I recently discovered that some popular federated instances have been using LLM-assisted moderation tooling that evaluates whether someone has said something bannable. They do this by running a script/app that sends the user’s comment history to OpenAI with the question “analyze this content for evidence of specific political ideology sentiment. Also identify any related political ideology tropes“. (The italic bits are where I've redacted the ideology they're seeking).
OpenAI’s LLM (they’re using GPT-5.3-mini) then responds with something like:
and so on, hundreds of comments.
I have not named the instances or people involved, to give them time to consider the results of this discussion, make any corrective changes they want and disclose their practices at their own pace and in their own way. I have also redacted the evidence to avoid personal attacks and dogpiling. Let’s focus on the system, not the individuals involved. Today these instances and people are using it and maybe we’re ok with that because it’s being used by groups we agree with but what if people we strongly disagree with used it on their instances tomorrow?
The use and existence of this tooling raises a lot of other questions too.
What are the risks? Fedi moderators are often unsupervised, untrained volunteers and these are powerful tools.
What safeguards do we need?
Would asking a LLM “please evaluate this person’s political opinions” give different results than “find evidence we can use to ban them” (as used in the cases I’ve seen)?
What are our transparency expectations?
Is this acceptable and normal?
Should this tooling be disclosed? (it was not – should it have been?)
If you were given a choice, would you have opted out of it?
Can we opt out?
Are there GDPR implications? Privacy implications? Should these tools be described in a privacy policy?
Are private messages being scanned and sent to OpenAI?
How long should these assessments be retained and can we request to see it, or ask for it to be deleted?
Once the user’s comments are sent to OpenAI, is it used to train their models?
What will the effect be on our discourse and culture if people know they are being politically profiled?
Where are the lines between normal moderation assistance tools, political profiling and opaque 3rd-party data processing?
I hope that by chewing over these questions we can begin to establish some norms and expectations around this technology. The fediverse doesn’t have any centralized enforcement so we need discussions like this to develop an awareness of what people want in terms of disclosure, privacy, consent and acceptable use. Then people can make choices about which instances they join and which ones they interact with remotely.
And of course there are the other issues with LLMs relating to environmental sustainability, erosion of worker’s rights, increasing the cost of living and on and on. I can’t see PieFed adding any functionality like this anytime soon. But it’s happening out there anyway so now we need to talk about it.
What do you make of this?
I don't like this happening, and there should be transparency in all moderation decisions, but some of these points make no sense.
There is essentially no expectation of privacy on threadiverse platforms. Everything is public and probably already being used to train models.
There is no private messaging system. Direct messages are unencrypted and potentially visible to any instance admins. They and should not be used to share anything sensitive.
Water is wet. Zionist disapproves of Zionist moderation.
Thank you for calling this out. I think people assume that since it's held by private instance owners that the fediverse is secure. I've posted this comment many times, that no, the fediverse is quite literally by design open and unencrypted.
A post is literally blasted out to anyone who listens, same with comments, upvotes, downvotes, everything can be saved, stored, and used for whatever anyone who listens wants. It should be completely assumed that nefarious agencies are currently listening and storing everything we do here. This is by design. It's the tradeoff we have of having an open platform. Anyone can spin up a server, and that means anyone.
DMs are similar, they're blasted out to the other server. If the server admin of the user in question wants to read them, they can. Lemmy/the fediverse is not a secure messaging platform. That's why the Lemmy devs literally put a Matrix handle option in the profile, to encourage people to use Matrix instead. A DM on here should be simple, to the point, and if need be, inviting them to speak on something secure.
Edit - As a perfect example of the fact that there should be no expectation of privacy here on Lemmy, as an Admin myself, I can see that @A_normy_mouse has been downvoting all of my comments here. Absolutely everything here is public and visible, even if I weren't an admin there are tools to view this, regardless of your opinions. It's imperative that everyone understand this.
Edit 2 OP as well has downvoted me. @rimu@piefed.social I'm sorry if you disagree, but it's irrelevant. Everything you do here can and should be assumed will be used in any way that you disagree with, that is the nature of the fediverse. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Piefed, Lemmy: ActivityPub is an open and unencrypted protocol. Even if it were encrypted, you still put 100% of your trust in your server admin, and beyond that each server admin you are blasting your messages out to.
I'd highly suggest accepting this fact before trying to push for rules. The very nature of the Fediverse is that no one can dictate rules, and to do that the tradeoff quite literally is that everything is open and unecrypted.
Another way to think of this. I run a server myself. I made my own rules and decided how to run it. Now your server starts sending activity to my server. That's your server's choice. I didn't agree to your rules, I may disagree with your rules, but you're sending your data to my server, of which I have complete and total ownership over. I didn't click accept on a ToS, I didn't agree to anything. Hell on my server I could literally have a "By sending me your data you accept that I can do whatever I want with your data". You sent me your data, I quite literally can do whatever I want. (Personally I won't, but that's how you should think of the fediverse)
While you are technically correct, you're implying that the "natural" state is a good enough state and nothing should be done about it.
