Casey NewtonEmbarrassed by how much I miss Twitter's quote-tweet feature on here. It was mostly used for evil but I tried to use it for good!!
Craig Newmark@caseynewton Yeah, I think I'd like quote-tweet, always used it to promote others' work, or, comedy
Rob MillerI haven't yet seen any actual data verifying that QTs caused more harm than good, or that removing them causes significant reduction in harassment and abuse. I'm 100% behind removing them even though I miss them personally if that's actually true, but so far I see a lot of folks asserting that to be so w/o any evidence.
If anyone who happens to see this has info one way or the other I'd love to hear about it, please and thank you!
John Wilson@nonsequitarian @craignewmark @caseynewton
Some groups (activists of all kinds) use this power to effect change and bring attention to people being abused by those in power.
Some groups of people are the regular recipients of quote tweet attcks and bad faith outrage at taking tweets out of context. I don’t have “data” (what would it even look like) but I’ve heard from plenty of trans folks who have suffered harm from a weaponized quote tweet dogpile
lakelady@crazybutable @nonsequitarian @craignewmark @caseynewton
My question is with stronger community engagement in moderation here in the fediverse would these attacks be more quickly reported and the bad actors removed from the community? From everything I've read about most of the fediverse this is how it should work.
@lakelady @nonsequitarian @craignewmark @caseynewton one terrible pattern I’m seeing is as mastodon gets more popular, there is nothing stopping dedicated stalkers from creating multiple accounts on multiple instances. Ban one, the next pops up.
“Right now they have about 10 active accounts they are spamming me with” is a quote I saw last week, and as each account is banned, another takes its place
It’s a structural problem I’m not sure how to solve
@crazybutable @lakelady @nonsequitarian @caseynewton good point, wondering if making them visible and asking for help might be the beginning of countermeasures. Need to think through...
@craignewmark @lakelady @nonsequitarian @caseynewton I like Block Party’s tools for Twitter, you can say “hide any tweets made by accounts created in the past x days”, and also “hide tweets posted by people with no profile photos”
Then the user has the ability to see their hidden tweets and decide when they want to do that, if they want to even look at them, or even delegate that work to a trusted friend or relative
@craignewmark @lakelady @nonsequitarian @caseynewton to be honest I don’t experience this abuse, so I can’t speak much to the effectiveness
On Twitter, making an account private temporarily would help, and so would setting up Block Party because it really acts as a filter before you see any of the crap that is coming in. https://blockpartyapp.com
You can auto block anyone who likes or retweets a tweet. (Mass attacks often start off with a viral quote tweet stirring up outrage)
@crazybutable @craignewmark @lakelady @caseynewton
Well, given that you'll see Mozilla on the list of Block Party funders (https://is.gd/AgLHtB), that Mozilla is starting to explore becoming an active presence in the Fediverse (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/?p=71185), and that there are a lot of people who work at Mozilla who care deeply about these issues (I'm one of them) there will be at least one constellation of actors thinking about how to solve these problems. But they're hard problems.
@crazybutable @nonsequitarian @craignewmark @caseynewton
I'm not techie enough to know this but could they be blocked by where they're originating? Not the country or ISP (maybe?) but maybe their IP?
@lakelady @nonsequitarian @craignewmark @caseynewton I dont know if instance admins have this level of control within mastodon itself. Certainly someone could create an ip blocklist that an instance admin could use to prevent accounts from being created on that instance, if only on an OS level. (who maintains the list and prunes it?)
I’m not an instance admin though so I don’t know what’s available built in.
Adam Burck@crazybutable @lakelady @nonsequitarian @craignewmark @caseynewton How about a flag set when a profile is banned with relevant information: IP address, reason for discipline, discipline status. Other #Mastodon instances can chose to take action or not (adding a warning symbol, removing or preventing a new/duplicate profile), so it’s not really a Blacklist. @stux
@adamburck @lakelady @nonsequitarian @craignewmark @caseynewton @stux that’s interesting but you’re going to have a mess of those lists spread across every instance in the fediverse, how do you keep malicious actors from spinning up instances and flooding the lists with targeted up bans?
I am not an expert. Just trying to think, how can the tools we are creating today be used for evil?
@crazybutable @lakelady @nonsequitarian @craignewmark @caseynewton @stux You’re raising an interesting but different question of how instances are vetted. IDK. @stux, can you explain?
@Gargron Can you help us out with this question?
@crazybutable @adamburck @lakelady @nonsequitarian @caseynewton @stux
My imagination is failing me regarding all this, but I'm interested, and am committed...
My imagination is failing me regarding all this, but I'm interested, and am committed...
@craignewmark @crazybutable @adamburck @lakelady @caseynewton @stux
Indeed. This is out of my depth, I'll defer to the people who have been thinking about and working on these problems for years. But I'll happily provide the support that I can.
@lakelady @nonsequitarian @craignewmark @caseynewton but certainly for average harassment and average unpleasantness, I think the tools are pretty good