The classic trilemma goes: "Fast, cheap or good, pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma goes, "Large, diverse userbase; centralized platforms; don't anger users - pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma is introduced in "Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media," a superb paper from @arozenshtein@mastodon.socialof U of Minnesota Law, forthcoming in the journal *Free Speech Law*, available as a prepub on SSRN:
Current approaches to content moderation generally assume the continued dominance of “walled gardens”: social media platforms that control who can use their ser
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Rozenshtein proposes a solution (of sorts) to the Moderator's Trilemma: federation. De-siloing social media, breaking it out of centralized walled gardens and recomposing it as a bunch of small servers run by a diversity of operators with a diversity of #ContentModeration approaches. The #Fediverse, in other words.
In Albert Hirschman's classic treatise *Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,* stakeholders in an institution who are dissatisfied with its direction have two choices: #voice (arguing for changes) or #exit (going elsewhere). Rozenshtein argues that Fediverse users (especially users of #Mastodon, the most popular part of the Fediverse) have more voice *and* more #FreedomOfExit:
Large platforms - think #Twitter, #Facebook, etc - are very unresponsive to users. Most famously, Facebook polled its users on whether they wanted to be spied on. Faced with overwhelming opposition to commercial surveillance, Facebook ignored the poll result and cranked the #surveillance dial up to a million:
A decade later, Musk performed the same stunt, asking users whether they wanted him to fuck all the way off from the company, then ignored the #VoxPopuli, which, in this instance, was not #VoxDei:
Facebook, Twitter and other #WalledGardens are designed to be sticky-traps, relying on high #SwitchingCosts to keep users locked within their garden walls which are really prison walls.
Millions of Twitter users asked Elon Musk to step down as the head of Twitter in a poll the billionaire created and promised to abide by. But by Monday afternoon there was no word on whether Musk would step aside or who the new leader might be.
By contrast, the Fediverse is designed for ease of exit. With one click, users can export the list of the accounts they follow, block and mute, as well as the accounts that follow *them*.
Update, October 1, 2021: The original version of this essay incorrectly stated that Metcalfe's Law dictated that the number of connections in a network doubled with each new user; that has been corrected, below.
Last month, "Nathan," the volunteer operator of mastodon.lol, announced that he was pulling the plug on the server because he was sick of his users' arguments about the new #HarryPotter game.
But the mastodon.lol saga demonstrates the *strength* of federated social media, not its weakness. After all, 450 million Twitter users are also at the mercy of a thin-skinned sysop - but when he #enshittifies his platform, they can't just export their data and re-establish their social lives elsewhere in two clicks:
Mastodon.lol shows us how, if you don't like your host's content moderation policies, you can exercise voice - even to the extent of making him so upset that he shuts off his server - and where voice fails, exit steps in to fill the gap, providing a soft landing for users who find the moderation policies untenable:
Tracking Exposed is a scrappy European nonprofit that attempts to understand how online recommendation algorithms work. They comine data from volunteers who install a plugin with data acquired…
Traditionally, centralization has been posed as beneficial to content moderation. As Rozenshtein writes, a company that can "enclose" its users and lock them in has an incentive to invest in better user experience, while companies whose users can easily migrate to rivals are less invested in those users.
And centralized platforms are more nimble. The operators of centralized systems can add hundreds of knobs and sliders to their back end and #twiddle them at will. They act unilaterally, without having to convince other members of a federation to back their changes.
Centralized platforms claim that their most powerful benefit to users is extensive content moderation.
Centralized systems claim that their enclosure keeps users safe - from bad code and bad people. Though Rozenshtein doesn't say so, it's important to note that this claim is wildly oversold. Platforms routinely fail at preventing abuse:
Willow Andring, a 14-year-old transgender high school freshman, said she faces regular harassment at her school, Armstrong Junior-Senior High School in Kittanni
But even where platforms *do* act to "keep users safe," they fail, thanks to the Moderator's Trilemma. Setting speech standards for millions or even billions of users is an impossible task. Some users will *always* feel like speech is being underblocked - while others will feel it's overblocked (and both will be right!):
And platforms play very fast and loose with their definition of "malicious code" - as when #Apple blocked #OGApp, an #Instagram ad-blocker that gave you a simple feed consisting of just the posts from the people you followed:
To resolve the Moderator's Trilemma, we need to embrace #subsidiarity: "decisions should be made at the lowest organizational level capable of making such decisions."
