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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.
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177 comments
@rmbles @Gargron while it’s normal to want transparency regarding moderation policy, “how many” is a detail that would allow monkeywrenchers to plan abuse of the report system and harassment or moderators. We should expect policy transparency and for admins to acknowledge mistakes, but details won’t help us know if the right thing is being done. (Exception: the answer “not enough moderators” is almost always true) @PennyOaken @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? @hllizi I just like the easy to remember name of this server, and since I am already here, I'd like to add any future accounts to the same instance. I have seen it today where a Dutch greens politician was harrased bij 6 accounts from mastodon.social The thread here https://mstdn.social/@JesseKlaver/109376653625729885 These are well know Twitter trolls, racists, extreme right-wing. The accounts are @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. @Gargron @mikebabcock “White men doing their best”: fills you with so much confidence. Especially when they reply out of turn. @i_jayas @mikebabcock now might be a good time to educate yourself instead of asking someone else to do the work for you. @cooplogic @i_jayas The difference from centralized systems is that nobody forces you to use this specific website. Run literally your own instance. Then the only thing that can happen to you is that people block you. Shrug. @yacc143 @i_jayas @Gargron @mikebabcock That’s too late. Black folks are going to the big instances because that’s where a lot of people go, and they are getting alienated. We can’t expect new users to know what instances are the “good” ones. @richburroughs I have a basic life philosophy of fixing things I can fix, instead of the ones I can't: @mikebabcock I was replying to the person who said that Black folks should just make their own server. I hope I don’t have to explain to people what a problematic message that is. I don’t know specifically what needs to be done to improve the moderation. I don’t know enough about what’s happening to say. @mikebabcock What I can tell you is that Black folks are seeing these misfires and some don’t want to come near the platform. I have a lot of Black friends I follow on Twitter and very few of them have come to Mastadon. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. @yacc143 most of us can’t run our own instance. I’m not sure that suggesting that it’s the job of the oppressed to fix the problems is the best stance here. @i_jayas Firstly, why do you presume that the moderation team is white? Germany is more diverse than you might think. Secondly, trying to silence @mikebabcock is the exact thing you are criticising @Gargron of doing. This is an open platform and everyone may participate, so long as they do not post hate speech. Prejudice and racism is not a one-way street. @mikebabcock@floss.social @GlowingLantern @Gargron Go and read about the post that was removed from mastodon[dot]social. If you have, and still don’t understand, you are part of the problem. @i_jayas @Gargron Accountability and having a positive, articulable, and enactable plan for improvement (to counter & prevent future issues) is an important skill for leading any team, especially a team that impacts trust & safety. @leopardboy Matt, you are the 142792th man to slide into my mentions to tell me that. Well done. Next. @leopardboy so we shouldn't demand accountability from moderators? So if my city is full of crime, I shouldn't call out the police chief. I should just move to a new city, and lose my history? Is that what you are saying? @flpresets Feel free to hold them accountable, but if you're claiming to be hurt by their behavior, then why would you stay? Because of your history? I've moved instances a few times since I started on Mastondon back in April of this year, and my old accounts are still archived and viewable on the old instances. I was also able to download my full archive each time, so my history has never been lost. There's a reason Mastodon has a migration feature, and it is for situations like this. @leopardboy Do you really not see the problem with your thinking here? That if mods/police act inappropriately, then those affected must flee them? Instead of staying and fixing their community? That's your suggestion? Please think long and hard about why some could be offended by this. Really, think. @flpresets Oh, good lord, please let me clarify that I'm not talking about the police. You brought that up in your poor analogy at justifying why you should hold moderators accountable. Mods are not the same thing as police. Moving Mastodon instances is not the same thing as moving to a new city. @tristen Thanks for asking. @PennyOaken sums this up very well. Questions need to be asked on whether there is enough cultural intelligence amongst those moderating the server. For example, are they all middle class cishet white men who cannot distinguish a far-right dog whistle from a the experiences of socially marginalised people. If the answer is “no”, what kind of people need to be recruited into these teams to make them more robust? @i_jayas So a more diverse moderation team. I can get behind this, but it won't guarantee that mistakes won't happen. With moderation and site management, there should also be different voices/lives, I agree. @tristen It’s a real start; and I can guarantee that a team with better social intelligence do helluva lot better than hollow apologies. I, like you, want this site to succeed. However the string of complaints relating to racism is just too troubling. It’s a pattern. That’s why I don’t think an apology and call for patience is good enough. @i_jayas @tristen Not only did he personally apologize, the bans were reversed and he even explained why those things happened. This is the largest instance in mastodon, and also the most outspoken from what I can tell, it's completely valid for moderators to make mistakes. 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. Also, thank goodness the mods are actually human! 😂 I've seen many decent people lose their YouTube channels and audiences for reasons unknown, with zero explanations. The algorithm is judge, jury, and executioner. @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. "Luckily all moderator actions can be appealed and reversed." The police investigated themselves and found their actions justified. There are apparently many server admins who now refuse to connect to mastodon.social; why is that? @devinyoung ... except here the 'police' investigated themselves and found their actions unjustified. @Gargron the Reddit moderation model seems to scale. In Mastodon there doesn't seem to be as rigid topical structure to content, but I guess some similar topical division could be achieved by divvying up moderation by hashtags or groups of hashtags. Then you could have something like { * } for moderating any content, or any other combination. E.g. { science, astrophysics, aww, caturday }, { feminism, toxicmasculinity }. Good luck to whomever would be moderating the latter. 