Senator Hawley's Section 230 Reform Even Dumber Than We Expected; Would Launch A Ton Of Vexatious Lawsuits

from the dude,-seriously? dept

So there were rumors about Senator Hawley's bill to reform Section 230 earlier this week, saying that it would remove 230 protections if you used targeted ads. Today, Hawley released the actual plan, which is very different, but even dumber. It would certainly turn the GOP from the party that wanted to push for tort reform and limit frivolous and vexatious lawsuits into the party that encouraged an avalanche of wasteful litigation.

The shortest version of the bill's likely impact is that it would create an army of "content moderation troll" lawyers, because you could sue any platform that you felt removed your content unfairly and get $5,000 plus attorney's fees. With a bit more detail, the bill requires that a platform have clear terms of service and any moderation would have to be tied back to those terms -- which pretty much shows that whoever wrote this pile of shit has no idea how content moderation works, and the fact that you need to keep adjusting the actual content moderation practices, because dishonest people who are trying to abuse your system are always trying to game things to stay "technically" within the "terms" while still wreaking havoc on your platform.

The bill then says that if a platform makes any design or operation decision that is not in "good faith", anyone can sue them for $5k and attorneys' fees. Note that this seems to go beyond just moderation decisions. It includes a platform making design decisions that you dislike. That's... crazy. There's also the question of what is actually meant by "good faith" and all the 1st Amendment issues that raises, because determining what is and is not "good faith" is a straight up editorial decision, and the whole point of the 1st Amendment is that the courts can't jump in to second guess editorial decisions.

To be clear, this law's attempt to expand "good faith" seems to be purposely made in bad faith to simply overwhelm internet platforms with tons of lawsuits.

This bill flips the entire purpose of Section 230. As Jess Miers said, this bill seems to take the immunity from civil suits in the law and turns it into a private right of action for tons of frivolous and vexatious lawsuits.

It is not a serious attempt at reform. It's an unconstitutional pile of crap that seems to serve no other purpose than to allow whiny aggrieved grifters to shake down every platform for their moderation and design choices.

Filed Under: frivolous lawsuits, good faith, intermediary liability, josh hawley, moderation, section 230, trial lawyers

FTC's Latest Fine Of YouTube Over COPPA Violations Shows That COPPA And Section 230 Are On A Collision Course

from the this-could-be-an-issue dept

As you probably heard, earlier this week, the FCC fined Google/YouTube for alleged COPPA violations in regards to how it collected data on kids. You can read the details of the complaint and proposed settlement (which still needs to be approved by a judge, but that's mostly a formality). For the most part, people responded to this in the same way that they responded to the FTC's big Facebook fine. Basically everyone hates it -- though for potentially different reasons. Most people hate it because they think it's a slap on the wrist, won't stop such practices and just isn't painful enough for YouTube to care. On the flip side, some people hate it because it will force YouTube to change its offerings for no good reason at all and in a manner that might actually lead to more privacy risks and less content for children.

They might all be right. As I wrote about the Facebook fine and other issues related to privacy, almost every attempt to regulate privacy tends to make things worse, in part, because people keep misunderstanding how privacy works. Also, most of the "complaints" about how this "isn't enough," are really not complaints directed at the FTC, but at Congress, because the FTC can only do so much under its current mandate.

Separately, since this fine focused on COPPA violations, I'll separately note that COPPA has always been a ridiculous law that makes no real sense -- beyond letting politicians and bureaucrats pretend they're "protecting the children" -- while really creating massive unintended consequences that do nothing to protect children or privacy, and do quite a bit to make the internet a worse place.

But... I'm not even going to rehash all of that today. Feel free to dig into the past links yourselves. What's interesting to me is something specific to this settlement, as noted by former FCC and Senate staffer (and current Princeton professor), Jonathan Mayer: the FTC, in this decision, appears to have significantly changed its interpretation of COPPA, and done so in a manner that is going to set up something of a clash with Section 230. What happened is a little bit subtle, so it requires some background.

The key feature of COPPA -- and the one you're probably aware of whether or not you know it -- is that it has specific rules if a site is targeting children under the age of 13. This is why tons of sites say that you need to be over 13 to use them (including us) -- in an attempt to avoid dealing with many of the more insane parts of COPPA compliance. Of course, in practice, this just means that many people lie. Indeed, as danah boyd famously wrote nearly a decade ago, COPPA seems to be training parents to help their kids lie online -- which is kinda dumb.

