{"id":2677,"date":"2023-12-27T17:22:07","date_gmt":"2023-12-27T17:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/?p=2677"},"modified":"2023-12-27T17:22:07","modified_gmt":"2023-12-27T17:22:07","slug":"moderation-at-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/2023\/12\/moderation-at-scale\/","title":{"rendered":"Moderation at scale"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"intro\" style=\"text-align: left;\"><em>On moderation of social media:\u00a0 principles, workloads, scale.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">I was thinking about the overall dynamics of instance-level federation <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/2023\/03\/choosing-an-instance-for-your-fediverse-mastodon-account\/\">on the Fediverse<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">The admins of each instance can choose to stay connected to each other instance as a whole, <em>or<\/em> can choose to block or limit it.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: left;\">Blocking instances, blocking individuals<\/h2>\n<p>Threads, the Twitter-alikey software from Facebook, has just taken the first small test steps towards connecting with the wider Fediverse.\u00a0 In that context, it would effectively be a kind of giant Fediverse instance.<\/p>\n<p>It was in one of the conversations about Threads that someone made a comment which I&#8217;m bouncing off here.\u00a0 It was along the lines of, &#8220;I&#8217;d never block a whole instance, only individuals&#8221;.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: left;\">Principles &amp; practice<\/h2>\n<p>I think the writer was saying it as a point of <strong>principle<\/strong>:\u00a0 like &#8220;it&#8217;s not fair to block one person&#8217;s connections for what another person did&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>But suppose you <em>did<\/em> rule out instance-level blocks, and only blocked people individually.\u00a0 <strong>What would that look like in practice?<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Who does the housekeeping<\/h2>\n<p>A <strong>well-moderated<\/strong> instance <strong>does its own housekeeping<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If one of the people on that instance accidentally crosses a line in the instance&#8217;s rules, the mods will have a gentle word.<\/li>\n<li>If a new person makes an account on that instance, and it turns out they spam people or harass people, they won&#8217;t be allowed to keep doing that:\u00a0 either they&#8217;ll stop, or their account will be removed.<\/li>\n<li>Well-moderated instances often make you write a little intro-application before your account is activated, which cuts down on casual or automated spammers.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A <strong>badly-moderated<\/strong> instance <strong><em>neglects<\/em> that care<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>On a badly-moderated instance, new people can join all the time who just want to be annoying!\u00a0 or worse!\u00a0 And nobody stops them!<\/p>\n<h2>Workload implications<\/h2>\n<p>Now let&#8217;s think about that difference <strong>from the perspective of being an instance admin<\/strong>, with people on your instance that you want to take care of.<\/p>\n<p>If your instance connects to a <em>well<\/em>-moderated instance, you probably won&#8217;t need to do tons to moderate the posts of people from there.\u00a0 Either the people who join there are considerate of others in the first place, or the mods of <em>that<\/em> instance take care of it.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, there&#8217;ll be <strong>situations which still take work<\/strong>.\u00a0 For example, there might&#8217;ve been subtle racism or sexism or ableism in a post, which neither you or the original poster had spotted until the post was reported.\u00a0 Then, to moderate fairly, you have to raise your own skills, and maybe do some consultation.<\/p>\n<p>But <strong>the load is shared<\/strong>.\u00a0 The <em>obvious<\/em> problems &#8220;at the other end&#8221; are taken care of by the mods &#8220;at the other end&#8221;.\u00a0 A lot of potential bother never gets as far as your instance.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, <strong>if your instance connects to a <em>badly<\/em>-moderated instance<\/strong>, any blocking of badly-behaved people is going to have to be done by <em>you<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ve invited an endless, tedious, very boring process of blocking people for doing annoying stuff.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine that situation, and imagine running the numbers on your moderation workload.\u00a0 If you&#8217;re willing to connect with badly-moderated instances, then it&#8217;s likely that 90% or more of your moderation workload is going to come from <em>those<\/em> instances.<\/p>\n<p>Did you really want ten times as much work?<\/p>\n<p>(To keep this post simple, I&#8217;m not really talking about &#8220;middlingly-moderated instances&#8221;, but that&#8217;s a thing too.\u00a0 A common limitation is not really having enough mods for the number of users, so although they <em>do<\/em> give the boot to annoying accounts, it might take a while.\u00a0 Also, if you auto-approve without an intro, you&#8217;re likely to be hosting more spammers and bots than the instances that ask for intros first.)<\/p>\n<h2>&#8220;One strike &amp; you&#8217;re out&#8221; allows a lot of strikes<\/h2>\n<p>What&#8217;s worse is:\u00a0 Of all the new accounts being set up on badly-moderated instances every week, you don&#8217;t know which ones are going to be spamming or abusing &#8220;your people&#8221; <strong>until after they&#8217;ve done it<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>If you federate with somewhere badly moderated, then as well as bringing upon yourself more work for <em>you<\/em>, you&#8217;ve opened the door to an endless stream of bother and abuse <strong>for the other people on your instance<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Every badly-moderated instance is one more opportunity for spammers and wind-up merchants to make new accounts, again and again each time they&#8217;re blocked.\u00a0 The scale of it is impossibly unwieldy.<\/p>\n<p>When you&#8217;ve opened a floodgate, picking out individual droplets from the stream of it will not stop the stream.<\/p>\n<p>The unpleasant posts will be aimed disproportionately at women and at people of colour, because that&#8217;s how online harassment stats always go.\u00a0 If you&#8217;re a white bloke (or your account <em>looks<\/em> like you&#8217;re probably a white bloke), you can be pretty sure you aren&#8217;t getting the full experience of how bad it is.