live and let live

Privacy Badger has recently started blocking Twitter embedding for me (in the past few days). Does anyone know specifically what Twitter is doing to prompt this? For instance, see this thread on the Ukraine war on Daily Kos, which includes a lot of embedded Twitter posts https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/9/2204752/-Ukraine-Invasion-Day-625-RU-may-experience-redeployment-issues

Food for thought @michael@yall.theatl.social

I found this comment on blocklist systems to be interesting: https://social.treehouse.systems/@adrienne/111043288202527510

How do we unblock any instance that got on Oliphant tier 0 but are later removed? Is that something that will be checked for?

Another thought – how does blocking and silencing affect the new search system? I guess blocking is obvious…but does silence block search? If so, I think that makes silencing much more impactful and we’d need to be more careful with it.

Wow. This is exactly the wrong way to report on a BS from a known liar…the sentence reads as though this is a credible statement.

I get an XML doc here: https://roughdraftatlanta.com/rss

It includes a few paragraphs plus metadata for each story

twitter is full of vapid partisan hacks. Like most other prominent media in our society…all about posers trying to get influence

I too am a big advocate for free speech and robust public debate, which is why I support the fediverse. But that doesn’t mean that individual instances need to include access to everything that’s legally published. The ability to access everything is supported by the fediverse as a whole, just as its supported by the publishing industry as a whole, not individual magazines.

Behaviors that are tolerable in individuals can become a problem when they are organized and professionalized, as Brighton has done with conspiracy-theorism (some background info here). Brighton is a noise machine. A community dedicated to conspiracy theories is a community that is not only dedicated to lies, it is dedicated to figuring out how to promote these lies with manipulative arguments and by slowly drawing people into a fantasy world. It’s frankly a lot of work to assess these lies on a case-by-case basis and I don’t think people will be attracted to theATL if the site expects them to do this work for themselves. This isn’t a matter of letting people voice their opinions and hear other people’s opinions – it’s a matter of turning down the volume on a propaganda campaign. We can see the world around us better when we filter out other people’s attempts to mislead us; when those attempts to mislead us are coordinated at the community level, it’s appropriate to silence them at the community level.

Tangentially, a community dedicated to conspiracy theories is bound to contain a lot of slander and antisemitism (along with other hateful attitudes).

I skimmed over the Oliphant unified tier 0 blocklist, and it does not block any instances that I interact with, for what that’s worth. I am a bit concerned with the idea of routinely updating the block list based on the Oliphant algorithm. I suspect that the Oliphant project has a tendency to attract administrators who most enthusiastic about blocking. The justifications that I see for blocking would often apply to a lot of mainstream/establishment opinion in the USA (and probably more so in GA).

That said, I’m fully in favor of blocking obnoxious sites simply for the purpose of maintaining a pleasant and productive environment. For instance, brighton.social is on the tier0 list – this is basically a conspiracy theory propaganda mill; the local feed screams paranoia. I’d support blocking brighton.social purely to protect theATL users from wandering into a conversation prompted by their nonsense. I consider this to be the same as public parks having a policy that people need to clean up after their dogs. I consider it very unpleasant to be at the receiving end of a propaganda firehose, even if the propaganda is not personally threatening. (I don’t know if this captures the entire story for why they are on the blocklist – there could be other problems with them)

I did notice two sizable instances that are often considered “borderline problematic” in the defederation debates – and both were set to “silence” rather than “suspend”. One, is newsie.social (where Decaturish is located). I vaguely remember some criticisms about newsie.social a few months back – I think part of it was that people were reposting or repeating opinions that published in the Washington Post or New York Times. Many of the critics wanted nothing to do with journalists. As we’ve seen with the BBC instance, there are a decent number of people in the fediverse who would block those mainstream publishers, either because they have different standards from mainstream society or because they simply don’t want that experience on their Mastodon instance. I wouldn’t necessarily take their ‘block’ as meaning that the instance is anything we’d consider horrible.

The other ‘borderline’ instance I saw silenced was “QOTO” – this instance is controversial because its policy is to only defederate when absolutely necessary (e.g. spam overwhelms the server). Many other instances block QOTO either because they view this as aiding hate-mongers, or because they just want to keep the hate-monges a couple steps removed from them. (Disclaimer, my account was hosted on Qoto before I came here)

So I guess I don’t have a clear opinion here. I think even tier0 may be a bit too stringent, but i can’t suggest a better way to quickly distinguish between those that are exceptionally horrible and those that are everyday horrible. Perhaps just silence them, and treat that as a strike, so that if we have any problems with harassment we quickly block the whole server. I suspect that some need to be blocked outright – if you look at Qoto’s blocklist, that could give you a small number that are absolutely intolerable.