Сферический ВК в вакуумеThere were two notable moderation incidents on mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the past 24 hours that I would like to address. In the first, a post was wrongfully removed due to a report claiming it contained a dogwhistle, and in the second, a person was wrongfully suspended due to a report claiming it's an impersonator. Both were undone and apologies issued.
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@Gargron At least all this happened after non-destructive mod actions were available.  @Gargron will further registrations on this server be closed forever, or is there a known time frame? @Gargron Please pass on my thanks to everyone, this shared space is such a pleasure. Thanks for everything you all do @Gargron Thank you for all the work you’re doing! Must be hard, suddenly being in this situation under the spotlight, with all the attention and expectations. Hope you also get some rest! 🫰 @Gargron Thank you very much. I really like this social network. It is really easy and comfortable to create content here. Once again, thank you very much for Mastodon, have a nice day and prosperity. @Gargron We need to make sure these false positives stop happening with such troubling frequency to underrepresented folks. @Gargron Thanks for the update - I can see an opportunity for some (hopefully foundation-sponsored) training for all instance admins/mods down the road - the Commons needs standards, and standards take time, effort and money to implement. Good luck with your work. @Gargron You haven’t reversed the massive dent in the trust and trauma for those on the receiving end however. Apologies are important, but they wash over quickly. Where is the evidence that they will learn, and that similar mistakes won’t be made. “Moderator actions can be appealed & reversed” is hardly a guarantee of safety. Thank you for your honesty. This sort of transparency is not something we would get on Twitter or Facebook. The moderators are human, and thus can make mistakes. My hope we we can all learn to be better, so that these sorts of mistakes, which inevitably hit minorities hardest, don't happen again. @Gargron I know you have a lot on your plate right now, and if anything this would be way down on the list, but have you considered something like Polis for community driven moderation? It seems to *possibly* have the potential of being a real benefit to society. https://compdemocracy.org/Polis/ I should note this is what the bird apps "Community Notes" is based on, but there's no affiliation. @Gargron With the size of the instances now, have you considered doing an annual moderation and privacy report? I think it would be helpful to understand the moderation workload, what type of content is being removed, what the threat landscape looks like, how many state actor data legal requests were complied/denied, filtering in various state jurisdictions, etc. @polymerwitch @Gargron 💯 cosigned on this. Transparency reports are increasingly the baseline for tech companies operating within a human rights commitment to demonstrate their trustworthiness to users, governments, and civil society organizations and advocates. @Gargron @Gargron Should we be worried about how the UKs Online Safety Bill and the US Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) could affect mastodon and moderation on the site if they were to pass? @Gargron Fair enough. But getting this right - especially for people who routinely face so much exclusion and erasure - is the test of whether this decentralized model can really support democratic discourse for a large, diverse set of communities. |
The moderation team is bigger than ever and so is the amount of reports we have to process. We're dealing with unprecedented growth despite having closed registrations on these servers weeks ago. Some false positives are unavoidable, but we understand these mistakes are upsetting and unacceptable, and we are trying to do better. Luckily all moderator actions can be appealed and reversed.