Of course, the key point under COPPA is not actually the "under 13" users, but rather whether or not a website or online service is "directed to children under 13 years of age." Indeed, in talking about it with various lawyers, we've been told that most sites (including our own) shouldn't even worry about COPPA because it's obvious that such sites aren't "directed to children" as a whole and therefore even if a few kids sneak in, they still wouldn't be violating COPPA. In other words, the way the world has mostly interpreted COPPA is that it's not about how whether any particular piece or pieces of content are aimed at children -- but whether the larger site itself is aimed at children.

This new FTC settlement agreement changes that.

Basically, the FTC has decided that, under COPPA, it no longer needs to view the service as a whole, but can divide it up into discrete chunks, and determine if any of those chunks are targeted at kids. To be fair, this is well within the law. The text of COPPA clearly says in definitional section (10)(A)(ii) that "a website or online service directed to children" includes "that portion of a commercial website or online service that is targeted to children." It's just that, historically, most of the focus has been on the overall website -- or something that is more distinctly a "portion" rather than an individual user's channel.

Except, that under the law, it seems that it should be the channel operator who is held liable for violations of COPPA under that channel, rather than the larger platform. In fact, back in 2013, the last time the FTC announced rules around COPPA it appears to have explicitly stated, that it would apply COPPA to the specific content provider who was directed at children and not at the general platform they used. This text is directly from that FTC rule, which went through years of public review and comment before being agreed upon:

... the Commission never intended the language describing ‘‘on whose behalf’’ to encompass platforms, such as Google Play or the App Store, when such stores merely offer the public access to someone else’s child-directed content. In these instances, the Commission meant the language to cover only those entities that designed and controlled the content...

But that's not what the FTC is doing here. And so it appears that the FTC is changing the definition of things, but without the required comment and rulemaking process. Here, the FTC admits that channels are "operators" but then does a bit of a two-step to say that it's YouTube who is liable.

YouTube hosts numerous channels that are “directed to children” under the COPPA Rule. Pursuant to Section 312.2 of the COPPA Rule, the determination of whether a website or online service is directed to children depends on factors such as the subject matter, visual content, language, and use of animated characters or child-oriented activities and incentives. An assessment of these factors demonstrates that numerous channels on YouTube have content directed to children under the age of 13, including those described below in Paragraphs 29-40. Many of these channels self-identify as being for children as they specifically state, for example in the “About” section of their YouTube channel webpage or in communications with Defendants, that they are intended for children. In addition, many of the channels include other indicia of child-directed content, such as the use of animated characters and/or depictions of children playing with toys and engaging in other child-oriented activities. Moreover, Defendants’ automated system selected content from each of the channels described in Paragraphs 29-40 to appear in YouTube Kids, and in many cases, Defendants manually curated content from these channels to feature on the YouTube Kids home canvas.

Indeed, part of the evidence that the FTC relies on is the fact that YouTube "rates" certain channels for kids.

In addition to marketing YouTube as a top destination for kids, Defendants have a content rating system that categorizes content into age groups and includes categories for children under 13 years old. In order to align with content policies for advertising, Defendants rate all videos uploaded to YouTube, as well as the channels as a whole. Defendants assign each channel and video a rating of Y (generally intended for ages 0-7); G (intended for any age); PG (generally intended for ages 10+); Teen (generally intended for ages 13+); MA (generally intended for ages 16+); and X (generally intended for ages 18+). Defendants assign these ratings through both automated and manual review. Previously, Defendants also used a classification for certain videos shown on YouTube as “Made for Kids.”

That's a key point that the FTC uses to argue that YouTube knows that its site is "directed at" children. But here's the problem with that. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, specifically the often forgotten (or ignored) (c)(2) is explicit that no provider shall be held liable for any moderation actions, including "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable." One way to do that is... through content labeling policies, such as those that YouTube used and described by the FTC.

So here, YouTube is being found partially liable because of its content ratings, which is being shown as evidence that it's covered by COPPA. But, CDA 230 makes it clear that there can't be any such liability from such a rating system.

