Flagging conspiratorial rants

Question

On Sec.SE, it is not uncommon for people to flag (and delete) posts that spout conspiracies and do not give a real answer. I came across a question like that here on Crypto.SE and flagged it. The result was "helpful". Later, I came across another answer in the same vein and flagged it as well. That flag was declined, pointing out that flags are not used for incorrect answers. I am curious to know what the difference between the two questions is. To me, it seems like an answer that posts conspiracies fits squarely under "not a real answer", at least if the core of the answer itself is a conspiracy (rather than an off-hand mention of one in an otherwise useful answer). Can someone explain the discrepancy in flagging results? At what point does a such a post deserve flagging?

Twofish vs. Serpent vs. AES (or a combo)
Reason: silly conspiracy nonsense, as well as not being a real answer
Result: helpful

Why was WEP apparently not reviewed by many cryptographers?
Reason: as mentioned in the comments, tinfoil conspiracy nonsense that doesn't answer the actual question
Result: declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer

Answer 1

First up: @SEJPM accepted that first flag. resulting in deletion of the answer, while I rejected the other flag when stumbling upon it (which is why @PauUszak's answer is still there). As a result, the answers provided here at Meta happen to represent two different moderator views related to a similar situation (which I think makes this Meta Q rather interesting for the community).

Two things to remember:

1. Mods should intervene as little as possible… aka we do not decide if a wrong or conspirancy-loaded answer is an answer in the first place — that's the job of the community (they have down votes for that). This is underlined by #2
2. Flags should not be (ab)used to kill incomplete or altogether wrong answers. Remember the mod flag rejection option that says something along these lines — which OP here points to too. Simply killing a conspiracy- loaded answer feels wrong as this somewhat contradicts what we usually do (and SE expects from us - as mods - in such situations).

   flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer

To wrap it up, I disagree with the deletion of the first answer since flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer. The according flag should therefore never have gone through. Users have downvotes to handle such answers and that obviously works perfectly when I look at the downvotes those answers accumulated.

My view is (pun intended) that flags are not to be used to report wrong (or "conspiracy") answers, and handling such wrong flags by accepting them and accordingly deleting Qs or As is… wrong. Doing so seems to contradict SE guidelines, and it also fuels potential conspiracy thoughts — which is anything but constructive for our site.

As we know from the past, fueling conspiracy by abusing flags with the goal to suppress the related Q&As can and will result in weird suspicions targetted at Crypto.SE as a whole. We've been there before. Let's try not to reboot such drama.

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Consensus

To get a consensus for us all (which will definitely help moderators to handle things the way the community prefers), please drop your votes here.

Answer 2

TL;DR: I drew the line at "does the tin-foil hatted answer technically answer the question"?

I handled the first flag and followed its recommendation to remove the answer on the basis that the "answer" didn't actually answer the question. The answer essentially stated "this is an opinion, NSA made AES weak, longer AES keys would be better" which is indeed not an answer to the question

So I'm looking for an up-to-date answer about which of these is the safest encryption to be used, or rather most unbreakable?

Because it doesn't talk about Serpent nor Twofish nor about any combination. The fact that this answer is tinfoil-hatted nonsense didn't lead to deletion itself.

I also saw the the second flag first and brought it up in a private chat with my co-mods because there was a similar earlier flag, which was declined and because the "answer" technically did answer the question. @e-sushi then saw the flag and handled it.

The answer to the second flag essentially states "it was an NSA plot to not have any real cryptographers on the committee", which does technically answer the question "why were there no cryptographers involved".

This case lead me to think that we keep answers that technically answer the question, even though they may not be the most credible and that we leave them to downvotes and self-deletion at the discretion of the poster.

As we all in the mod team seem to have different opinions on how to handle these cases, I have created a Meta Q&A to collect and decide on a more consistent strategy for the future.