<\/p>\n<p>So if you&#8217;re <em>not<\/em> content for your instance to be enabling a horrible environment for at least some of the people there, <strong>in practice you are going to have to do some wholesale blocking<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>(Even blocking <em>whole instances<\/em> one by one is pretty unwieldy &amp; endless, given how easy it is to start another one &#8211; which is why people are working on instance-level opt-in blocklists and allowlists.)<\/p>\n<h2>Is it unfair?<\/h2>\n<p>Circling back round to the <strong>principle<\/strong>:\u00a0 <em>is<\/em> it unfair, to &#8220;the people who did nothing wrong&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>I think there are some nuances here.<\/p>\n<p>Someone who doesn&#8217;t realise how the Fediverse works, and chooses a middlingly-moderated instance as their home base, and finds that there are people they&#8217;d like to follow and can&#8217;t, due to an instance-level block&#8230; I&#8217;d agree that&#8217;s hard lines on them.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, if someone chooses to join an instance whose code of conduct is &#8220;no rules&#8221; or indeed &#8220;we like winding people up&#8221;, then they probably weren&#8217;t looking to contribute to the overall good vibes of the Fedi, and I don&#8217;t feel sorry for them.<\/p>\n<p>But beyond that:\u00a0 <strong>fairness has to include the people on your <em>own<\/em> instance<\/strong>.\u00a0 If an instance creator sets out to provide a space for constructive and usually-friendly discussion, and people have signed up on that basis, then there has to be some minimum level of <strong>curated space<\/strong> for those people.\u00a0 That will inevitably sometimes require limiting connections to people who don&#8217;t share your aims.<\/p>\n<p>And the way that&#8217;s done has to be manageable for the moderation team, or the instance won&#8217;t survive.<\/p>\n<h2>Selecting your home instance<\/h2>\n<p>Part of the beautiful elegance of the Fediverse (notwithstanding its many limitations haha) is that when people <strong>choose an instance to make their home base<\/strong>, they can &#8211; at least in theory &#8211; select for their preference on moderation frameworks, as well as their preference for many other things.<\/p>\n<p>I say &#8220;in theory&#8221; because of course, <em>actually<\/em> being able to do that requires (a) realising it&#8217;s a possibility, (b) knowing where to look to get a sense of each instance&#8217;s moderation policies, and (c) if you&#8217;re lucky, finding one that&#8217;s able to deliver what you were looking for.<\/p>\n<p>You can intentionally go looking for an instance where the admins <strong>prioritise safer space over wider connection<\/strong>.\u00a0 Or you can intentionally go looking for an instance where the admins are <strong>more relaxed about who can connect, at the expense of putting up with more bother<\/strong>.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a kind of spectrum.<\/p>\n<p>Adding further dimensions to the spectrum, you can look for an instance where the admins are skilled in certain <em>types<\/em> of safer-space moderation, because of their own cultural backgrounds and\/or the work they&#8217;ve put in to be able to pick up on subtle implications.<\/p>\n<p>(Of course, ideally the mods of <em>all<\/em> instances would be able to accomplish an adequate level of recognition of, say, racism or antisemitism.\u00a0 It&#8217;s an abdication of responsibility to suggest to Black people or Jewish people that they should go and be on Black-run or Jewish-run instances.\u00a0 But I&#8217;m acknowledging that cultural competence is a thing.\u00a0 These are skills.)<\/p>\n<h2>The option of moving<\/h2>\n<p>And if you don&#8217;t like the policies or decisions where you ended up, it&#8217;s possible (albeit with some tedious admin) to <strong>move to a different instance<\/strong>, and <strong>take your follow lists<\/strong> with you.\u00a0 In the year or so that I&#8217;ve been following people on the Fediverse, I&#8217;ve seen quite a few people do that.<\/p>\n<p>(Mastodon software doesn&#8217;t yet let you re-import your old <em>posts<\/em> at the new place, though I seem to remember hearing that some of the other Fediverse software does enable even that nowadays.\u00a0 It&#8217;s common to leave the old posts up at the old account.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m seeing a bit of an uptick in discussion recently about moving from one instance to another &#8211; I think because of the prospect of Threads connecting with the Fediverse.\u00a0 Some people are about to move to a different instance because they <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> want to federate with Threads, and their instance admins are planning to give it a try &#8211; or because they <em>do<\/em> want to federate with Threads, and their instance admins are planning not to.<\/p>\n<h2>A note on Threads<\/h2>\n<p>To loop back round to Threads&#8230;\u00a0 I personally don&#8217;t see any need to &#8220;wait and see how that goes&#8221;.\u00a0 We already know what Facebook is like and what their priorities are:\u00a0 if in doubt, please read Erin Kissane&#8217;s excellent, careful explanation of <a href=\"https:\/\/erinkissane.com\/meta-in-myanmar-full-series\">Facebook&#8217;s role in the Myanmar genocide<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t want to federate with their callous, reckless company, because I don&#8217;t want to give it any more of my time and energy.\u00a0 I&#8217;m glad that the admins of <a href=\"https:\/\/scicomm.xyz\">scicomm.xyz<\/a>, my main Fediverse base, already came down on the side of no Threads federation.<\/p>\n<p>I do also think that if Threads federation takes off, the admins who decided to &#8220;give it a chance&#8221; are likely to encounter the dynamics I describe above.\u00a0 From estimates I&#8217;ve seen, I get the impression that numerically, Threads is something like ten times the size of the whole Fediverse;\u00a0 and I suspect the moderation there is middling at best.\u00a0 That&#8217;d be a hefty addition to the modding workload.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On moderation of social media:\u00a0 principles, workloads, scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moderation","category-systems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2677"}],"version-history":[{"count":67,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2744,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677\/revisions\/2744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}