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I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees. I understand it can be p

I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees. I understand it can be particular bad for women and minority journalists, because some people will make sexualised or sexists and racist comments in response to an article the truth of which they cannot contest, but the existence of which they abhor - in order to discourage such journalists from writing on this topic. Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that the owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come from that instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of external instances is to ignore the whole thing. That would mean a BBC journalist could neither hear legitimate criticism from positive participants, nor harassment from negative participants. And anyone on that second host would continue to see the harassment, and it might simply have its chilling effect on the next generation. I think the interest of journalism companies in having their own instance would only be met if they could moderate replies and mentions no matter where they're from. In such a world, perhaps the user could say, "Please ignore moderation from these instances" - so that you could continue to see a post on a third-party instance excluded by the BBC if you didn't trust their moderation. Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate extensively. It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft tend to look askance at any email not sent from the servers of one of them. (If the trusted third party instances allow federation, it might be much more interactive than email is.) A final possibility would be that the BBC and other major content producers would treat Mastodon as "write-only", in much the same way that Reddit links to content and people discuss it, but generally the major media companies ignore it.

blowski 4y ago
> I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees That's certainly one issue, but there are many others. Owning your own Mastodon server should make it easier to find a solution compared to having to use Twitter's tools. > It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft There are more trusted email servers than just those two. Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind. Albeit that's not the perfectly distributed model, I would rather an oligopoly like that than just Twitter. Highlighting ways in which Mastodon is not utopia isn't a valid reason to stick with what we've got.
- nirimda 4y ago
  My comment was not highlighting ways in which Mastodon isn't a utopia and it certainly wasn't an argument to stick with what we've got. It is dismaying to think someone might have read it that way. I was trying to make some constructive criticism and analysing possible usecases and possible consequences, while very clearly requesting more information about whether the possible usecases are fulfilled yet or not. > There are more trusted email servers than just those two. Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind. My comment completely survives this pedantry. In fact, I can hardly think of any way whatsoever that such pedantry weakens my argument in any degree, or could be thought to speak to any of my concerns.
ekidd 4y ago
> Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that the owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come from that instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of external instances is to ignore the whole thing. Mastodon has a lot of tools for muting and ignoring, both at the account and at the instance level. Here are the admin-level tools: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/ Right now, it looks like admins can "suspend" or "silence" external instances as a whole, but not individual users. "Silence" is interesting, because it's essentially a "soft ban": Users from that server will only appear to local users who follow them, if understand correctly. It's essentially, "Mostly we don't want to hear from @wretchedhiveofscumandvillany.example.com, but some of our users want to follow specific people from there, and that's cool." > Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate extensively. This is already true to a certain extent. It appears that instances that won't moderate especially abusive users may gradually be defederated from other servers (or at least silenced). And of course, individual users can also ignore entire instances.
- nirimda 4y ago
  Thanks; the tools are more extensive than I had understood. Silence, as you note, is very useful. The tools that are provided should allow them to protect their employees' to about the extent that they are protected on Twitter, while allowing about the same degree of interaction that available on Twitter. It seems that the main issue that is missing is third party moderation, to allow third parties on other instances to opt into their moderation without actually having accounts on their instances. To the extent that users can be trusted to sign up on decent instances, it's probably no worse off than current. Whether the media companies see it that way, of course, is a different question.
supportlocal4h 4y ago
A company like the BBC can post content to their own website completely under their own control. They can build their own platform that completely controls commenting. They can pay a large staff to build and maintain that platform exactly as they see fit. So why do they need Twitter? Seriously, what is the value of Twitter for them? It isn't the same as for the masses who need somebody else to build and maintain all that infrastructure. For entities capable of running their own networks, Twitter and TikTok and all the other "social media" serve a different function. Indeed, when you are not only capable of running your own datacenters but actually do run them and operate your own media network, but still include Instagram as a core component of your business strategy, it is because it provides a value you aren't realizing from everything within your own datacenter.
- nirimda 4y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the way your post relates to mine. Are you genuinely asking why BBC needs Twitter and Instagram? The last sentence makes it sound like you have your own hypothesis but you're withholding it. In any case, I disclaim any notion that "need" is a relevant verb here. They want to be on these platforms, and their readers want to be on these platforms, and there's no doubt some interrelation between their desire and their readers' desire. I don't think any organisation is ever fully rational, even an organisation the size of the BBC. On the other hand, I think the journalists themselves provide a lot of pressure for themselves to be on these platforms. Ultimately they're where it seems to make sense to be. It would harder to not be where the eyeballs are, than it is to be there. It's like the old saying - no one was ever fired for choosing IBM.
sinity 4y ago
> I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees. They certainly don't want the responsibility of moderating themselves. That's why comment sections disappeared, probably. There's a nice theory about that in: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread... "We Need To Have A National Conversation About Why We Can No Longer Have A National Conversation" > It’s the story of everyone who’s tried to host a space for political discussion on the Internet. Take the New York Times, in particular their article 'Why No Comments? It’s A Matter Of Resources'. Translated from corporate-speak, it basically says that unmoderated comment sections had too many “trolls”, so they decided to switch to moderated comment sections only, but they don’t have enough resources to moderate any controversial articles, so commenting on controversial articles is banned. > And it’s not just the New York Times. In the past five years, CNN, NPR, The Atlantic, Vice, Bloomberg, Motherboard, and almost every other major news source has closed their comments – usually accompanied by weird corporate-speak about how “because we really value conversations, we are closing our comment section forever effective immediately”. > This confused me until I had my own experience with the Culture War thread. > The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did. > But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all. > Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons. > Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. Each of these views has, at times, won over entire cultures so completely that disagreeing with them then was as unthinkable as agreeing with them is today. I disagree with most of them but don’t want to be too harsh on any of them. Reasoning correctly about these things is excruciatingly hard, trusting consensus opinion would have led you horrifyingly wrong throughout most of the past, and other options, if they exist, are obscure and full of pitfalls. > I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas. But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections. > The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time. > “So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!” > No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action. > Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.