This won't get challenged in court (here) since Google/YouTube have agreed to settle, but it certainly does present a big potential future battle. And, frankly, given the way that some courts have been willing to twist and bend CDA 230 lately, combined with the general "for the children!" rhetoric, I have very little confidence that CDA 230 would win.

Filed Under: cda 230, coppa, ftc, moderation, privacy, section 230
Companies: google, youtube

NY Times Joins Lots Of Other Media Sites In Totally And Completely Misrepresenting Section 230

from the seriously,-guys? dept

So, about a week ago, the NY Times properly mocked politicians for totally misrepresenting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This week it needs to mock itself. Reporter Daisuke Wakabayashi wrote a piece provocatively titled (at least as it was originally published) Why Hate Speech On The Internet Is A Never Ending-Problem, with a subhead saying: "Because this law shields it." And in case you believed it might be talking about some other law, between the head and the subhead it showed part of the text of Section 230 (technically, it showed Section (c)(1)).

If you want to see how badly the NY Times botched this, just check out the current headline on the piece. It's pretty different. Now it says: "Legal Shield for Websites Rattles Under Onslaught of Hate Speech." Even that's... not great. Also, the NY Times added the following whopper of a correction notice:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the law that protects hate speech on the internet. The First Amendment, not Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, protects it.

Yeah. So that's kind of a big deal. The original version blamed Section 230 -- a bill currently under attack from both sides of the aisle -- for somehow being the root cause of hate speech online, saying it's what "protected" it. And now the article admits in the fine print that, oh, whoops, actually it's that old 1st Amendment that protects it. Kind of a big difference, and one that completely undermines the entire point and thrust of the original article. That's a pretty massive fuck up

Of course, it's not entirely clear who is to blame here. Editors, not reporters, tend to write the headlines, so it's very likely that the incorrect headline came from the editorial team at the NY Times, and not Wakabayashi himself. After all, the article itself suggested that he had done some research on the matter, including speaking to Section 230 expert Jeff Kosseff, who spends much of his time these days debunking myths about 230. It also notes the actual history of Section 230, and how it was designed in order to encourage content moderation, not block it. Of course, you would not get that from that original headline, which suggested something very, very different.

Law professor and the UN's expert on free speech, David Kaye, wrote an excellent piece in response to the NY Times piece detailing not just the problems with that original headline, but some other important points regarding the idea that Section 230 is somehow responsible for hate speech:

But that headline… Does hate speech persist online because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act “shields it”? I’m sorry, Times readers; if you were looking for an easy fix to online hate, this isn’t it.

From there he goes on to list four important questions anyone looking to regulate "hate speech" online needs to answer. You can read his entire piece for explanations of each question, but I'll just list them out there:

• First, what is “hate speech”?
• Second, who should regulate it? Who decides?
• Third, should there be a global standard and global enforcement?
• Fourth, and finally, what to do about Trump and other public officials who trade in hateful content?

Too often people get stopped at that first one, with some sort of "well, it's obvious" kind of response. And that would be great if that were so, but it's not. And when you combine the first and second questions, we've noticed quite a pattern, in that when governments get to define hate speech, they quite frequently use it to target critics, the marginalized, and the powerless. I mean, it's not like we have a ton of articles showing just that.

And, given that Kaye's final question is what to do about Trump and other public officials, a related "5th" question might be why would you want a government led by someone like Trump, who has shown a propensity to ratchet up tensions and hate, deciding what counts as hate speech? Because he (and his supporters) certainly would argue that nothing he says should count as hate speech. To them it's either everyone else "misinterpreting" him, or it's a joke. Or, I guess, sometimes they'll just lie and claim "fake news."

But there's a bigger point here. Taking away Section 230 certainly doesn't do anything to stop hate speech online. Making platforms liable for content could very likely increase that kind of speech online for a variety of reasons. First of all, as noted, at least in the US, it's protected by the 1st Amendment. And some of the proposals to modify Section 230 are premised on the idea that platforms need to leave up all speech that is protected under the 1st Amendment. That would certainly lead to much more of the kind of speech that the NY Times is apparently concerned about.

