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Decentralised content moderation

martin.kleppmann.com

81–90 of 135 posts

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#81
post #63

My suggestion is to not indulge in any content moderation which is not illegal. Only take down content which is required by a court order. Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy to solve cases like child pornography. Why? It is fairly clear at this point that content moderation at internet scale is not possible. Why? A. Using other users to flag dangerous content is not working. Which users do you tr…

So it would be OK for a kids TV show website to have Viagra ads on it? Edit: I mean spam.

That would be a stupid waste of money for an advertiser. Maybe ad networks are really the problem.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#82
post #63

My suggestion is to not indulge in any content moderation which is not illegal. Only take down content which is required by a court order. Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy to solve cases like child pornography. Why? It is fairly clear at this point that content moderation at internet scale is not possible. Why? A. Using other users to flag dangerous content is not working. Which users do you tr…

So it would be OK for a kids TV show website to have Viagra ads on it? Edit: I mean spam.

I am only commenting on this in the context of community standards and user generated content and should not be extrapolated to all content in all other contexts.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#83
post #63

My suggestion is to not indulge in any content moderation which is not illegal. Only take down content which is required by a court order. Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy to solve cases like child pornography. Why? It is fairly clear at this point that content moderation at internet scale is not possible. Why? A. Using other users to flag dangerous content is not working. Which users do you tr…

I’d point out that child sexual abuse content is not an “easy to solve case”. The extent to which Facebook, Google, and more recently, Zoom look the other way on this issue is horrifying and it seems to be a very hard problem due to the laws surrounding the handling of such material. I’m not faulting the laws, I just think this is an inherently hard issue to crack down on. Gabriel Dance and Michael Keller at the NYT did some very high quality reporting on this whole issue in 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...).

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#84

It's pretty obvious that the tech crowd right now is so intoxicated by its own groupthink that these attempts to come up with "solutions" are going to have awful results. You don't even know what the problem really is. "I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian be…

Solidly agree on all points, just wanted to plug a podcast favorite of mine, Philosophize This!, for a less daunting introduction to McLuhan's ideas [1] than "go read a couple hundred pages of fairly dense media theory books."* 1. https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-149-on-medi... * Of course, I enjoyed the podcast episode so much that I did end up going on to read The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium Is…

Philosophize this is great. If you were a fan of McLuhan, you should read L.M. Sarcasas. His blog (https://thefrailestthing.com/) was how I was introduced to McLuhan, Postman, and other philosophers of media and technology. He has unfortunately shuttered that blog, but he has a substack newsletter thing that talks about similar things: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/people/1810437-l-m-...

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#85

Since I'm using libp2p in Go for a side project, may I take this opportunity to ask how this could work in principle for a decentralized network? The way I see it, this seems to be impossible but maybe I'm missing something. For example, in my network, anyone can start a node and the user has full control over it. So how would you censor this node? The following ideas don't seem to work: 1. Voting or another social c…

I've thought about this a lot. Currently, my preferred solution to the problem of Sybil attacks in decentralized social networks is a reputation system based on a meritocratic web of trust.

Basically it would work something like this: By default, clients hide content (comments, submissions, votes, etc) created by new identities, treating it as untrusted (possible spam/abusive/malicious content) unless another identity with a good reputation vouches for it. (Either by vouching for the content directly, or vouching for the identity that submitted it.) Upvoting a piece of content vouches for it, and increases your identity's trust in the content's submitter. Flagging a piece of content distrusts it and decreases your identity's trust in the content's submitter (possibly by a large amount depending on the flag type), and in other identities that vouched for that content. Previously unseen identities are assigned a reputation based on how much other identities you trust (and they identities they trust, etc.) trust or distrust that unseen identity.

The advantage of this system is that it not only prevents sibyl attacks, but also doubles as a form of fully decentralized community-driven moderation.

That's the general idea anyway. The exact details of how a system like that would work probably need a lot of fleshing out and real-world testing in order to make them work effectively.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#86
post #68

It's pretty obvious that the tech crowd right now is so intoxicated by its own groupthink that these attempts to come up with "solutions" are going to have awful results. You don't even know what the problem really is. "I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian be…

They are separate problems. Engagement is still roughly "our" problem, because ad-driven ~media are externalizing the costs of engagement on society. This is where the Upton Sinclair quote fits. Moderation is still roughly the platform's problem because it comes with liabilities they can't readily externalize. Engagement certainly overlaps with this, but most of these liabilities exist regardless of engagement.

Engagement _is_ moderation! When FB chooses what to show you, it's already moderating things but simply using a different value system. The're a pushback on "censorship" today but censorship has been happening for years.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#87
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it would be OK for a kids TV show website to have Viagra ads on it? Edit: I mean spam.

I am only commenting on this in the context of community standards and user generated content and should not be extrapolated to all content in all other contexts.

Sorry, I meant spam. If anyone can post a comment, and only "illegal" comments can be removed, that would surely allow a lot of email-style spam.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the usage of the word “man”, so noted in every dictionary, and backed up by millennia of descriptive usage. I'm quite sure you know that too, to be honest. It is something that every English speaker knows, but some act as if they not, because they do not like the actual descriptive, and historical usage of that word. From Merriam-Webster : (1): an individual human especially : an adult male human https://www.…

I do not see it that way. But, fair enough. If it has always been that way we should keep it that way.

IIRC and AFAIK it comes from old norse, madr which used to mean human.

They had separate words for female madr and male madr.

Lately it has been a popular conspiracy that this is because "patriarchy" but the real reason is probably as mundane as simplifications over centuries.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#89
post #83
post #63

My suggestion is to not indulge in any content moderation which is not illegal. Only take down content which is required by a court order. Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy to solve cases like child pornography. Why? It is fairly clear at this point that content moderation at internet scale is not possible. Why? A. Using other users to flag dangerous content is not working. Which users do you tr…

I’d point out that child sexual abuse content is not an “easy to solve case”. The extent to which Facebook, Google, and more recently, Zoom look the other way on this issue is horrifying and it seems to be a very hard problem due to the laws surrounding the handling of such material. I’m not faulting the laws, I just think this is an inherently hard issue to crack down on. Gabriel Dance and Michael Keller at the NYT…

That link is pay/auth-walled for me, but I do get your point. Perhaps easy to solve was underestimate the technical problem as I was more thinking in terms of political problems. From that perspective no one, other than pedophiles themselves, disagrees with removing that kind of content. But completely agree on tech side of it.

Re: Decentralised content moderation

#90

Good piece. This line articulates the problem well: "without objectivity and consistency, moderation can easily degenerate into a situation where one group of people forces their opinions on everyone else, like them or not." And it gets to the core of the problem. Objectivity and consistency are extremely difficult to scale and maintain over time. They require constant reinforcement from environment, context, and cul…

The central problem here is in what circumstances free people should give up the right to decide what information they can consume. This is not a question that can be answered easily but without first accepting it as the central issue we are not going to make meaningful progress.

That’s part of it. The other part is that free people say they don’t want to see illegal content (child exploitation imagery, terrorism, scams, sale of opioids etc). The platform needs to moderate to remove that. Then the same users also say they don’t want to see legal but distasteful (in their opinion) content like pornography, spam and so on. The platform then has to remove that as well.

For most part platforms take decisions that will suit the majority of users.

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