If you're a Fediverse admin, this is a plea for you to defederate threads.net
#Threads is part of Meta/Facebook, and their track record on moderation is as horrific as it is possible to be:
The victims of prejudice, violence and genocide cannot "block" attackers that were radicalised online. Victims of bigotry and hatred cannot opt out of being beaten up or murdered.
Please defederate Threads/Meta/Facebook đ
@FediTips Iâm a bit skeptical of this interpretation. Is the assumption that Threads will have worse moderation than your average Mastodon instance? If so, I find that difficult to believe.
Or is it a problem of scale â to many posts to reasonably moderate? In that case the argument seems to be that no fediverse instance should ever be that large. Thatâs a fair position that Iâve heard before, but itâs far from being a consensus position among fediverse and Mastodon users and admins.
Facebook/Meta/Threads have a 20 year record of the worst possible decisions on moderation.
A leaked internal memo shows F/M/T knew at the highest level that their policies would get people killed and they would carry on doing these policies regardless:
They knew, they carried on, they've never changed. They need to be defederated.
Facebook Vice President Andrew âBozâ Bosworth said that âquestionable contact importing practices,â âsubtle language that helps people stay searchable,â and other growth techniques are justified by the companyâs connecting of people.
Another specific example, Zuckerberg famously said that Holocaust deniers should be allowed to post their lies. He called such denial an honest mistake.
This is directly quoted from Zuckerberg:
"I find (Holocaust denial) deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I donât believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I donât think that theyâre intentionally getting it wrong."
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587080/mark-zuckerberg-holocaust-denial-kara-swisher-interview
In a podcast interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recommitted to providing a platform for misinformation. Facebook will continue to offer a platform to Holocaust deniers, Infowars, and other publishers of hoaxes on the assumption that they are sincere in their beliefs, Zuckerberg said.
Facebook/Meta seems pretty consistently bad, unfortunately. The reports by human rights groups linked to in the original post are from 2021, 2022, 2023.
I think this is about more than one person. Even if Zuckerberg left, Facebook/Meta is structurally problematic as its business model is built around having many users with cheap bad moderation.
@kentenmakto @ocdtrekkie @FediTips @wonkeythemonkey
The odd thing is that billionaires seem to keep wanting for a lot of things, including more billions.
And they seem to fear so deeply anything getting in the way of keeping their billions and getting more billions that theyâre willing to let (or make) other people suffer all sorts of exploitation, harm, and death.
For the sake of people and planet, we really should do everything we can to stop creating billionaires. Theyâre dangerous.
@kentenmakto @ocdtrekkie @FediTips @wonkeythemonkey
Yep.
It is strange how wealth addiction seems to cause widespread suffering for others, on a scale far greater than any other addiction.
Many of us less affluent still suffer from consumptionism / consumerism and the addictive nature of spending. And weâre in this bind where our political-economic system has been structured so that we almost all need to spend to survive, and sell our labour to be able to spend.
Quite a predicament.
@ocdtrekkie @FediTips @wonkeythemonkey He hasn't. Facebook's *more* tolerant of that kind of thing than it was six years ago, and is generally extremely comfortable with users making increasingly-explicit calls for violence, as long as those calls are aimed at minorities of some sort. Basically nothing violates "Community Standards" anymore.
No other instance with their moderation policies and practices would be allowed to even briefly interact with the overwhelming majority of Mastodon.
âIt is perhaps the only area where the metrics tell the true story as far as weâre concernedâ
Is a great example of turning metrics into the goal and ignoring - and actively discounting - anything in the wider environment.
If the metric youâre aiming for with your product / service / policy allows you to ignore the fact that the product contributes even indirectly to deaths, youâre almost definitely measuring the wrong thing eh?
@wonkeythemonkey âThe lack of content moderation on Threads has already allowed misinformation to thrive, including false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, fake news about gender-affirming care, and Covid-19 vaccines. Users have also posted racist, antisemitic, and anti-immigration comments and videos on threads, including one of Fuentes using the N-wordâ
That was last July: https://news.yahoo.com/meta-told-hand-over-threads-191000848.html
@wonkeythemonkey @FediTips I would like to point out that we are not prejudicially against federation with Threads, even if we have decided to protect our users by silencing Threads on our Mastodon instances and "obscuring" it with the function provided in Friendica.
However, for anyone who has tried these two worlds, it is quite clear that Big Tech's moderation is on average worse than that of any somewhat structured Mastodon or Friendica instance.
See: techpolicy.press/first-transpaâŚ
Now beyond Facebook's serious responsibilities with the Rohingya or in Ethiopia, or in the exploitation of Kenyan moderators, Meta manages to combat only a part of the problematic contents thanks to automatic systems subject to an impressive amount of false positives. Meta does not intervene in the most toxic arguments, he does not stop bullying or veiled threats; instead, it favors the most problematic conversations because they are the ones that attract the average user for the longest time, providing the greatest amount of data and reactions in favor of advertisers.
Then, of course, from the point of view of a white supremacist or a homophobe, Mastodon moderation is a disgusting woke den where there is no free speech... But honestly, I don't make my pleas available to those who think like this... đ
Tech Policy Press is a nonprofit media and community venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. We publish opinion and analysis.
It is a problem of priorities, not of scale. Facebook (not Threads) *certainly* has worse moderation than the average Mastodon instance, as you can trivially find if you wander around a bit.
There's a reason that it's so famous for radicalising elderly relatives. And spreading Covid misinformation. And election misinformation. And ivermectin misinformation.
Will Threads be better? No clue, but the odds don't look good.