Other proposals try to put some sort of "knowledge" standard on the speech. And, in such cases, you go back to a standard where platforms are encouraged to just look the other way and deliberately blind themselves to avoid having any kind of "knowledge." It's hard to see how that makes any sense at all.

The whole point of Section 230 -- which the NY Times of all papers should understand -- is that it created an important balance to try to enable the most "good" speech possible, while limiting the most "bad" speech. And it did so in a very clever way -- by letting the various internet platforms decide how best to meet that balance, rather than by dictating what is and what is not "good" and "bad" speech. Different platforms can and do create their own standards. That has been incredibly valuable not just for free speech online, and not just for innovation on the internet, but also in allowing for widespread experimentation with platform moderation.

It's too bad that rather than educate its readership about all of that, the NY Times decided to jump on the misleading (and simply incorrect) bandwagon claiming that 230 is somehow to "blame" for bad stuff online.

Filed Under: free speech, moderation, new york times, section 230, social media

Gizmodo: Why Can't YouTube Do 'Good' Content Moderation? Answer: Because It's Fucking Impossible

from the super-fucking-impossible dept

We've had something of a long-running series of posts on the topic of content moderation, with our stance generally being that any attempt to do this at scale is laughably difficult. Like, to the point of being functionally impossible. This becomes all the more difficult when the content in question is not universally considered objectionable.

Tech firms tend to find themselves in the most trouble when they try to bow to this demand for content moderation, rather than simply declaring it to be impossible and moving on. The largest platforms have found themselves in this mess, namely Facebook and YouTube. YouTube, for instance, has released new moderation policies over the past two months or so that seek to give it broad powers to eliminate content that it deems to be hate speech, or speech centered on demographic supremacy. Wanting to eliminate that sort of thing is understandable, even if you still think it's problematic. Actually eliminating it at scale, and in a way that doesn't sweep up collateral damage and garners wide support, is impossible.

Which makes it frustrating to read headlines such as Gizmodo's recent piece on how YouTube is doing with all of this.

YouTube Said It Was Getting Serious About Hate Speech. Why Is It Still Full of Extremists?

Because it's fucking impossible, that's why. There is simply no world in which YouTube both successfully eliminates all, or even the majority, of speech that some large group or another considers hate speech or "extreme." That's never going to happen. YouTube never should have suggested it would happen. The screw up here is YouTube not properly setting the public's expectations as to what its policy would achieve. Yeah, there is still a good deal of extremist content on YouTube. Whipping up anger at content that's available at this moment is trivially easy.

Making it more frustrating is Gizmodo's assertion, with a sinister connotation, that all of this is "part of YouTube's plan."

Strangely, this isn’t a simple oversight by YouTube’s parent company, Google. In fact, it’s the policy working as planned. YouTube hosts more than 23 million channels, making it impossible to identify each and every one that is involved with the hate movement—especially since one person’s unacceptable hate speech is another person’s reasonable argument. With that in mind, we used lists of organizations promoting hate from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Hope Not Hate, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, and the Counter Extremism Project, in addition to channels recommended on the white supremacist forum Stormfront, to create a compendium of 226 extremist YouTube channels earlier this year.

While less than scientific (and suffering from a definite selection bias), this list of channels provided a hazy window to watch what YouTube’s promises to counteract hate looked like in practice. And since June 5th, just 31 channels from our list of more than 200 have been terminated for hate speech. (Eight others were either banned before this date or went offline for unspecified reasons.)

Before publishing this story, we shared our list with Google, which told us almost 60 percent of the channels on it have had at least one video removed, with more than 3,000 individual videos removed from them in total. The company also emphasized it was still ramping up enforcement. These numbers, however, suggest YouTube is aware of many of the hate speech issues concerning the remaining 187 channels—and has allowed them to stay active.

I would suggest that these numbers actually likely represent YouTube blocking too much content, rather than not enough. In a politically divided country like ours getting some significant number of people to state that even a relatively innocuous video is "extreme" would be pretty easy. Add to that fact that the selection bias mentioned above is way understated in this article, and the problem deepens. Layer on top of that the simple fact that some of the sources for this list of "extremist" content -- namely the SPLC -- have been caught quite recently being rather cavalier about the labels they throw around, and this whole experiment begins to look bunk.

