Fediverse Trust and Safety: Supporting Moderation at Scale

Convener: @jaz@toot.wales Jaz-Michael King / IFTAS

Participants (add yourself here if you want to be listed, no obligation): Name and Fediverse handle

• Jayne Samuel-Walker (@TCMuffin@toot.wales)
• Laurens Hof (@laurenshof@calckey.social)

Today’s slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11417wmhW2xWZ7Le0Aw0NCgbGdZ_qOGnlfH6jZUmR-Us - some disturbing content (slide 3)

Interactive brainstorming: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lpDYcwZUOdGmJx7nG5CIWP8YR-rvC3KB3RmmzYhelsA/:

• Three anticipated areas of activity - add your thoughts and ideas inline or using comments:

  • Community of Practice

    • Convene, support, and grow the moderator community
    • Provide communication tools (chat, discussion, wiki) to form a body of knowledge
    • Create a sliding-scale membership approach
    • Collect and disseminate academic research, best practice

  • Moderation-as-a-service

    • Provide actionable content and resources, and UGC moderation at scale; from single event to full time moderation
    • Build sustainable pathways to compensating T&S practitioners in Fediverse
    • Convene protocol, platform and dev community to build federated T&S toolsets

  • Collective representation for:

    • Data privacy bodies
    • Insurers
    • Group memberships

• Advisory Board / Working Groups

  • Best Practices

    • Equity/marginalised/disadvantaged/minority voices
    • Civil society/community management
    • Hate Speech/Dangerous Speech
    • Spam
    • CSEA/CSAM
    • Disinfo/misinfo
    • Terrorism/extremism/criminal activity

  • Legal/Regulatory/Compliance

  • Protocol/Platform/Federated Moderation Tools

  • Mental Health/Resilience

Key points:

• Since nov22 people people have quickly set up new servers, but not taking moderation needs into account

• fragmentation of codes of conduct leads to uncertainty for members. For example huge diversity approach in generative art: from blanket ban to encouraged

• survey to show what tools mods would use if provided.

• IFTAS is a community driven member organisation with community of practice for moderators

• Recruit, train and pay moderators, IFTAS wants to sell mod servers to all sorts of servers

• Can help with geographical clustering of server users (providing mod service during nighttime for example)

• IFTAS can serve as a front-facing entity for law enforcement, mandatory reporting

• Act as group for purchasing materials/licensing/training

• IFTAS wants to host working groups and shephard it through, but not build software (for example) themselves.

• IFTAS sees itself mainly as a convening body