@wonkeythemonkey @FediTips it should become consensus. No huge megacorporation instances on the fediverse.
Let's keep the fediverse non-dystopian!
@FediTips I got some really good feedback on this question, so thanks to everyone! In case anyone is still reading this, a clarification:
I do not trust Meta to do good moderation. But I also donât trust most instances to do good moderation. The difference between Meta and any average neo libertarian instance admin is one of scale and visibility. If allowing Meta to federate will destroy the fediverse, maybe it was always doomed.
Shameless plug on how to defederate threads.net
https://fedi.tips/how-to-defederate-fediblock-a-server-on-mastodon/
Users cant defederate, but can block instances. How do users "PRE block" these instances?
Users can't really block instances unfortunately. All that the user level domain block really does is hide stuff from that you. The bigoted material can still mislead/radicalise other people on your server.
The blocking needs to be done by the server admins for it to have a protective effect.
I dont want to accidentally boost a post from an instance that should be GONE.
Might, but feeling like defending a good thing.
@gunchleoc @tyrannosaurusgirl @FediTips
Its not a link.
@kevinrns Maybe because my server is already blocking. Copy/paste it into your search box to see if the profile comes up.
@gunchleoc @tyrannosaurusgirl @FediTips
The server I request mastodon from doesnt see the link
@kevinrns @gunchleoc @FediTips
.scot has threads suspended, that's why it didn't convert to a link. But you should be able to copy and paste it into search.
Ah fair enough, that's a good point!
For user-level blocks, you have to find an account that belongs to that server, go to its profile, click on ⯠and then select "Block domain".
Because it requires finding the account, it can't be done pre-emptively at user level. However the admin can block any server pre-emptively by just adding its domain name to the server's suspension list.
Individual users can block a domain without having a post from that domain. It involves creating a text csv file of the domains to be blocked, then uploading that file to the "Domain Blocking List" option on one's preferences->imports page. It's not hard, though the process is a bit clumsy.
Detailed instructions about halfway down this article: https://medium.com/@geofbard/how-to-block-server-domains-in-mastodon-899b24f8fb6e
Problem: Organized troll brigades are harassing outspoken people on Mastodon. If you ever express support for marginalized communities, you are likely to attract annoying DMs and replies â at best, aâŚ
@hybridhavoc @FediTips @kevinrns
I see from your posts you are picking nits with many over the blocking of threads.net.
<PLONK>
@FediTips
I'm sorry, I'm having trouble following your reasoning here.
Your complaint is that a user blocking an instance still leaves posts from that instance visible to other users? How else would you possibly expect that to work?
I'm not complaining!
I'm saying that in this situation (where radicalisation is getting people killed) the main action has to be taken at the instance level, in order to prevent radicalisation.
Having said that, Kevin Russell responded with the valid point that they wanted to avoid boosting Threads posts by accident so I did a reply with info on how to block domains at user level.
Ah okay, that needs a bit more detail yes.
When a user blocks a domain on Mastodon, it hides that domain's posts from the user, but it doesn't hide that user's posts from the domain.
That's what I mean by it not really being a block.
This is different to instance-level defederation which is more like a proper two-directional block.
Just to give a real world example, when FediTips was on another person's server and I blocked domains at user level, I'd still see people from those domains showing up in my replies when I logged out. But I didn't see them when I was logged in, because my user-level domain "block" hid them from me.
When I moved to my own instance, I was able to do a proper instance level block and no longer had replies from those domains even when logged out.
@FediTips @hybridhavoc so if I understand correctly:
user level block == one way
instance level block == both ways
Roughly. It gets complicated with federation because there are also things like server settings (especially "authorized fetch") that have a big effect.
@loewe @FediTips I disagree and believe that we should not embrace #Facebook (or #Meta) as they continue to destroy the internet and the world around us.
Can you honestly say that #Fuckbook has made the world a better place???
#Fakebook, #Wastebook, or whatever you want to call should not be permitted to destroy the #Fediverse with their #Threads facade!
@redking well, one of the best things about the #Fediverse is the user which doesn't like their server admin blocking the #Fedbook sponsored #Threads can #SelfHost a server to federate with #Fakebook.
The Fediverse gives US ALL the power that ALL of these #destructive #WalledGarden & #Centralized #BigTech #SurveillanceCapitalist corporations would never want you to have.
#ThreadsIsBiggestFacade #Wastebook #Facebook #FacebookDestroyedTheInternet #FacebookDestroyedTheWorld
@Killab33z_OG @loewe @FediTips and am all for that, thats why I think the fediverse is superior to any other social media but I think it's good manners to at least tell your users you are now going to block an instance and let them give their feedback.
If we do not have a good communication channel user/admin we are going to end up with one person instances all over the place.
If an admin knows that there is extreme hate being spread on their instance, and they decide to allow that hate to spread, surely they should be defederated?
This is a consistent pattern of behaviour by Meta/Facebook right at the top:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587080/mark-zuckerberg-holocaust-denial-kara-swisher-interview
In a podcast interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recommitted to providing a platform for misinformation. Facebook will continue to offer a platform to Holocaust deniers, Infowars, and other publishers of hoaxes on the assumption that they are sincere in their beliefs, Zuckerberg said.
"those that donât like it can defederate"
Fedi.Tips doesn't like it, as is asking like-minded admins to defederate...
"if you donât like your admins decision, change instances or start your own."
...and users who want to remain federated to Threads can find servers with like-minded admins.
How is Fedi.Tips' ask different from "the correct organic approach" that you pitch?
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