For Rozenshtein, "content-moderation subsidiarity devolves decisions to the individual instances that make up the overall network." The fact that users can leave a server and set up somewhere else means that when a user gets pissed off enough about a moderation policy, they don't have to choose between leaving social media or tolerating the policy - they can simply choose another server that's part of the same federation.
Rozenshtein asks whether Reddit is an example of this, because moderators of individual subreddits are given broad latitude to set their own policies and anyone can fork a subreddit into a competing community with different modeations norms. But Reddit's devolution is a matter of *policy*, not *architecture* - subreddits exist at the sufferance of Reddit's owners.
Reddit is poised to go public, meaning those owners will include activist investors and large institutions that might not care about your little community.
You might be happy about Reddit banning /r_TheDonald, but if they can band that subreddit, they can ban *any* subreddit. Policy works well, but fails badly.
By moving subsidiarity into technical architecture, rather than human policy, the fediverse can move from *antagonism* (the "zero-sum destructiveness" that dominates current online debate) to #agonism, where your opponent isn't an enemy - they are a "political adversary":
Scholars have long debated whether the administrative state is a democratic institution. This Article offers a new framework for analyzing this question—one drawn from agonistic democratic theory.
> For this to happen, different ideologies must be allowed to materialize via different channels and platforms. An important prerequisite is that the goal of political consensus must be abandoned and replaced with conflictual consensus...
So your chosen Mastodon server "may have rules that are far more restrictive than those of the major social media platforms."
But the whole Fediverse "is substantially more speech protective than are any of the major social media platforms, since no user or content can be permanently banned from the network and anyone is free to start an instance that communicates both with the major Mastodon instances and the peripheral, shunned instances."
A good case-study here is #Gab, a Fediverse server by and for far-right cranks, conspiratorialists and white nationalists. Most Fediverse servers have defederated (that is, blocked) Gab, but Gab is still there, and Gab has actually defederated from many of the remaining servers, leaving its users to speak freely - but only to people who want to hear what they have to say.
This is true meaning of "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach." Willing listeners aren't blocked from willing speakers - but you don't have the right to be heard by people who don't want to talk to you:
Fediverse servers are (thus far) nonprofits or hobbyist sites, and don't have the same incentives to drive "engagement" to maximize the opportunties to show advertisements.
Fediverse applications are frequently designed to be #antiviral - that is, to prevent spectacular spreads of information across the system.
It's possible - likely, even - that future Fediverse servers *will* be operated by commercial operators seeking to maximize attention in order to maximize revenue.
But the users of these servers will still have the freedom of exit that they enjoy on today's #Jeffersonian volunteer-run servers - and so commercial servers will have to either curb their worst impulses or lose their users to better systems.
I'll note here that this is a progressive story of the benefits of competition - not the capitalist's fetishization of competition for its own sake, but rather, competition as a means of disciplining capital.
It can be readily complimented by discipline through regulation - for example, extending today's burgeoning crop of data-protection laws to require servers to furnish users with exports of their follow/follower data so they can go elsewhere.
There's another dimension to decentralized content moderation that exit and voice *don't* address - moderating "harmful" content. Some kinds of harm can be mitigated through exit.
If a server tolerates hate speech or harassment, you can go elsewhere, preferably somewhere that blocks your previous server.
But there are other kinds of speech that must not exist - either because they are illegal or because they enact harms that can't be mitigated by going elsewhere (or both). The most spectacular version of this is #ChildSexAbuseMaterial (#CSAM), a modern term-of-art to replace the more familiar "child porn."
Rozenshtein says there are "reasons for optimism" when it comes to the Fediverse's ability to police this content, though as he unpacked this idea, I found it much weaker than his other material. Rozenshtein proposes that Fediverse hosts could avail themselves of #PhotoDNA, #Microsoft's automated scanning tool, to block and purge themselves of CSAM, while noting that this is "hardly foolproof."
If automated scanning fails, Rozenshtein allows that this could cause "greater consolidation" of Mastodon servers to create the economies of scale to pay for more active, human moderation, which he compares to the consolidation of email that arose as a result of the #spam-wars. But the spam-wars have been catastrophic for email as a federated system and produced all kinds of opportunities for mischief by the big players:
It feels like only yesterday that we were living through the Substack bubble, as mailing lists enjoyed a new renaissance (rebranded as “newsletters”), a tangible expression of the techlash and our…
Rozenshtein: "There is a tradeoff between a vibrant and diverse communication system and the degree of centralized control that would be necessary to ensure 100% filtering of content. The question, as yet unknown, is how stark that tradeoff is."
