuse. In any case,  the main question is ~ "should we make more heavy use of the backpage prominence option".

Best,

Gareth

[Oliver Lineham]

I've also been thinking about how to limit the reach of "fringe" requests, but have reservations about the methods. Here's my current thinking. First, I'm not counting requests which are against the rules. Just the fringe requests which remain.

The "problem" isn't that I don't like the request, it's the potential harms:

1. Diminished credibility of our service. This impedes our objectives by: (i) Discouraging requesters who don't want to be associated with such users. (ii) Discouraging volunteers. It certainly demotivates me sometimes. (iii) Discouraging sponsors. If the first requests they see are quite fringe, they may think twice. I know this has happened at least once.

2. Wasted public agency time. But I've talked to a few FOI officers here and they have told me that requests of this nature from our platform are a drop in the bucket. They've told me they think the requests will get sent to the agency one way or another. That makes me feel less bad about it, so long as we're not encouraging more.

I've steered clear of "backpage" prominence at all because:

• Proportionality: It's quite severe, disappearing even from the user's profile page.
• Fairness: If a user asked why, it's difficult to give a satisfying answer why a request should be buried this way if it didn't break moderation rules. The user should know the criteria in advance. And if it did break a rule, it's not suitable for publishing so why isn't it requester-only?
  

Inventing lesser measures of "deboosting" (e.g. just using noindex to keep it out of Google) seem quite underhanded. If we're taking manual action on specific requests or users, we should be transparent about it and be able to explain our decisions.

So instead I'm now thinking about how to "surface the good requests" instead. Reorganise lists and search results so that exemplar of good requests are seen first. Somehow work out a way to calculate or crowdsource a quality metric to sort by.

This approach would also help with one of my other goals I've not done enough work on: guiding users to write better quality requests.

Oliver

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[Gareth Rees]

> Inventing lesser measures of "deboosting" seem quite underhanded… So instead I'm now thinking about how to "surface the good requests" instead

Yeah, we've gone through a similar thought process, and should have mentioned we're also actively working on "surfacing the good requests", though I do think you have to tackle issues from both ends. Here's the main stuff that's been done recently:

* Ability to link & highlight where requests have been used in external journalism, campaigning or research: https://www.mysociety.org/2020/01/14/has-your-foi-request-been-used-in-a-news-story-now-you-can-let-everyone-know/

* Ability to add notes to requests which can be used to boost good stuff, or e.g. we've considered adding "caution" warnings where a valid request is broaching topics where there's a lot of misinformation/conspiracy: https://www.mysociety.org/2023/01/18/notes-giving-our-users-more-information/

* Ability to import blog feed and display around the site to promote case studies and other good use near related content: https://www.mysociety.org/2024/07/09/new-in-alaveteli-importing-presenting-blog-posts/

* Adding the category system to requests to help users understand what can be asked for and promote requests that have lead to useful releases: https://www.mysociety.org/2024/07/22/new-in-alaveteli-request-categories/

Best,

Gareth