Making Gizmodo's analysis all the worse is that it seems to complain that YouTube is only policing the content that appears on its platform, rather than banning all content from uploaders who take nefarious actions off of YouTube's platform.

To understand why these channels continue to operate, it’s important to know how YouTube polices its platform. YouTube’s enforcement actions are largely confined to what happens directly on its website. There are some exceptions—like when a channel’s content is connected to outside criminality—but YouTube generally doesn’t consider the external behavior of a group or individual behind an account. It just determines whether a specific video violated a specific policy.

Heidi Beirich, who runs the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, charges that YouTube’s approach puts it far behind peers like Facebook, which takes a more holistic view of who is allowed to post on its site, prohibiting hate groups and their leaders from using the social network.

“Because YouTube only deals with the content posted, it allows serious white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke to keep content up,” Beirich said. “In general, our feeling is that YouTube has got to get serious about removing radicalizing materials given the impact these videos can have on young, white men.”

It's an insane request. Because a person or group says some things that are obviously objectionable, we want their voices silenced on YouTube, even when the content there isn't objectionable? That's fairly antithetical to how our country operates. YouTube is of course not governed by the First Amendment and can take down whatever content it chooses, but the concept of free speech and the free exchange of ideas in America is much more global as an ideal than the specific prescriptions outlined in the Constitution. Silencing all potential speech from a party simply because some of that speech is objectionable is quite plainly un-American.

Gizmodo then complains about the inconsistencies in enforcing this impossible policy.

The apparent inconsistencies go on: The channel of South African neo-Nazigroup AWB was terminated. Two others dedicated to violent Greek neo-Naziparty Golden Dawn remain active. The channel of white nationalist group American Identity Movement, famous for distributing fliers on college campuses, is still up. As is a channel for the white nationalist group VDARE. And, notably, none of the 33 channels on our list run by organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as anti-LGBTQ hate groups have been removed from the platform.

In addition to giving many hateful channels a pass, this agnosticism to uploaders’ motives means that some channels with no interest in promoting white supremacy have been punished as YouTube enforces its policies.

Unlike what Gizmodo -- and even YouTube -- says, this is a bug, not a feature. We cannot say this enough: there is no good way to do this. Frankly, save for criminal content, YouTube probably shouldn't even be trying. Alternatively, if it does want to try, it probably would be more satisfying if YouTube's public stance was something like: "We'll block whatever we want, because we're allowed to. If those blocks don't seem to make sense to you, deal with it." At least that would set the proper expectations with the public.

And then maybe there would be less consternation as to why YouTube hasn't yet achieved the impossible. Impossible, in this case, being both doing content moderation at scale and simultaneously making everybody happy.

Filed Under: moderation, social media
Companies: youtube

UK Lobbyist's Long-Running Astroturf Efforts Shows Facebook Will Never Be Able To Stop Fake News, Ban All Conservatives

from the Facebook-shows-users-the-radar,-provides-low-altitude-flying-tools dept

For all the talk about social media platforms and their supposed anti-conservative bias, it seems like plenty of conservatives are doing just fine. Once you eliminate a short list of fringe grifters and Nazi fans, you're left with plenty of big name conservatives who still enjoy the use of multiple platforms. Even Dennis Prager of PragerU is struggling to make a federal case of YouTube's moderation of a small percentage of his videos; asking the court to ignore the forest of views for a few pruned trees.

Moderation at scale is hard and every new wrinkle demanded by politicians and activists results in another string of failures. Jim Waterson of The Guardian digs in deep into the details of another Facebook moderation failure -- one that allowed newly-minted Prime Minister Boris Johnson's lobbying buddy to skirt rules meant to inform users about paid political campaigning efforts.

The news follows the Guardian’s April report that Crosby’s company was behind a series of hugely influential pro-Brexit Facebook groups, which spent as much as £1m seeding the idea of a no-deal exit from the EU in the minds of the British public.

But the latest revelations reveal that the company has pursued that approach more broadly, in the service of previously unreported corporate interests and foreign governments.

And they expose a major flaw in Facebook’s political transparency tools, which make it possible for Crosby’s company – which boasts on its website that it deploys “the latest tools in digital engagement” – to use the social network to run professional-looking “news” pages reaching tens of millions of people on highly contentious topics, without apparently disclosing that they are being overseen by CTF Partners on behalf of paying clients.

