"Rude or offensive:" how does the nature of the offense and its visibility influence flag responses?

Question

This is about our behavior policy and how it relates to flagging offensive comments (and posts, I suppose).

• Is it a violation of the behavior policy to insult another citizen, or to equate their actions on the site with serious offenses such as violent hate crimes?
• In particular, should a "rude or offensive" flag for such statements be acted upon?
• Are flagged comments which would normally be deleted as offensive considered not worthy of removal if their visibility is limited to only some citizens rather than the entire Internet? (i.e. does our dirty laundry get washed less vigorously if we're the only ones who can see it?)

These questions are prompted by a recent comment which compared a citizen's undesirable posting habits to an act of genocide. It was an otherwise accurate comment which may have contributed to the speedy deletion of the post by its owner, and so the comment is only visible to 10k+ rep users. I flagged it as offensive prior to the post's deletion, and the flag was declined after the deletion --to my incredulous dismay.

I provided links to the individual incident, as requested, but I'm concerned it'll put focus on the incident instead of the questions it brought to my mind.

Answer 1

Flags and Flag Handling

As for the flag, I don't know in this specific case because I didn't handle it (I was the flag-ee), but I usually decline flags on stuff that's deleted already. Deleted items are meant to be deleted and they appear just for change-history, they're not "Q&A just for high rep users." Not sure what the value would ever be except for a Vindicated Feeling of Righteousness (tm).

Flag handling is pretty low tech actually. It generally just gives you the options of "delete," "declined - helpful", and "declined - not helpful." So unless it's a flag on a Q/A/C that we think is egregious enough to delete out of hand, we "decline-helpful" and then edit or comment or mod-message or do whatever other thing that the flag system doesn't understand to mitigate. As a result the vast majority of flags are "declined." We only really proc the delete when it's over the top - spam or a long string of cusses... Or sometimes a comment we'd delete anyway, though often there it's part of an argument-thread where we delete the whole batch instead.

You should interpret "declined - helpful" as the mod agrees and will possibly do something, and "declined - not helpful" as the mod thinks you just wasted their time and please don't do it again. Because of how it works technically, unless deletion out of hand is the answer, it gets declined. This is an odd fencepost case in that the answer and thus comment was already deleted, so "delete" is not really effective...

Also, the flagging system is super inconsistent from Q to A to C. Comment flags just have "delete," "edit," and "dismiss" but no "helpful/unhelpful" choice, dismiss just dismisses it.

Flag stuff that's a problem, but don't seek self validation in the result codes that come back.

Some other information on flags and flag handling.

• What are the “spam” and “rude or abusive” (offensive) flags, and how do they work?
• What is a disputed flag?
• How does comment voting and flagging work?
• Why are the moderators being so strict with quality related flags recently?