"If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of freedom of speech."
"The distinction between content #moderation and #censorship is nebulous. Social networks’ moderation systems combat perceived disinformation, often pitting their AI censors (as well as human ones) against human and AI propagandists... In America, Congressional committees, social scientists, and AI ethicists have all demanded more effective suppression of messages they don’t want heard."
This would be the first time the subject of #AI-based #moderation is raised at FediForum, I think. Should be a fascinating discussion to which people will very likely bring passionate arguments. But that's one of the beautiful things about an unconference: smart people figuring out hard problems, together.
“Another question [...] a user who had been banned on Meta should be able to export their content and users and start up again elsewhere on their own Mastodon server.”
I raised this in a conversation recently somewhere, and my gut feeling is "yes", but more specifically not just a "yes via data export" but actually a "yes via Move activity", allowing the banning server to automatically ban their new account from interacting with their server!
In all the posts I've read from the #Threads federation meetings, all held under the chatham house rule, it's never been clear exactly when they'll implement the features required for successful moderation of ActivityPub based platforms.
I would love to gain some clarity into how & when Threads intends to handle Flag, Block, Ignore, and Reject activities, since these are essential to ensuring we can retain safe spaces.
Like, I believe there is a direct correlation between a platform's business values (how it makes money), its moderation practices, and overall user happiness & desired retention.
Like there's a reason users are referring to your platform as a "hell hole" besides just it being funny.
@caseynewton writes how he came to the decision to move Platformer from Substack after three years of building its substantial readership on the online publishing service. He talks about his search for answers from Substack's co-founders, an investigation into pro-Nazi content on the platform and the importance of understanding the thoughts of Platformer's readers.
Do users want platform moderation or individual control? Examining the role of third-person effects and free speech support in shaping moderation preferences
Jhaver et al., 2023
New Media & Society
"Our findings show that platform governance initiatives need to account for both actual and perceived media effects of norm-violating speech categories to increase user satisfaction."
Since one of my fellow moderators made a thread about #moderation complaining about receiving a "vile treatment" using the collective "we", I wish to express that I do not feel that way AT ALL and never felt "spat upon". Everyone has perfectly the right to be upset about a moderation action perceived as unfair (sometimes justifiably so, regrettably). Appeals are not always expressed diplomatically but everyone in a position of power should welcome recriminations, imo.
The idea is that in the near future or even present day of the Fediverse, we'll see groups of servers, moderators, and communities working together to define the boundaries that they want & accept.
e.g., FediPact could be considered a "bloc" of server's who all agree not to federate with Meta, that'd be an example of such.
You could maybe also consider the Mastodon Server Covenant as being a "bloc" of servers
e.g., they could publish a federation "accept list" of all the servers that have agreed to it, and have a process for appeals or challenges, and then you could subscribe to that and only accept instances that agree with the covenant's terms.
For me, "coalition" felt a little weird because it implies to me a political power, where as I'd say "bloc" invokes trading power which is perhaps closer to what we're doing: trading Activity's between different ActivityPub servers. "union" could work too.
#Mastodon client #MammothApp appears to use a moderation layer separate from server-level #moderation, where posts are removed exclusively on this third-party app.
I screen recorded the event.
This particular post was by Seirdy, and is the third time in a month this has happened to him.
Here's the thing, other odd behavior resulting in missing posts has happened a lot, to multiple users. All on one app. A lot related to #threads
I posted a thorough write-up about it back in Dec. 🧵
What are people's feelings on using the FediBlock tag for calling out individual accounts? Personally, I find it mildly annoying at best, in that most of these accounts are already acted upon by staff, but potentially harmful at worse if people are going there instead of immediately clicking the report button, or even worse, using it to call out a user by finding one of their worst out of context posts and putting it on blast.
Honestly, I'm using it as a tool to scope out instances that we need to block because they are literal Nazis, literal pedos, literally attempting to harass people off of the network, or otherwise bad faith. I would rather it not come into play for individual accounts, but be advance warning for when the actual staff of a server is the problem.
What do people think though? Is there a perspective I'm missing?
A couple of my friends have an account on Threads. So naturally, I created an account over there after it became available in the EU.
The amount of unmoderated hate speech, transphobia, homophobia, and racism is staggering and mind-blowing. I had to block more people in the first couple of days than in a year on X, even after Elon.
I am so grateful for this well-moderated Mastodon instance - thank you so very much, @ordnung!
It looks like, if Threads knows you’re a trans person, it may just start bombarding you with transphobic posts in your For You feed — even if you’ve never interacted with that kind of content on the platform before.
Someone earlier was complaining about not profileration one maston.world or something. The bot attack on my account seems to be coming from mastodon.online. #mastodon#fediverse#moderation#spam