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I am still struggling to understand how migrating to a censorship-resistant platform will mitigate concerns about a lack of strict content moderation at twitter

I am still struggling to understand how migrating to a censorship-resistant platform will mitigate concerns about a lack of strict content moderation at twitter.

viraptor 4y ago
It's only censorship-resistant as in, nobody apart from LE can force you to take your instance down. Otherwise the network is still highly moderated. Both at the local instance level (people get banned) and at the federation level (whole instances are either silenced or disconnected from others).
cies 4y ago
Mastodon is, IMHO, more tightly moderated than Twitter, depending which side of the split-fediverse you are on. See my other comment in this thread for my story.
dale_glass 4y ago
Mastodon as a whole is "censorship-resistant". Individual servers very much have rules. My home is on FOSStodon, and it's very, very far from an anarchy: https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules It's also selective about which other servers it will interoperate with and how much: https://fosstodon.org/about/more#unavailable-content https://fosstodon.org/about/more#unavailable-content
- Timshel 4y ago
  Nice to see the granularity of moderating servers; had not look at the subject and was kind of afraid that if it was only on/off then you might end up with a disconnected fediverse.
FortiDude 4y ago
But now your post won't be taken down by a paid employee of a corporation with actual contractual obligations and custom made moderation tools to limit collateral damage, instead a 17yo Discord friend of the admin will have complete access to your account!
- kibwen 4y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk himself and all of his friends have full access to your Twitter account, with no protections whatsoever. You don't own your account, Musk does.
  - FortiDude 4y ago
    I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk and Twitter at large have more to lose from a reputational damage caused by blatant moderation misuse than an anonymous kid with an anime profile picture has
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      Looking at the last events, Musk sure seems unaware of that. First he whined about advertisers leaving. Then he threatened to publicly shame them. Then he asked for feedback, got some constructive feedback from some huge ad exec, and promptly blocked him. He appears to have messed with AOC's account because he didn't like her arguing with him. He already seems to be reversing on his free speech ideals and is instituting permanent bans that he said he was opposed to. I don't know what's up with him, but it's hardly a shining example of reputation management that's for sure. And it's been what, a week?
    - littlestymaar 4y ago
      As if Musk had any reputation left to save. We're talking about somebody who has canceled the Tesla order of a blogger who criticized him…
vidarh 4y ago
You can see censorship as about being able to control what people is allowed to say. The fediverse is highly resistant to that. You can also see censorship as about being able to control what people will be able to say to you. The fediverse is not at all resistant to that. That is, nobody can stop you from setting up your own instance, or write your own ActivityPub implementation, or find one that tolerates whatever thing you want to say. But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will. The structure of the fediverse supports that by letting groups pick instances whose moderation fits what they want, and different groups with different moderation requirements or even contradictory moderation requirements can co-exist without all being beholden to the vagaries of policies set by a third party we have no control over.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  > But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will. This is Robber's Cave experiment [1] all over again: A society that does no longer talk with each other and is segregated (e.g. along political lines) will at first become hostile between different factions within it, and eventually break. Filter bubbles ultimately destroy civil society and democracy. [1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html
  - pjc50 4y ago
    I guess we've got to include some flat earthers in our space programme or we'll never get to Mars. Can't be in a filter bubble, after all.
    - DocTomoe 4y ago
      No one questions that segregated groups with tight information and communication control can result in more efficiently reached results. History has shown us several examples of such highly efficient societies where what can and cannot be said where tightly enforced. But history also has shown us how such societies eventually break from unresolved conflicts within it. Talking to someone with another viewpoint, even if that viewpoint is a stupid or hateful one, does not mean endorsing. This is not about "fair and balanced", it is about communication and providing ideas outside of their peer group. Now, if you decide to just block flat earthers individually, or as a group (even for non-flat-earth-related communication), you will just create a filter bubble for them in which they can strengthen their now-unchallenged beliefs in.
OscarCunningham 4y ago
I think Scott Alexander's recent post about this made a good point. (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...) He draws the distinction between censorship (stopping people from getting messages they want to recieve) and moderation (stopping people from getting messages they don't want to recieve). With those definitons censorship is bad and moderation is good. Mastodon isn't as simple as the model he imagines (simple click-boxes to select what kind of messages you want) but it does give you moderation (on your local instance) while still letting you avoid censorship (by moving instances if necessary).
- msravi 4y ago
  The only correct answer to that should be that you let people maintain their own filters (blocklists and allowlists) so they can see messages they want to receive and not see what they don't want to. Also, you might let people apply such community created lists, that they can subscribe to. Unfortunately, Mastodon rather than doing that, gives complete control to the server administrator to "moderate" their instance. The result is that you end up having isolated echo-chambers, with each server blocking all other servers that don't agree with their viewpoint.
  - jonathanstrange 4y ago
    That solves almost no problem. Libel and slander will continue to affect you, there will continue to be toxic communities who instigate violence and violate local laws, and the feature encourages echo chambers and fragmentation. The worst system is when other people can see comments to your posts that you cannot see when you've blocked the commenter. It's the best system for smear campaigns and targeted character assassination. You'll never get a job and everybody hates you, and you'll have have no idea why.
- jorgesborges 4y ago
  It’s ironic that the top comment to that post was removed.