The situation is much simpler when it comes to servers hosted by moderators who are complicit in illegal conduct.
"The Fediverse may live in the cloud, its servers, moderators, and users are physically located in nations whose governments are more than capable of enforcing local law." That is, people who operate "rogue" servers dedicated to facilitating assassination, CSAM, or what-have-you will be arrested, and their servers will be seized.
Fair enough! But of course, this butts up against one of the Fediverse's shortcomings: it isn't particularly useful for promoting illegal speech that *should* be lega, like the communications of #SexWorkers who were purged from the internet en masse following the passage of #SESTA/#FOSTA. When sex workers tried to establish a new home in the fediverse on a server called #Switter, it was effectively crushed.
This simply reinforces the idea that code is no substitute for law, and while code can interpret bad law as damage and route around it, it can only do so for a short while. The best use of speech-enabling code isn't to avoid the unjust suppression of speech - it's to organize resistance to that injustice, including, if necessary, the replacement of the governments that enacted it:
Listen to those who extol the virtues of blockchain and cryptocurrency and pretty soon, you’ll hear about the power of cryptocurrency to resist tyranny. This isn’t a novel claim: the cypherpunk…
Rozenshtein briefly addresses the question of #FilterBubbles, and notes that there is compelling research that filter bubbles don't really exist, or at least, aren't as important to our political lives as once thought:
Abstract
The new high-choice media environment has raised concerns that users of social networking sites primarily select political information that supports their political opinions and avoid information that challenges them.
Rozenshtein closes by addressing the role policy can play in encouraging the Fediverse. First, he proposes that governments could host their own servers and use them for official communications, as the EU Commission did following Musk's Twitter takeover:
EU Voice is the official ActivityPub platform of the EU institutions. With EU Video, it is part of an alternative social media pilot proposed and provided by the European Data Protection Supervisor.
He endorses #interoperability mandates which would required dominant platforms to connect to the fediverse (facilitating their users' departure), like the ones in the EU's #DSA and #DMA, and proposed in US legislation like the #ACCESSAct:
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) allows new messaging services to demand interoperability (the ability to exchange messages) from the internet's largest messaging services (like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage).
To get a sense of how that would work, check out #InteroperableFacebook, a video and essay I put together with @eff to act as a kind of #DesignFiction, in the form of a user manual for a federated, interoperable Facebook:
He points out that this kind of mandatory interop is a preferable alternative to the unconstitutional (and unworkable!) speech bans proposed by #Florida and #texas 37/
In this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use socia…
These limit the ability of platforms to moderate speech. Indeed, this is an either-or proposition - under the terms proposed by Florida and Texas, the Fediverse *couldn't* operate.
This is likewise true of proposals to eliminate #Section230, the law that immunizes platforms from federal liability for most criminal speech acts committed by their users.
While this law is incorrectly smeared as a gift to #BigTech, it is most needed by small services that can't possibly afford to monitor everything their users say:
Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I apologize if it feels a bit cold and rude to resp…
Competition agencies could weigh interoperability with the Fediverse by big platforms to determine whether to enforce against them, and enforcement orders could include mandates to interoperate with the Fediverse. This is a much faster remedy than break-ups, which Rozenshtein is dubious of because they are "legally risky" and "controversial."
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/#agonism
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Pluralistic: Solving the Moderator’s Trilemma with Federation (04 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
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book by Albert O. Hirschman
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cory Doctorow
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https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-ignores-minimal-user-vote-adopts-new-privacy-policy-flna1c7559683
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Facebook ignores 'minimal' user vote, adopts new privacy policy
Wilson Rothman (NBC News)Cory Doctorow
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https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-8dac8ae023444ef9c37ca1d8fe1c14df
Facebook, Twitter and other #WalledGardens are designed to be sticky-traps, relying on high #SwitchingCosts to keep users locked within their garden walls which are really prison walls.
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Elon Musk Twitter poll ends with users seeking his departure
Matt O'brien, Kelvin Chan (Associated Press)Cory Doctorow
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
By contrast, the Fediverse is designed for ease of exit. With one click, users can export the list of the accounts they follow, block and mute, as well as the accounts that follow *them*.
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Facebook’s Secret War on Switching Costs
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
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https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/
Last month, "Nathan," the volunteer operator of mastodon.lol, announced that he was pulling the plug on the server because he was sick of his users' arguments about the new #HarryPotter game.
