When we asked the moderator community what resources they’d like IFTAS to work on, one of the most requested items was a way to convene and collaborate with fellow moderators around the world.
We heard requests for things like sharing lessons learned, tips and tricks, technical help with moderation tools, standard terminology, and translation of non-native language content.
Our favourite quote from the Moderator Needs Assessment… “together we are stronger”.
We couldn’t agree more.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of IFTAS Connect, a new community of practice designed specifically for Fediverse moderators. IFTAS Connect aims to provide moderators, community managers and anyone engaged in creating a safer Internet with a wealth of tools, resources, and a supportive network to help them connect, collaborate, and navigate the complexities of federated content moderation. (Read the Press Release here.)
We’ve worked with a broad array of moderators and advisors to kick-start the available resources – and we hope many more will join and contribute their experience.
Crowd-Sourced Library – A growing collection of practical guides, wellness resources, and research curated by moderators for moderators. The library is open to all, no sign-up required.
Discussion Forums – Engage with fellow moderators, share experiences, suggest new resources, and learn from one another.
Community Groups – Join groups focused on specific aspects of moderation, from software assistance to cultural issues.
Moderation Support – Ask for help with moderation software, content translation, and access IFTAS resources like the moderator sandbox and the FediCheck automated denylist service.
In addition we have aggregated news relevant to Fediverse community leaders, a multilingual feature under way to allow for contributed translations, and a wiki-like shared document feature being tested. Read more about the IFTAS Connect account features.
Join Us Today
IFTAS Connect is free to join. We invite all Fediverse moderators, community managers, trust and safety professionals, and academic researchers to request access to IFTAS Connect. Be a part of a global community that prioritizes trust, safety, and inclusivity across the Fediverse, and take part in growing the community and the toolset.
Visit IFTAS Connect to learn more and join our growing community.
We just expanded the section in our #SubduedSocial server rules to conform to the #IFTAS guidelines against targeted misgendering and deadnaming in the fediverse.
Takeaways from today’s #FediForum thoughts, although my brain is filled with all kinds of tangents right now:
Onboarding new devs sucks. There’s way too many assumptions of what developers are supposed to know before they write a single line of code. There’s cultural hostility towards things people barely take the time to learn about or understand. There’s not really much of a welcoming committee for new devs. Sash’s experience definitely came up here.
#IFTAS is building so many crazy-ass things that are incredibly important: moderator stipend funds, a portal for learning from other moderators & exchanging notes & building fellowship, CSAM detection tools, labelers, protection for at-risk moderators. Just so many things we probably should've started building years ago.
Also, the Fediverse is not the only one struggling with this right now. Both Bluesky and Nostr are trying to figure out Trust & Safety in their own ways. One kind of horrifying realization is that cross-service labeling has an edge-case: if most of the Fediverse blocks a subset of it en masse, there's not enough observability to know what to label. It can end up on the other side of the bridge with no information, which actually is a problem for Nostr.
First, IFTAS is doing a few things differently than others.
They are sourcing from only larger instances' blocklists. For inclusion servers must have at least 2k monthly active users and have been around a year.
They combine a manually sourced list (their DNI list) with their consensus list.
They do provide a way to get off the list via email.
This LGBTQ+ history month, we’ve signed the @iftas pledge to add specific terms against misgendering and deadnaming to our Community Guidelines.
Supporting LGBTQ+ people, including members of the Newsmast team, has always been central to Newsmast.
Newsmast has always stood against hate speech or harassment of any kind, but by using the specific terms set out by IFTAS and GLAAD we hope that more gender non-conforming people will feel safe on Newsmast 🧡
We're proud to have had those rules in place here since day 1 and will be reviewing our policies to further strengthen them as needed.
There is no room for bigotry against gender and sexual minorities here, and we thank IFTAS for their work on making the fediverse a safer and more welcoming place.
The notes and accounts from the FediForum in late September suggest that some of "the people who move the fediverse forward", as the conference promotes itself as platforming, are also acutely interested in moving forward the agenda of Meta.
The forum's notes tell the tale. Though a number of topics, including many of genuine benefit, were touched upon, digging through the sessions turns up a path of breadcrumbs that leads straight back to Palo Alto.
The FediForum dedicated no less than four sessions in support of a plan by the IFTAS thinktank for a realtime centralized "AI" surveillance system for the fediverse.
The centralization scheme is being developed in partnership with an entity called Thorn - a for-profit "AI" surveillance privateer which pretends to be a "for the children" NGO. Thorn is hot news lately due to its blatantly corrupt involvement in the EU Chat Control plot, which would destroy the free internet and online privacy in Europe but create a huge business opportunity for Thorn.
The blocklist system IFTAS proposes is called CARIAD - "Consensus Aggregated Retractable IFTAS Allowlist Denylist".
CARIAD's blocking data will be aggregated from two sources. The first is the Facebook Mafia spider-holed at Stanford, which fabricated the CSAM-scare influence operation that roiled the fedi a few months ago. More on them here: https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/110772380949893619
The second is "an aggregation of at least ten of the largest ActivityPub service providers"; this would seem to be a sugar pill to win over Mastodon gGmbH and a few other megaservers.