The loophole CTF used to engage in multiple astroturfing campaigns isn't really a loophole. It's part of the design. That it was used in this fashion makes it appear to be a loophole, but when the business is engagement, it only makes sense to allow businesses to run multiple pages from a single account.

The minimal reporting requirements on campaign pages only requires a public face for pages -- one person who can be viewed as the entity behind the content. Business manager pages don't even require this. The astroturf campaigns originated from a business manager account. Most of the pages posted legitimate news articles, making them appear to be purely concerned with spreading information. Behind the scenes, CTF was gathering data on views, reactions, and sharing, figuring out which hot buttons to start pushing once the objective facade was dropped.

The Guardian's reporting has resulted in many of these pages being memory-holed by CTF. Even so, Facebook's view on the coordinated astroturf campaigns is that they did not violate Facebook's terms of use, or even its new focus on disrupting the flow of "fake news."

[Facebook] said the network of pages pretending to be news sources on behalf of corporate and state clients did not break their rules on “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, a term used to shut down disinformation networks overseen by foreign governments in Russia and Iran. This is because Crosby’s employees used their real names on internal Facebook administration tools – information that is not available to the general public.

Real names make everything OK. So, it's not even a loophole. It's just the way the ecosystem works. In Facebook's case, everything on the backend looked fine, as did the facade-building on the front end. When the facade was torn off by this investigation, Facebook's response isn't so much defensive as it is "this is how our platform works." That everything working correctly meant the construction and deployment of coordinated disinformation is indicative of the limitations of moderation, not necessarily Facebook's tacit endorsement of fully utilizing the tools it provides to businesses.

But that's how Facebook users end up viewing pages purporting to provide news about the war in Yemen that are run by UK lobbyists on behalf of their Saudi government patrons. And that's how persecuted conservative-adjacent entities continue to flourish, despite their protestations otherwise. The sad truth is at-scale moderation will never work well enough to banish one end of the political spectrum. It can't even limit the stuff it's supposed to be limiting at this point. And that's after several years and millions of dollars.

Filed Under: boris johnson, censorship, free speech, moderation, social media, uk
Companies: facebook

Gab, Mastodon And The Challenges Of Content Moderation On A More Distributed Social Network

from the experimentation-through-federation dept

While so many of the discussions and debates about content moderation focus on a few giant platforms -- namely Facebook, YouTube and Twitter -- it's fascinating to see how they play out in other arenas. Indeed, one of the reasons why we're so concerned about efforts to "regulate" content moderation practices on social media is that focusing on the manner in which those big, centralized platforms work could serve to stifle newer, more innovative platforms, whose very set up may inherently deal with the "problems" in the first place (see my protocols, not platforms discussion for one example).

There are a few interesting platforms out there trying to take a different approach to nearly everything -- and one of the more well known is Mastodon, an open source "federated" system that is sort of somewhat like Twitter. If you somehow have missed the Mastodon boat, I'd recommend the long piece Sarah Jeong wrote about it two years ago, which is a pretty good intro to the topic. The really short version, though, is that anyone can set up their own Mastodon community and, if others so choose, they may "federate" with other Mastodon communities. You could build a Mastodon instance that is totally isolated from others, or you could build one that connects to others and allows "toots" to go from one instance of Mastodon to others. And, of course, the federating can change over time. It's kind of neat in that it allows for multiple communities, who can set different rules, norms and standards, and thus you get much more widespread experimentation. And, unlike a fully centralized system, like Twitter, the ability for different instances to just "go there own way" if they disagree, allows for much greater flexibility, without a centralized content moderation impossibility.

I'm still more interested in much more fully decentralized protocol-based systems, but a federated system like Mastodon, that allows for a distributed set of mini-centralized instances that can join together or separate as needed, is still pretty fascinating.

