🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)Nov 6

Why reactive moderation isn't going to cut it, aka, "The Sucker-punch Problem".

Imagine you invite your friend—let's call him Mark—to a club with you. It's open-door, which is cool, because you like when a lot of folx show up. Sure, it might get a little rowdy, but they have a bouncer, and you've never seen things getting out of hand.

So, you're busy dancing when a new guy walks in wearing a "I Hate Mark" shirt and promptly sucker-punches Mark. You didn't see it happen, but Mark is upset and tells the bouncer, who kicks the guy out.

A few minutes later, the same guy walks back in and sucker-punches Mark again. Same result. Some people in the club say they'll tell the bouncer if they see him come in again.

Mark wants to leave, but you tell him it's not that bad—after all, you've never been punched, and you didn't see Mark get punched, so maybe he's just being sensitive.

A different guy walks in wearing a "I Plan On Punching Mark" shirt. No one tells the bouncer, because they've never seen *this* guy punch Mark.

He sucker-punches Mark. At this point, Mark is pissed and yelling about being punched.

The club members talk about putting up a "No Punching Mark" sign, but the owner is worried it'll hurt his club's growth.

Another Mark in the club proposes they turn away anyone wearing an anti-Mark shirt or espousing anti-Mark rhetoric at the door, but this gets shot down for the same reason as the sign idea—then someone sucker-punches him.

By the end of the night, your friend Mark is beat to fuck and says he'll never come to this club again. In fact, he's going to tell anyone named Mark to stay clear of this place.

The next time you go to the club, half the folx there are wearing "I Kill Marks" shirts, but there aren't any Marks there, so it doesn't come up.

I've been sucker-punched every day, for the last three days in a row by some of the most vile hate-speech and imagery. The accounts are using open registration servers and signing up with variations on the username "heilhitler1488". I fully expect it'll continue as long as we have open registration servers.

And no, username pattern blocking alone won't fix this, it'll help a little, but mostly it'll just make them wear a different shirt while they sucker-punch us.

#OpenRegistrationHurts

CyberGwenNov 7
Show threadMartin Seeger

@alice I once was working with a friend on how to design a social network and from that discussion resulted Martin's Third Law:

If anything permits the harassment of people, that will become its dominant use case.

This is valid practically for all tech. You could already observe some shit in the UseNet newsgroups in the early 90s.

If you design social networks, you have to do adversial thinking: if someone wants to harm someone else, how can that person use the technology to do that. It would be useful to do wargaming like exercises to learn how resilient your product is.

Commercial social media does this, but only so far that they look how someone could use the technology to hurt them.

Nov 6 at 11:25amWeb
Show threadTobin BakerNov 7
@masek @alice I was recently trawling through 90s Usenet and modern social media could not be more toxic.
Show threadMartin SeegerNov 7
@tobinbaker @alice Yeah, but we didn’t notice it back then because we were stupid young men 😳
Show threadBilly SmithJan 22

@masek @tobinbaker @alice

You didn't notice it, as most internet access was through University networks, and they had very strict moderation policies, as not moderating could mean that the whole University would get banned from the Internet.

Show threadMartin SeegerJan 23
@BillySmith @tobinbaker @alice We came online through a computer club as our university was rather „backwards“. That made us build the first public (meaning for everyone who was interested) internet access in Germany and from that my career sprang up 😁.