Gregory's ServerThere were two notable moderation incidents on mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the past 24 hours that I would like to address. In the first, a post was wrongfully removed due to a report claiming it contained a dogwhistle, and in the second, a person was wrongfully suspended due to a report claiming it's an impersonator. Both were undone and apologies issued.
 188 comments
  @Gargron will further registrations on this server be closed forever, or is there a known time frame? @Gargron I have yet to see any of the tripe I saw on twitter on a daily basis @Gargron Glad to see you address the issue and even apologize. That's a welcome difference compared to what I am used to from the bird site. @Gargron Please pass on my thanks to everyone, this shared space is such a pleasure. Thanks for everything you all do  @Gargron Thanks for the clarification. This are really good news. May I suggest a blog article about the state of the moderation of the two instances? I think this would help to clear many things up that are currently in the debate. @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. 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. @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 @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. @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. 😅 @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. @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 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. @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 I appreciate this response which conveys humility and accountability. Thank you! @Gargron Better than Twitter which has total collapse of moderation. @Gargron your moderation teams should also get people that know the extremist research landscape before calling for posts to be taken down or forced to have some warning that are not inciting nor show violence, but are shared to show trends and research. @Gargron I’m not used to this kind of accountability. I’m…so happy to be here.   @Gargron I do wonder how scalable this model is, especially due to the voluntary nature. How are you going to ensure you all play along nicely with each other, via some kind of UN like approach? Surely you need some kind of guardrails in place? @Gargron While I appreciate the honesty behind this and the work the moderators are doing, I do find it surprising that the moderation team read that post as a dogwhistle. I actually doubt they read it and have just gone straight to believing the report and removed it. @Gargron I hope it is obvious that I am not Charlie Vickers. My user name belongs to me in different platforms & I did this for kind of fun as Charlie Vickers himself is not active on social media & we were goofing. @Gargron Way to go, Eugen. Love the transparency and immediate response even during intense growth.    @Gargron Lawrence Tribe told everyone on the bird site that the reason he won't come to Mastodon is because of at least 1 imposter who was posting his tweets here. He has a LOT of followers over there. @Gargron you’re doing great work, hopefully we can create and maintain an environment where our own behaviors will help you and the moderators not get snowed under by an avalanche of reports. I know that’s really naive, but hope springs eternal. @Gargron i don't even know how to join these instances everytome I try it sends me to find a different instance :/ Thanks. We are human, it's inevitable that mistakes will be made. Specially during a period of unprecedented growth when instances, admins & moderators are being pushed to their limits. Let's try to stay calm and not overreact while this surge goes on. @Gargron thanks for all the hard work. Thanks to you and thanks to the moderation team.  @Gargron I have nothing but positive experiences with people from all instances of Mastodon I can see. Thanks for the hard work behind the scenes that makes it happen. @Gargron @BlackAzizAnansi@mas. We all recognize mistakes will happen. The important part is to learn about why they are happening - are there blindspots in the moderator group that require additional education and/or selection of more diverse staff - to reduce the likelihood of the same type of mistake recurring. It is critical to understand that the person reporting isn’t always acting in good faith. If you haven’t realized that yet you’re being naive. Don’t overrely on character of community @Gargron Have you considered that people are being targeted? Are you investigating the reporters that are submitting false reports?  @Gargron Still 100x better than for profit social media who would deal with this in private with the relevant parties and never admit their mistakes publicly. Don't let the people bring you down This is a crazy amount of work you are doing to foster a positive environment so keep doing what you are, You are doing great 👍🏻 @Gargron The other place uses broken Laundromat Washing Machines as Moderators. @Gargron is this about the Asian American reader whom was speaking about giving her time to reading non white writers? Am I dreaming? A person takes responsibility for decision-making on this platform? Algorithms can't do it all, people. Thank you, human. DIGGING IT HERE! @Gargron thank you for envisioning and creating this amazing space. This is what I imagined Twitter could be! Thank you @Gargron We can always expect false positives. Software scanning for Christofascists and spammers is always going to find false positives also. @Gargron Kudos for the open, honest, and respectful demeanor with which you addressed this. And the fact that you actually apologized - truly fantastic. Such a breath of fresh air compared to that "other" place. Thank you 🙏 @Gargron I love the transparency and willingness to review and reconsider! I'm sure it is a tough job - thank you for doing it @Gargron excuse my ignorance. But an actual dog whistle? Or is this a term for something else? @Gargron Nope. Sorry. You’re not allowed to admit mistakes nor are you allowed to learn from them. This simply will not do. @Gargron I do have an important request though: @Gargron I had one removed for reasons I couldn't imagine. I contested and asked why it had been removed. Finally was told I was returned to good standing but never learned what the problem was that caused any of it. Almost left because of it. @Gargron @Gargron It seems to me the way to do this is investigate first, BEFORE suspending. Doing it this way seems bass-ackwards. @Gargron Perhaps allow users to flag their accounts as Parody/Satire/Fan/Commentary the same way we can flag as Bot, so as to lessen the amount of false reports about impersonators when there are clear indications for what purpose such accounts were created for. @Gargron The problem is that you HAVE a moderation team. Moderators distort and ruin everything that they touch. @Gargron Suspending @thegrayzone@mastodon.social should also be considered a pretty big moderation mistake. It's an important alternative opinion site. Let's not play Wikipedia here. |
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.