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The social impacts of moderation & censorship


Dr. Percy reshared this.

in reply to Rokosun

in reply to Tio

in reply to Rokosun

Hold on, if you limit your access to only your friends, it means your friends make your post/profile discoverable, right? So you didn't choose your friends well. That aside, a technical solution is again reasonable here: set up so only your friends can interact with your post. So you won't see any comments from anyone that is not your friend. Right? This should be default.

But again I do not see any argument that cannot be fixed with a technical solution. And thus, no more debates or "what ifs" 😀
in reply to Tio

@Tio
Yes, having more control over who can see your posts can be very useful if you're worried about things like online bullying, I never thought of it before.

On Mastodon you can make it so that only your followers can see your posts, Friendica also has this option but they also allow more granular controls over it, so if you only want a specific group of people to see the post then you could do that. I haven't tested this feature, so I don't know how well it works across different platforms, but Friendica does allow you to use more privacy controls.
@Cleo of Topless Topics
in reply to Rokosun

Yeah just harden these settings as admin. So that no one can ever contact you or interact with your posts, unless you allow that. Make profile profiles 😀 - Strict, Moderate, Lose 😀 - in any regards, I see technical solutions to this that are far better than relying on human moderators to take care of you, and in the process burning bridges between instances.
in reply to Rokosun

in reply to Bill Statler

in reply to Tio

@Tio @Bill Statler
I agree that's why the best is to have privacy-oriented defaults.
I feel like this is an important point, so I just edited my post to add it.
I think for most users this is wildly confusing and something they won't put up with. I can, but most won't probably. And why create such a waste of duplicated accounts when there is no need for it. Simply stop blocking instances at admin level. Let's find better solutions like I exemplified in a comment above.
Yes, this is why I asked people if they'll be willing to switch instances for me. While its technically possible to do so, I don't think most users will do that for a single person. I do agree that things like "Nomadic identities" and "Channel cloning" are nice to have, they can be useful for many things. But maybe we should also focus a bit more on reducing the chance of a user saying "dammit I picked the wrong instance" 😄
in reply to Bill Statler

@Bill Statler @Tio
I don't think it's ever a good idea to use instance-blocking to influence admins of other instances. An admin should not be thinking of user connectivity as something the admin "owns" and is free to use as a weapon.
Yes, this is why I was very uncomfortable with that idea, you explained it very well.
in reply to Rokosun

in reply to Liwott

in reply to Rokosun

Nitter, Invidous and the like, cannot be blamed for fetching remote content from twittter or Youtube. So if someone posts child porn, or god forbid GUNS on twitter or youtube, and others access it via our nitter/invidious instances, it is not even legal in our stupid world of stupid laws, to accuse me. It is simply proxying and the content from youtube/twitter is not even on my server. Perhaps federated networks should do that if possible. It is already doing something similar in the sense that I, as admin, can choose to remove remote cached content daily or immediately. You can still connect to others, but the content needs to be fetched every time you "poke" at them or something like that...

This is the saner way of doing it. Not the butcher way please! Cut and slice! But the librarian way. Sit down and come up with a solution that is future-proof and does not impede people's ability to connect with others.
in reply to Rokosun

(mind if I don't reply all at once? it may become quite long otherwise, and some subtopics make sense to be split)
different people want to block different types of stuff than others.
What I meant with unfair moderation is when the same content is treated differently according to who wrote it. For example, see this comment on a Lemmy drama. The first user seemed to benefit from a laxist treatment because they shared the admins' political opinion, hence the accusations of unfair moderation. (for the record, that first person ended up getting a 5-days ban) Please, anyone reading this, let us not turn this about a discussion of whether or not there was a double standard, I only meant to say that this kind of double standards may exist, and not every dispute on moderation concerns the two types mentioned in the OP
in reply to Liwott

@Liwott
What I meant with unfair moderation is when the same content is treated differently according to who wrote it.
Okay I understand what you mean now. So your point was that moderators could treat people differently based on their political believes, religion, race, etc. This might happen sometimes, as moderators are humans too, and well, humans can be biased. For example, an admin might be more reluctant to block an instance if they have close friends on it compared to other instances where they don't know anyone (so they block it without much thought). I think this could be seen as one more reason why users choosing for themselves is better than letting admins handle everything.
in reply to Rokosun

in reply to Liwott

in reply to Rokosun

in reply to Liwott

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Rokosun