@woozle Excellent bit at the end of Doctorow's New Yorker profile on content moderation:

I worry that, because of the attacker’s advantage, the people who want to break the rules are always going to be able to find ways around them, and that we’re never going to be able to make a set of rules that is comprehensive enough to forestall bad conduct. We see this all the time, right? Facebook comes up with a rule that says you can’t use racial slurs, and then racists figure out euphemisms for racial slurs. They figure out how to walk right up to the line of what’s a racial slur without being a racial slur, according to the rule book. And they can probe the defenses. They can try a bunch of different euphemisms in their alt accounts; they can see which ones get banned or blocked, and then they can pick one that they think is moderator-proof.

Meanwhile, if you’re just some normie who’s having racist invective thrown at you, you’re not doing these systematic probes—you’re just trying to live your life. And they’re sitting there trying to goad you into going over the line. And as soon as you go over the line they know chapter and verse. They know exactly what rule you’ve broken, and they complain to the mods and get you kicked off. And so you end up with committed professional trolls having the run of social media and their targets being the ones who get the brunt of bad moderation calls. Because dealing with moderation, like dealing with any system of civil justice, is a skilled, context-heavy profession. Basically, you have to be a lawyer. And, if you’re just a dude who’s trying to talk to your friends on social media, you always lose.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/cory-doctorow-wants-you-to-know-what-computers-can-and-cant-do

I think Doctorow's touching on a universal truth: that any rules-based system ultimately ends up being a sort of barristered hell. It's why content moderation is so damned context-sensitive. And also why and how extremists on both sides of a divide can drive out moderates and give rise to a highly-partisan shriekfest. Closely related to SSC's "Toxoplasma of Rage":

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

@pluralistic

#CoryDoctorow #NewYorker #ContentModeration #Lawyering #ToxoplasmaOfRage

#introduction #reintroduction

Hi all, Roel he/him.

An artist and designer with an interest in computer networks, materiality of the internet, digital community infrastructure, DIY/DIWO approaches, FOSS culture.

You might know my work from the LowTech Mag's solar powered server project https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com

Currently pursuing a #PhD in Interaction and Participatory #Design at Malmö University. As part of that research I work together with actors in the cultural sector to co-design alternative social media infrastructures with/for them. These are mostly based on fediverse applications, so I am also interested in aspects of #federation #governance #contentmoderation and more generally how to transition to and improve alternatives together etc. This space is far from perfect and in some cases insufficient but we need to start somewhere??

I'm a founding member of https://varia.zone, and also part of https://lurk.org. With LURK we've been running a fediverse instance called post.lurk.org since 2018, for which I am happy to be one of the co-admins! As part of that I boost #introductions, calls and questions..

This is introduction is really long because post.lurk.org has a character limit of 1337