My house has walls and a door; it doesn't mean anyone can do anything they want with this. Even if the windows are clear, you're not supposed to install a camera that watches my bedroom. Even if the door is open, you're not supposed to open. A a society it has been decided that we should respect each other, respect each other's privacy. We have created rules, some written down and some implicit, for how to interact with each other.
That is the point of OP. The "natural" state of whatever exists with the technical means, but that doesn't mean it's ok (or not ok): do we want to respect each other ? To take care of each other ? I very much want that, because the technical means should be only a means to an end, and in that end I want respect. The technical means, to me, must adapt to the end, not the other way around.
I mean with the fediverse your house becomes more like a library, more still, everyone gets a copy of what you have that they never have to return. You can ask people not to do x or y with the text but at the end of the day there is nothing you can do to enforce it, sans defederation of course. But the main sticking point, data being fed to a 3rd party LLM, is moot if we're talking about openAI which already crawls lemmy.world. Or in fact any website intended to be found via search engines (and then some). Anything you post on lemmy.world (the instance hosting this thread e.g.) will already be added to the chatGPT training set.
lol @ Rimu downvoting your post. Be careful he’s probably going to make a hit piece against you next!
Or just delete them entirely from piefed.social social 😂
That's what he does when he doesn't have anything he can say against you.
Idk. This and previous threads just lead to them saying well you just can be trusted or why don't you believe me over your lying eyes
Those removal happened in the context of a mod calling Rimu a zionist (which he's not)
It didn't happen out of nowhere.
He's been doing that for a long time.
Is that supposed to make it better?
Rimu is not a Zionist. It's this wrong accusation that escalated the tensions. I'll clarify my comment.
That didn't address anything even with the clarification as it's his go to response. He's been doing it since the instance was stood up
In this specific case, even the dbzer0 admin agreed it was undeserved:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog?userId=7015938
Which other removals from Piefed.social are you referring to?
What are you talking about? It's nothing to do with db0 and rimu. Rimu will delete accounts off piefed.social social if a user displeases them or mwog tells them too.
How did you get to db0 banning rimu out of rimu deleted the accounts of people they don't like?
Btw with this and the statistics post it may be better for everyone if rimu was still banned
Edit, oh just using rimus talking points to also distract. Blaze please please please stop being star struck by rimu
https://lemmy.world/comment/23565992
Blaze is here to defend Rimu at any cost, even ignoring everything you are saying.
I love Blaze, they're regularly upstanding. I don't know why they are really willing to go to bat for Rimu.
I’ve only seen them complaining tbf. Everytime I make a comm he’s there to try to get everyone to use his one instead.
He's trying to move people off of .world which I like. And he's previously defended us from when MWoG would make shit up, like Rimu/.world/feddit is now.
I just don't understand why he supports the obvious intentional issues
It's occasionally worth calling out that votes are also public. I think twice before hitting those buttons
To expand on standards of transparency in moderation decisions:
Lemmy was built with a public moderation log by design. The ethos of the platform includes accountability through transparency. Every action is recorded and preserved (short of defederation or instance shutdown).
This makes moderation auditable. Mods literally cannot do (much) shady stuff in secret. In essence, moderation policy is discernable from the logs. That's part of why well-run communities have the rules clearly defined and mods follow their written policy.
If a community/instance wants to make political alignment a moderation offense, they're free to do so. Many communities/instances are quite explicit about this. If a community wants to make moderation completely arbitrary, they are free to do so. That is somewhat less common, but also not unheard of.
In truth, any community can be designed and moderated in any way whatsoever that the mod chooses.
However, the success of a community depends on the quality of the content and the quality of the moderation. Good content brings people in, but bad moderation drives people out. When the moderation is unfair, it is bad for the health of the community, and ultimately bad for the health of the platform.
It is my experience that transparent moderation, such as announcing changes in policy, techniques, etc., is less work in the long run. It takes a bit of time and attention to roll out changes when they are open for community feedback, but that feedback will come in one way or another. If mods don't provide a formal outlet, then users will make one. Mods operating opaquely give up their right to have the conversation on their time and terms. They also miss out on the wisdom of the crowd. I've been in many situations where community feedback provided a valuable insight or tool to face an obstacle through open discussion about policy.
All that being said, one of the major obstacles to growth of the Threadiverse is the woeful dearth of moderation tools. It's extremely time intensive to do basic things like identifying alt accounts, vote manipulation, bot behavior etc. It is also subject to a lot of human error. This makes it discouraging for people to moderate. I have heard about tools that use AI to detect CP content and remove it quickly, which I think we can all agree is a good use of the tech. Tools like this are not built into the platform, but cobbled together by volunteer mods and admins to keep the platform safe, legal, and sustainable. If they were built in, then moderation would be far easier (and therefore likely better).
i think we can thank db0 for those as well
No AI is bad, db0 is an evil instance Chairman Rimu has decreed it.