content moderation | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a tweet by Dan York (Twitter)

@ambrwlsn90 - Thanks for writing that post. A question - how does Webmentions deal with spammers trying to add links to your posts? That was historically the big problem we wound up with both pingbacks and before that trackbacks.
— Dan York (@danyork) January 31, 2021

Dan, since you’re in the WordPress space, there are several pieces in place there. Akismet and other anti-spam tools can still be used to filter webmentions just like any other comment/response on your site.

If you moderate your responses on your site, the webmention plugin has an “approve & always allow” function as well as domain allow-listing for people you know and trust.

It also bears saying: there’s also nothing that says you have to display webmentions on your site either, you can use them simply as notifications on your back end.

In my experience, I’ve also seen people strip active links, scripts, etc. out of their received webmentions as a security precaution. I believe that the WordPress suite of IndieWeb plugins does this by default.

If you need/want to go further, you could work on implementing the Vouch extension of Webmention. Any additional ideas or brainstorming you’ve got to help mitigate these sorts of harms is most welcome.

For the record, for Webmention to work as a protocol, it requires a link to your site to actually appear on a public web page–something neither trackback/pingback required and made them even easier/cheaper to game.

Read Thread by

@pfrazee (threadreaderapp.com)

Yo, decentralizers. If our projects are ONLY about censorship resistance and NOT about better algorithms for elevating truth, and NOT about creating constrained but real powers of moderation, then we're making things worse. 1/n

It kills me, absolutely kills me, that after years of decentralization advocacy it's a moment like this when all the dweb projects pop up on HN and social media. The interest popped -- not when truth became inconvenient for corporate power, but when lies did.

Charitably, people may be reflecting on the kind of power imbalance being revealed and reflecting on how it could be abused.

https://twitter.com/pwang/status/1348335710303096833

Uncharitably? Do I need to even say it.

For anybody still unsure:

We have to find a way to square our ideals and our fears about monopoly control with the realities of how our technology is working. It's not enough to defend an ideal. We need to be effective.

We've all done our spiderman homework. What comes with great power?

If we really believe that free speech is important -- as I do -- and we want to protect it, then we need to work hard to make sure that free speech provides value to people. Otherwise they're going to shrug and let it drift away, "a nice idea, but impractical, really"

The question isn't "how do we make moderation impossible?" The question is, how do we make moderation trustworthy.

That, it turns out, is much harder than p2p tweets

It's also about *checking* power, not just distributing it. Like code-forking: FOSS doesn't always mean "anybody can contribute," but it definitely means that the users can fork if the core devs abuse their position. How can we get that kind of check on power here?

It's nuanced. It's harder to sell than "censorship resistance." Maybe we need a new framework for discussing this, a new set of words. I don't know what to tell you, but the reward is equal to the challenge. n/n

Read Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump (blog.twitter.com)

After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.

Too little, too late, but nonetheless.

Read What if Social Media Worked More Like Email? by Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci (knightcolumbia.org)

Hearkening back to the internet’s good ole days with decentralized networks

Bookmarked on 2020-11-04 at 00:29.

Read 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments by Derek Powazek (Derek Powazek)

The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’…

👓 How Facebook and Twitter Help Amplify Fringe Websites | Anti-Defamation League

Read How Facebook and Twitter Help Amplify Fringe Websites (Anti-Defamation League)

Extremists are leveraging Facebook and Twitter to ensure that the hateful philosophies that begin to germinate on message boards like Gab and 8chan find a new and much larger audience.

I’ll note here that I’ve noticed that sites like Gab have been working at transitioning into projects like Mastodon as a means of getting around roadblocks related to getting their mobile apps into marketplaces like the Apple and Google app stores.

We need far more tools to help individuals to control the crap that they see on the internet.

📑 How The Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deepfakes | Nieman Lab

Annotated How The Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deepfakes (Nieman Lab)

As deepfakes make their way into social media, their spread will likely follow the same pattern as other fake news stories. In a MIT study investigating the diffusion of false content on Twitter published between 2006 and 2017, researchers found that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth in all categories of information.” False stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth and reached 1,500 people six times more quickly than accurate articles. ❧

This sort of research should make it easier to find and stamp out from the social media side of things. We need regulations to actually make it happen however.

Where is the digital pale?