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Pluralistic: What the fediverse (does/n’t) solve (23 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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https://mastodon.lol/@nathan/109836633022272265
But the mastodon.lol saga demonstrates the *strength* of federated social media, not its weakness. After all, 450 million Twitter users are also at the mercy of a thin-skinned sysop - but when he #enshittifies his platform, they can't just export their data and re-establish their social lives elsewhere in two clicks:
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Nathan 🏳️🌈
2023-02-09 20:20:14
Cory Doctorow
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https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
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Twiddler - Cory Doctorow - Medium
Cory Doctorow (Medium)Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Centralized platforms claim that their most powerful benefit to users is extensive content moderation.
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Cory Doctorow
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https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300261431/custodians-of-the-internet/
Centralized systems claim that their enclosure keeps users safe - from bad code and bad people. Though Rozenshtein doesn't say so, it's important to note that this claim is wildly oversold. Platforms routinely fail at preventing abuse:
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/sexual-assault-harassment-bullying-trans-students-say-targeted-school-rcna7803
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Sexual assault, harassment, bullying: Trans students say they're targeted at school
Jo Yurcaba (NBC News)Cory Doctorow
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https://www.scmagazine.com/news/threats/apple-bugs-ios-macos_new_class
But even where platforms *do* act to "keep users safe," they fail, thanks to the Moderator's Trilemma. Setting speech standards for millions or even billions of users is an impossible task. Some users will *always* feel like speech is being underblocked - while others will feel it's overblocked (and both will be right!):
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship
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New class of Apple bugs found in iOS, MacOS
Jessica Davis (SC Media)Cory Doctorow
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https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained
To resolve the Moderator's Trilemma, we need to embrace #subsidiarity: "decisions should be made at the lowest organizational level capable of making such decisions."
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/full-stack-luddites/#subsidiarity
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Pluralistic: When Facebook came for your battery, feudal security failed (05 Feb 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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You might be happy about Reddit banning /r_TheDonald, but if they can band that subreddit, they can ban *any* subreddit. Policy works well, but fails badly.
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-administrative-agon
Here, Rozenshtein cites @320x200 and @rra's "Seven Theses On The Fediverse And The Becoming Of Floss":
https://test.roelof.info/seven-theses.html
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The Administrative Agon: A Democratic Theory for a Conflictual Regulatory State
www.yalelawjournal.orgCory Doctorow
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So your chosen Mastodon server "may have rules that are far more restrictive than those of the major social media platforms."
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen
Fediverse servers are (thus far) nonprofits or hobbyist sites, and don't have the same incentives to drive "engagement" to maximize the opportunties to show advertisements.
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Pluralistic: Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech (10 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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It's possible - likely, even - that future Fediverse servers *will* be operated by commercial operators seeking to maximize attention in order to maximize revenue.
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Cory Doctorow
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I'll note here that this is a progressive story of the benefits of competition - not the capitalist's fetishization of competition for its own sake, but rather, competition as a means of disciplining capital.
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Cory Doctorow
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There's another dimension to decentralized content moderation that exit and voice *don't* address - moderating "harmful" content. Some kinds of harm can be mitigated through exit.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/27
But there are other kinds of speech that must not exist - either because they are illegal or because they enact harms that can't be mitigated by going elsewhere (or both). The most spectacular version of this is #ChildSexAbuseMaterial (#CSAM), a modern term-of-art to replace the more familiar "child porn."
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d
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Dead letters - Cory Doctorow - Medium
Cory Doctorow (Medium)Cory Doctorow
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The situation is much simpler when it comes to servers hosted by moderators who are complicit in illegal conduct.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4
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The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis - OneZero
Cory Doctorow (OneZero)Cory Doctorow
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https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2021-0002
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A critical review of filter bubbles and a comparison with selective exposure
sciendo.comCory Doctorow
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https://social.network.europa.eu
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EU Voice
Mastodon hosted on social.network.europa.euCory Doctorow
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-acts-interoperability-rule-addresses-important-need-raises
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The EU Digital Markets Act’s Interoperability Rule Addresses An Important Need, But Raises Difficult Security Problems for Encrypted Messaging
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
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https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
He points out that this kind of mandatory interop is a preferable alternative to the unconstitutional (and unworkable!) speech bans proposed by #Florida and #texas
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Interoperable Facebook
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
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This is likewise true of proposals to eliminate #Section230, the law that immunizes platforms from federal liability for most criminal speech acts committed by their users.
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/
One more recommendation from Rozenshtein: treat interop mandates as an alternative (or adjunct) to antitrust enforcement.
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Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act
TechdirtCory Doctorow
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