blowski 4y ago

> I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees That's certainly one issue, but there are many others. Owning your own Mastodon server should make it easier to find a solution compared to having to use Twitter's tools. > It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft There are more trusted email servers than just those two. Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind. Albeit that's not the perfectly distributed model, I would rather an oligopoly like that than just Twitter. Highlighting ways in which Mastodon is not utopia isn't a valid reason to stick with what we've got.

nirimda 4y ago
My comment was not highlighting ways in which Mastodon isn't a utopia and it certainly wasn't an argument to stick with what we've got. It is dismaying to think someone might have read it that way. I was trying to make some constructive criticism and analysing possible usecases and possible consequences, while very clearly requesting more information about whether the possible usecases are fulfilled yet or not. > There are more trusted email servers than just those two. Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind. My comment completely survives this pedantry. In fact, I can hardly think of any way whatsoever that such pedantry weakens my argument in any degree, or could be thought to speak to any of my concerns.

ekidd 4y ago

> Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that the owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come from that instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of external instances is to ignore the whole thing. Mastodon has a lot of tools for muting and ignoring, both at the account and at the instance level. Here are the admin-level tools: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/ Right now, it looks like admins can "suspend" or "silence" external instances as a whole, but not individual users. "Silence" is interesting, because it's essentially a "soft ban": Users from that server will only appear to local users who follow them, if understand correctly. It's essentially, "Mostly we don't want to hear from @wretchedhiveofscumandvillany.example.com, but some of our users want to follow specific people from there, and that's cool." > Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate extensively. This is already true to a certain extent. It appears that instances that won't moderate especially abusive users may gradually be defederated from other servers (or at least silenced). And of course, individual users can also ignore entire instances.

nirimda 4y ago
Thanks; the tools are more extensive than I had understood. Silence, as you note, is very useful. The tools that are provided should allow them to protect their employees' to about the extent that they are protected on Twitter, while allowing about the same degree of interaction that available on Twitter. It seems that the main issue that is missing is third party moderation, to allow third parties on other instances to opt into their moderation without actually having accounts on their instances. To the extent that users can be trusted to sign up on decent instances, it's probably no worse off than current. Whether the media companies see it that way, of course, is a different question.

supportlocal4h 4y ago

A company like the BBC can post content to their own website completely under their own control. They can build their own platform that completely controls commenting. They can pay a large staff to build and maintain that platform exactly as they see fit. So why do they need Twitter? Seriously, what is the value of Twitter for them? It isn't the same as for the masses who need somebody else to build and maintain all that infrastructure. For entities capable of running their own networks, Twitter and TikTok and all the other "social media" serve a different function. Indeed, when you are not only capable of running your own datacenters but actually do run them and operate your own media network, but still include Instagram as a core component of your business strategy, it is because it provides a value you aren't realizing from everything within your own datacenter.

nirimda 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand the way your post relates to mine. Are you genuinely asking why BBC needs Twitter and Instagram? The last sentence makes it sound like you have your own hypothesis but you're withholding it. In any case, I disclaim any notion that "need" is a relevant verb here. They want to be on these platforms, and their readers want to be on these platforms, and there's no doubt some interrelation between their desire and their readers' desire. I don't think any organisation is ever fully rational, even an organisation the size of the BBC. On the other hand, I think the journalists themselves provide a lot of pressure for themselves to be on these platforms. Ultimately they're where it seems to make sense to be. It would harder to not be where the eyeballs are, than it is to be there. It's like the old saying - no one was ever fired for choosing IBM.

sinity 4y ago

> I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees. They certainly don't want the responsibility of moderating themselves. That's why comment sections disappeared, probably. There's a nice theory about that in: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread... "We Need To Have A National Conversation About Why We Can No Longer Have A National Conversation" > It’s the story of everyone who’s tried to host a space for political discussion on the Internet. Take the New York Times, in particular their article 'Why No Comments? It’s A Matter Of Resources'. Translated from corporate-speak, it basically says that unmoderated comment sections had too many “trolls”, so they decided to switch to moderated comment sections only, but they don’t have enough resources to moderate any controversial articles, so commenting on controversial articles is banned. > And it’s not just the New York Times. In the past five years, CNN, NPR, The Atlantic, Vice, Bloomberg, Motherboard, and almost every other major news source has closed their comments – usually accompanied by weird corporate-speak about how “because we really value conversations, we are closing our comment section forever effective immediately”. > This confused me until I had my own experience with the Culture War thread. > The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did. > But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all. > Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons. > Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. Each of these views has, at times, won over entire cultures so completely that disagreeing with them then was as unthinkable as agreeing with them is today. I disagree with most of them but don’t want to be too harsh on any of them. Reasoning correctly about these things is excruciatingly hard, trusting consensus opinion would have led you horrifyingly wrong throughout most of the past, and other options, if they exist, are obscure and full of pitfalls. > I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas. But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections. > The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time. > “So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!” > No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action. > Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.