I'm writing this on behalf of the mod team. They've reviewed and commented on this post, but mistakes are mine. 

We want and value criticism on the EA Forum. EA organisations often make their decisions transparent to the Forum audience in a way which makes good criticism possible. But transparency has its challenges, one of which is that not all criticism is good.

By ‘good’ criticism, I mean criticism which is valuable to spend time engaging with. Criticism which can improve your project, or improve the case you make for your project. I also mean criticism which is good for the world but not for the criticised person or organisation. For example, perhaps an approach to solving a problem, or a the work of a particular organisation, is getting too much funding or attention relevant to its merits. Then, the recipient of the criticism may protest — but the criticism is good.

Bad criticism, by contrast, is criticism which is time-consuming to respond to and complicatedly wrong. Criticism which might still tarnish a brand, but which doesn’t give readers a more accurate picture of the world, or help the target of the criticism to improve.

Part of running an epistemically healthy discussion space is accepting a certain amount of bad criticism along with the good. The ideal wouldn’t be a space with no bad criticism — interventions that ensure no bad criticism would doubtless also reduce the amount of good criticism.

This is partially why the moderation team does not hide criticism that we think is bad. However, we encourage all Forum users to share their opinions on which criticisms are valuable by voting and commenting. As users, moderators can also do these things.

This doesn’t mean that criticism is never moderated. Some of the accounts, comments or posts that are hidden or lead to banning are also critical. However, they are hidden or banned because they break strong forum norms, generally involving hostility, rudeness, or off-topic content, rather than because they are critical.

Practices we’d like to encourage

This doesn’t mean the moderation team takes no responsibility for bad criticism on the Forum. We can promote and assist the development of practices around criticism, without resorting to drastic action like banning. Some practices we’d like to promote are:

Reach out to people before posting criticism of their work (in almost all cases).

• Lizka previously wrote a post about why, how and when to share a critique with the subject of your criticism. I highly recommend reading that post — she also includes a helpful guide with template emails for critics.
• The most compelling reason to do this is to ensure that you, as a critic, are interpreting the subject of your criticism correctly. It isn’t in anyone’s interest to make complicated, false criticism—it’s bad for the person or organisation being criticised and bad for the critic.
• The best reason not to involve the criticised person or org is if doing so would in practice stop you from posting your criticism. You can always ask the mod team for support if this is the case. Simply email forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org with a link to your post, and we’ll coordinate with the subject of the criticism to get a response.
• NB- This practice isn’t usually necessary for critical comments. Reaching out for a reply to a comment before posting would mean it is posted far too late to be seen by readers of the post. In this post, I’m thinking about critical posts.

Where possible, give an organisation or individual sufficient notice that they can respond along with your post, i.e. something like a journalistic “right of reply”.

• There is a practice (and in Brazil, a constitutional right) in journalism known as the ‘right of reply’. It’s the idea that the person being critiqued should have the opportunity to respond at the same time the critique is published. This can be particularly important because, as rational as we might aspire to be, seeing criticism can update our opinion without causing us to look out for later rebuttals.
• This is important on the Forum, where you can easily read a post critiquing something, and then never see a comment under that post rebutting the criticism (unless you have subscribed to the post or commented on a thread yourself).
• In a Forum post, this could look like:
  • Sending the post to the criticised person or organisation to be commented on, and then sharing those comments as footnotes.
  • Letting the criticised person or org pre-write their comment, and know when you plan to post, so that they can post their comment along with the post.

I recognise that these practices may be time-consuming for the critic to actualise, and I don’t want the result to be substantially less good criticism.

We aim to alleviate the burden of this process for both critics and those being critiqued, wherever possible. If we can assist in coordinating this, please feel free to reach out to forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org. We could help by (for example):

• Coordinating with the subject of the criticism on your behalf.
• Collecting comments from the organisation on a google doc of your post, and then publishing the critique, with comments as a dialogue (via your account).

To emphasise, we will not take strong moderation action (banning users or moving posts to drafts, for example) if a user doesn’t break strong forum norms, and this post establishes no new strong norms. This post is a statement of our hopes for good criticism on the Forum and a statement of intention to be more involved and proactive in stewarding it.

Note that I changed some uses of the word "norm" to "practice" to make clearer that in the "practices we'd like to encourage" section of the post, I'm not setting up new Forum norms.