anonymity and privacy seem to come at odds with a social platform’s ability to moderate content and control spam.

If users have sufficient privacy and anonymity, then they can simply use another identity to come back, or use multiple identities.

Are there ways around this? It seems that any method of ensuring that a banned user is kept off the platform would necessitate the platform knowing information about the user and their identity

  • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlOP
    31·
    1 year ago

    What is even the value of content moderation being a thing by a separate entity (the platform admins or community mods)? Why not just filter content on your own? Why do we like having others choose for us what content we see?

    • tr00st@lemmy.tr00st.co.uk
      7·
      1 year ago

      Two main points personally:

      • with self-moderation, you can’t really say “I don’t want to see this sort of content”, you can only say “I don’t want to see this content again”. A well stated set of rules for a community let’s you know what to expect, so you get to make that choice if advance. This is a massive difference in preventing distress and general unpleasant feelings. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it’s a lot nicer.
      • it avoids massive duplication of effort. If you have a moderator-to-reader ratio of 1000:1, you’ll be saving the vast majority of self moderation with those people would be doing. Yes, reporting exists, but it’s a tiny fraction of the time one would spend “moderating” for yourself
      • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlOP
        2·
        1 year ago

        Great points; thanks! On that, there’s a couple of ways I could see content moderation involving more personal freedom and choice:

        • give users more general types of content. For example “block all content containing ____ racial slur”. Could be made more complex as well, especially with how open source language models are coming along

        • give users the ability to follow another user’s content self-moderation choices. Consequently, a group of users can all be part of a group where, if one user flags content or type of content, it applies to others. The niceness of this is that it would be extremely fluid and you can opt out with a button.

        This could lead to better moderation in my opinion, and less disconnect between moderators and users.

        Does not solve the anonymity issue, but that’s for another comment.