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?
You stay far, FAR away from that shit, is what you do.
Scanning people's entire history for political leanings, etc? That's some deeply dystopian stuff right there.
It's easy to forget that these sorts of communities are dictatorships with only as much transparency as the owner wants to share. Usually they're benevolent dictators, so we don't think about it too much. But they can change in a heartbeat - and we don't ever really know what they're really thinking, or doing behind the scenes.
When the mask slips and they reveal this sort of thing, thinking we'll just accept it and keep living under their rule, it's time to read the red flags and GET OUT.
Hopefully someone compiles a list of places that do this stuff, so we can avoid them like the plague <3
All of that was already happening, because all Lemmy posts & comments are public.
Yep. It's Cambridge Analytica and Palantir level shit.
Don't give it too much credit. It's Reddit level shit. Current models are so good at providing the kind of reports mods want because Reddit's automated mod tools have been running these assessments on hundreds of thousands of users for years and feeding the results back as training data.
And let's be real, a tool that assesses the public posts of a specific account isn't doing anything different than mods already did. (Not to mention users - how many people, when they get into an online argument with someone, start going through their post history to find something to gotcha them with?). The LLM just does it faster.