I am still struggling to understand how migrating to a censorship-resistant platform will mitigate concerns about a lack of strict content moderation at twitter.

viraptor 4y ago

It's only censorship-resistant as in, nobody apart from LE can force you to take your instance down. Otherwise the network is still highly moderated. Both at the local instance level (people get banned) and at the federation level (whole instances are either silenced or disconnected from others).

cies 4y ago

Mastodon is, IMHO, more tightly moderated than Twitter, depending which side of the split-fediverse you are on. See my other comment in this thread for my story.

dale_glass 4y ago

Mastodon as a whole is "censorship-resistant". Individual servers very much have rules. My home is on FOSStodon, and it's very, very far from an anarchy: https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules It's also selective about which other servers it will interoperate with and how much: https://fosstodon.org/about/more#unavailable-content https://fosstodon.org/about/more#unavailable-content

Timshel 4y ago
Nice to see the granularity of moderating servers; had not look at the subject and was kind of afraid that if it was only on/off then you might end up with a disconnected fediverse.

FortiDude 4y ago

But now your post won't be taken down by a paid employee of a corporation with actual contractual obligations and custom made moderation tools to limit collateral damage, instead a 17yo Discord friend of the admin will have complete access to your account!

kibwen 4y ago
I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk himself and all of his friends have full access to your Twitter account, with no protections whatsoever. You don't own your account, Musk does.
- FortiDude 4y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk and Twitter at large have more to lose from a reputational damage caused by blatant moderation misuse than an anonymous kid with an anime profile picture has
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Looking at the last events, Musk sure seems unaware of that. First he whined about advertisers leaving. Then he threatened to publicly shame them. Then he asked for feedback, got some constructive feedback from some huge ad exec, and promptly blocked him. He appears to have messed with AOC's account because he didn't like her arguing with him. He already seems to be reversing on his free speech ideals and is instituting permanent bans that he said he was opposed to. I don't know what's up with him, but it's hardly a shining example of reputation management that's for sure. And it's been what, a week?
  - littlestymaar 4y ago
    As if Musk had any reputation left to save. We're talking about somebody who has canceled the Tesla order of a blogger who criticized him…

vidarh 4y ago

You can see censorship as about being able to control what people is allowed to say. The fediverse is highly resistant to that. You can also see censorship as about being able to control what people will be able to say to you. The fediverse is not at all resistant to that. That is, nobody can stop you from setting up your own instance, or write your own ActivityPub implementation, or find one that tolerates whatever thing you want to say. But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will. The structure of the fediverse supports that by letting groups pick instances whose moderation fits what they want, and different groups with different moderation requirements or even contradictory moderation requirements can co-exist without all being beholden to the vagaries of policies set by a third party we have no control over.

DocTomoe 4y ago
> But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will. This is Robber's Cave experiment [1] all over again: A society that does no longer talk with each other and is segregated (e.g. along political lines) will at first become hostile between different factions within it, and eventually break. Filter bubbles ultimately destroy civil society and democracy. [1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html
- pjc50 4y ago
  I guess we've got to include some flat earthers in our space programme or we'll never get to Mars. Can't be in a filter bubble, after all.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    No one questions that segregated groups with tight information and communication control can result in more efficiently reached results. History has shown us several examples of such highly efficient societies where what can and cannot be said where tightly enforced. But history also has shown us how such societies eventually break from unresolved conflicts within it. Talking to someone with another viewpoint, even if that viewpoint is a stupid or hateful one, does not mean endorsing. This is not about "fair and balanced", it is about communication and providing ideas outside of their peer group. Now, if you decide to just block flat earthers individually, or as a group (even for non-flat-earth-related communication), you will just create a filter bubble for them in which they can strengthen their now-unchallenged beliefs in.

OscarCunningham 4y ago

I think Scott Alexander's recent post about this made a good point. (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...) He draws the distinction between censorship (stopping people from getting messages they want to recieve) and moderation (stopping people from getting messages they don't want to recieve). With those definitons censorship is bad and moderation is good. Mastodon isn't as simple as the model he imagines (simple click-boxes to select what kind of messages you want) but it does give you moderation (on your local instance) while still letting you avoid censorship (by moving instances if necessary).

msravi 4y ago
The only correct answer to that should be that you let people maintain their own filters (blocklists and allowlists) so they can see messages they want to receive and not see what they don't want to. Also, you might let people apply such community created lists, that they can subscribe to. Unfortunately, Mastodon rather than doing that, gives complete control to the server administrator to "moderate" their instance. The result is that you end up having isolated echo-chambers, with each server blocking all other servers that don't agree with their viewpoint.
- jonathanstrange 4y ago
  That solves almost no problem. Libel and slander will continue to affect you, there will continue to be toxic communities who instigate violence and violate local laws, and the feature encourages echo chambers and fragmentation. The worst system is when other people can see comments to your posts that you cannot see when you've blocked the commenter. It's the best system for smear campaigns and targeted character assassination. You'll never get a job and everybody hates you, and you'll have have no idea why.
jorgesborges 4y ago
It’s ironic that the top comment to that post was removed.