The system itself is somewhat similar to that proposed in the Nivenly FSEP plan which has proven so controversial over the last couple of months; except that, instead of centralizing blocklist control with WelshPixie, CARIAD centralizes control with Meta-linked authoritarian techbros.
Other aspects of the IFTAS surveillance scheme are outlined in the slide deck. They include centralized realtime image and video scanning utilizing Thorn's "AI". Transgressive accounts would be auto-reported to authorities. It should also be noted that Thorn technology employs Amazon's facial recognition algorithms.
As a further comment to this prospect, consider that we are now observing how the moderates currently in power in the so-called United States seem to be gift-wrapping policies (KOSA, the border wall, the criminalization of protest and homelessness) for the reactionary extremists who may well succeed them.
Technologies such as Thorn's should be evaluated in the same light. They may - or may not - only detect CSAM for now. But how will they be repurposed if there are drastic political changes in the US or other "democracies"? What beliefs, convictions, sexual or gender identities will come to be mandated as equivalently deviant? Europol already has some ideas: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimited-data-access-in-online-child-sexual-abuse-regulation/
The workshop notes also reveal that some of the FediForum sessions concerning the IFTAS system featured multiple participants straight from Meta. There's no need to speculate further. The Zuckerberg entity seeks to impose this surveillance technology on the fediverse before federating.
The September FediForum and the solutionist machinations it platformed provide further detail for our understanding of Facebook's designs on the fediverse. The water is gradually being brought to boil, and it remains to be seen if the frogs of the FediPact 🐸 can leap to action in time.
It is, without a doubt, true that the #fediverse is unsafe for a lot of marginalized groups in a variety of ways.
It is unsafe even for groups that are overrepresented here compared to society at large, such as for queers.
It is also true that the fediverse needs a multipronged, multi_layered_ approach to these issues
#Blocklists are necessary and vital, but I'm not convinced that consensus blocklists nor rapidly updating blocklists are the answer, or even have a place.
Given this behavior any attempt to implementing a rapidly updating blocklist that you automatically import (be it run by #IFTAS or through #FSEP or something else) is very likely to be abused and it is going to cause problems even absent abuse cases.
People keep acting like this is up for debate?
We have literally decades of precedent here. It's going to happen.
My hardline: the only ethical and responsible approach here is to fix that first and tread carefully until then.
Every time I see someone in the FediBlock tag bring up one of the handful of extremely well-known terrible servers, I'm reminded that we DO really need some kind of starter blocklist for new servers that want to be safe from harassment. In theory it's a great tool, people's egos just get in the way. #FediBlockMeta
One common comment is how there are "zero instances blocked by default now."
But it's worth examining why that is and looking again at the use case of that "default blocklist."
If your use case for a "default blocklist" is to block nazi and CSAM instances, do you need it updated every hour, or could you update it once per release?
If the problem is that people aren't uploading a blocklist, how is your tool going to be different?
If #IFTAS were to publish a manually reviewed blocklist once a month and mastodon/other providers were set up by default to pull that list once a month, it's a lot less scary—even with the current problems with how mastodon handles blocks—than "an instance added one hour, sever everyone's connections, and then can be removed the next all without a single human looking at the whole picture or verifying"
Considering the #IFTAS proposal for building a shared #blocklist system the devil is in the details, but IMO trying to get consent and build their list from large instances circumvents some of the problems in lists that derive from smaller instances. Not all, not by a longshot, but some.
Larger instances cause higher impact on their users by wanton blocking, making them less likely (though not unlikely, for reasons I'll get into) act capriciously or to align with a single person's view.
Unlike the #FSEP proposal the #IFTAS approach creates a little more of an external system, obviating the need to 1) use mastodon and 2) merge changes into the mastodon mainline.
Several core failure modes are addressed by this model, along with the explicit inclusion of how different preferences can be set
Either way it is something that needs to be called out and considered.
Now, to be clear, #IFTAS may very well have considered all of these factors and have safeguards planned. It's one line on a single slide for a product that has no public interface yet and where the website is still on the way.
We're a fair bit away from knowing and, as I said at the beginning, the devil is in the details.
But these are some of the things I personally believe we should be looking for.
#Lemmy has experienced CSAM attacks in the last week, with the material posted on multiple communities for people to see. Due to how federation works on Lemmy, this meant that the images also got send over and stored in the databases of other Lemmy servers. This poses questions and challenges for the admins, among others on how to make sure they are legally compliant.
Glad to hear that there will be many #IFTAS-related discussions at the upcoming #Fediforum. If you haven't come across them, check them out:
"IFTAS is a non-profit team organizing to help foster and preserve inclusive, civil discourse for the common good. We aim to serve as a valued resource for trust and safety ... We will do this by convening leading voices, experts and moderator communities to develop guidelines and resources that are built in consensus ..."
OC Independent Federated Trust and Safety: Who, What, and How? (wedistribute.org)
As the Fediverse continues to grow, new challenges arise in community management and user safety. A new organization seeks to make it easier.