😅 @lightrush @Gargron or we can encourage instances to stay medium-small, so moderation duties will be distributed and (de)federation mechanisms can be applied meaningfully. @Gargron I suppose there's always a problem with dog whistle interpretation, since I imagine that offence can be given by accident. When that happens I assume you give a time frame for the offender to respond and if they're an infrequent poster they're more likely to get caught out? I'm making a lot of assumptions here since I've never moderated or been moderated, except in one place where tg:// links were verboten and I had no idea. Hope that's not the case here or that was a mistake :) @Gargron I think you’re doing great under the circumstances, from what I’ve seen so far. Keep up the good work. It’ll all come together. 👍 @Gargron Glad to hear it! Hopefully more budget is allocated for moderation now that funding for Mastodon has increased 😉 @Gargron Great work at a very difficult moment in our history. One problem for this instance specifically is that it is a natural attractant for nubies. It is mastodon.social, after all, so it looks like it is Mastodon for people used to the monolithic services. Another issue is finding the right instance to join. I try to go through the list sometimes, and it is overwhelming. A curated list organized by subject would be very helpful. @BertL @Gargron I think one of the problems is that the number of instances has increased a lot, so it could be out-of-date always? Though there’s obviously enough tech brains on here to work on that? Also - just a newb - I’m baffled by a lot of this conversation? Given what I’ve read about the history of the Fediverse and the people that built it. @Gargron How are moderators trained to do this work? What is the diversity of the moderation team like? If it is mostly white, please hire more BIPOC people onto the team. @Gargron You and your team are doing a terrific job dealing with the flood of new people. @Gargron Now's the time, if you haven't already, to hire a moderation firm and keep the identity of the moderation staff private. Otherwise it's just pressure campaign after pressure campaign on the poor folks. I can recommend some good firms. We're trying to spread the load. However, it's not easy! Anyone know who runs joinmastodon.org? Currently showing 61 servers -- half of which are closed. There are thousands of severs. It's the default place new users land and they have very limited choice. Most #newbies don't Google for instances as they don't always understand, so they just pick one from this very limited list. @Gargron@mastodon.social Even in addressing this issue you have missed the most important aspect of this whole thing. It might be time to invest in some diversity training to learn why these two incidents are getting the attention and causing the level of fallout you are seeing. @Gargron have you or your moderation team reached out to the instances saying they plan to defederate from you soon, and worked out what needs to happen to stop that? I worry that something like this child spiral out of control and fracture the mastodon part of the fediverse. @APBBlue I hear you. I only jumped as fast as I did because I'd decided to move for other reasons before this. The process is easy, but choosing the new instance isn't. And you can't bring your old toots over. Which is annoying. @Gargron thank you so much for all the great work you are doing to provide a safe and engaging space #connectionsmatter and so does #languageofsafety @Gargron moderation can be very difficult, there will be mistakes but it's fixing them that counts! All the mods are doing a great job under an unprecedented flood of toots. You've all put in incredible effort and it shows 🙂 @Gargron Thanks for all your effort. Moderation is complex even with companies with billions of dollars. Errors are bound to happen. "false positives" Can you elaborate ? Also: Is there a (Silly me thinks of "5 (expirative) red crosses on the profile" before being near acc termination) I dislike unneccesary drama. @Gargron You folks are awesome and I so appreciate all your hard work. Fantastic to have found a new social home! @Gargron I don’t plan on needing the information but the suspended account: how did the contact you to appeal? Can you make appeals clear? @Gargron hello Eugen I don’t appear to have the CW feature on my iPhone which is the only device I have to access Mastodon? Would you kindly advise please? @Gargron How many mods are American vs. European? Asking because US norms of anti-racism (~nobody calls it anti-fascism there) differ from ours a bit, and the case I saw of the Asian woman who complained of having to read books by white men would be an obvious no-violation-of-TOS case to an American anti-racist, but a white European may be unfamiliar with nonwhite anti-racist norms (and let's face it, Berlin Antifa spaces are very white - I don't remember seeing POC at B-Lage, Lovelite, etc.). @Gargron I notice most of the replies here are supportive, but I have to say trying to do better isn't going to cut it if moderators aren't up to the job. A lot of newcomers think of these instances as being more official; expectations should be higher. I don't see any acknowledgement that you may have a real moderation problem here, and that changes will be made. I hope some deeper reflection and real changes are implemented before these instances are allowed to grow any larger. @Gargron Constructive criticism of moderation process (to help improve): Any moderation action that will result in the suspension of a user account should be subject to a “two-person” approval - that two people with mod privileges approve a suspension. I've been on Mastodon for more than a week. In that time, I haven't needed to block or report anyone. I haven't even felt a slight urge to do it. @Gargron Transparency and appeals being possible is a huge step forwards compared to say Twitter. Plus, worst-case scenario, you can join another server if the process goes sideways somehow. I feel like federated services will be much like democracy, terrible, but far less terrible than the other things we tried. @Gargron No system is perfect, nobody is infallible. Your team has had a lot to absorb. I have been assuming that you and they are operating in good faith and I will continue to assume that. Appreciate hearing from you on the challenges and efforts to address them. @Gargron Is there a plan to address say 1 billion users (+bots) ? How is it supposed to work on volunteers alone. Either you have 10k users/instance (manageable by a small team of volunteers) but 100k instances, so an unmoderatable amount of links+debates to designate "good/bad" instances, or 1k instances of 1m unmoderatable users. Do some have perspectives about that ? @Gargron I know it wouldn’t really help with the workload, but would it be possible to include a second set of eyes prior to suspensions? Maybe, make the offending post invisible on the first mod action, and throw the account into a pre-suspension queue that can be looked at on more than just the singular post? Is there a trend? Implementing a dispute process, that is more transparent than a “you’ve been suspended” screen? |
@Gargron If you say so.