However, it got more fascinating and interesting earlier this month when the social network Gab moved to Mastodon. If you haven't followed this space at all, Gab likes to call itself the "free speech alternative" to Twitter, but in practice that has meant that it's the place that many trolls, racists and other general assholes have gathered after being kicked off of Twitter. Gab announced, back in May, that it was planning to shift its platform to Mastodon, setting up its own instance. In theory, this solved some "problems" that Gab had been facing -- starting with the fact that Apple and Google had removed Gab's mobile app from their app stores (something Gab sued over, in a strategy that was not very successful). Since there are a bunch of Mastodon apps that allow users to log into any particular Mastodon instance, Gab itself made it clear that this was a key reason for the move:

Of course, building on top of someone else's better tested open source code probably also helps Gab with the long list of technical issues the site was having. And then there's the pure troll factor. Besides harboring social media trolls, Gab, as a company has always sort of gleefully taken on a trollish roll in the way it works as a company as well. And, considering that part of the very reason that Mastodon's creator, Eugen "Gargron" Rochko, set up Mastodon in the first place was to build an alternative to Twitter that was free of Nazis, assholes and trolls... it was a truly trollish move to jump onto that platform and at least imply to many a plan to "invade" (or, perhaps we should say brigading) the wider "fediverse" of Mastodon.

The switch over happened earlier this month and it's been fascinating to watch how it's all played out. The shortest summary might be that the federated model has shown to be somewhat resilient so far. Mastodon itself put out a statement urging various Mastodon instances not to federate with Gab and also suggesting that the various Mastdodon app developers choose to blacklist Gab's domains from their apps (meaning that Gab's plan to use this to get back into the app store might not work as well as planned).

The Verge has a long, in-depth article about how all of this is playing out, and it seems like, as a federated system is designed to do, different parts of the system are experimenting and figuring out what makes sense. Most of the other instances have decided they don't want to federate with Gab.

If you join a major Mastodon instance right now, chances are you won’t be connected to Gab. “All the admins that I know, that I interact with myself, have already blocked Gab,” says Rochko — including Mastodon.Social. “Essentially, they’re isolated.”

As for the various app makers, they're figuring out what they want to do:

This has turned app access into a battlefield. Developers can lock Gab out by disabling login options to the instance or completely blocking content from its servers. And several have done just that. Mastodon lists six major mobile apps on its homepage. Four of them — the Android client Tusky and the iOS apps Toot!, Mast, and Amaroq — block Gab in some fashion.

Amaroq developer John Gabelmann banned Gab to avoid potential problems with the App Store. “My core objective is to keep Amaroq publicly available and to abide by all Apple policies, which keep unmoderated extremist/hateful content off the store,” he tells The Verge. “If your network is large enough and unmoderated enough to get the negative attention of Apple, Amaroq will follow Apple’s policies.”

Mast’s creator Shihab Mehboob, by contrast, blocked Gab after users requested it. He’s gotten one-star reviews from angry Gab users, but “if hate speech is masquerading as free speech on an app I’ve built, it’s upon myself to somehow moderate that and reduce it where possible,” he says. “I understand that the Fediverse is intended to be open and entirely at the user’s discretion as to what they want to see/use/partake in, but that shouldn’t cover Nazi-based ideologies. There has to be a line drawn somewhere.”

Other app developers maintain that this blocking doesn’t fit Mastodon’s mission. The Android-based Fedilab app’s free version initially blocked Gab because of Play Store content policy fears. But the ban has since been lifted. “I will simply not block instances with the app,” wrote Fedilab’s developer. “I clearly think that’s not my role … If you want a strong block, it’s in the hands of social network developers or your admins.”

And the developer of Subway Tooter, who goes by Tateisu, is skeptical that stores will censure apps for supporting Gab. “They can run their web app on a web browser,” Tateisu points out. “If Google wants to ban it, they should start from their Chrome web browser.”

This is all quite interesting. It's also the kind of experimentation and more distributed decision-making we'd like to see more of online. This is not a truly distributed system where the power is moved all the way out to the ends, but it is a federated system where the power is moved to various nodes -- leading to more competition and variety. The fact that most of the major Mastodon instances have said they don't want to federate or deal with Gab is an expression of preferences, and in many ways a better overall system than one in which a single company is making the decisions. And it's much better than politicians telling companies what they need to do. Of course, in a world without Section 230 -- or one with a nonsensical requirement for "neutrality" in platform moderation -- would these options even be available?

Filed Under: content moderation, distributed systems, federation, mastodon, moderation, platforms, protocols, social media
Companies: apple, gab, google, mastodon, twitter