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?
If it can be done, it sooner or later will be done.
That's a lot of why I have a couple of dozen accounts scattered around the threadiverse and new ones whenever I come across a server that looks promising - because it takes a while to get used to one and get a feel for whether it's one I like or not, and because there's always the possibility that one I like will go sideways and/or shut down, in which case I can just unpin it and go on.
And in fact, I'm only using this account on something of a whim for this post - I don't normally use it because one of the instances I don't like much is yours. And specifically what I don't like about it is you, and your bland presumption that you know what's best for me - which communities I should subscribe to, which posters I should trust or even becallowed to see, which sources I should be allowed to use or see...
And really, I'm sort of surprised that you're the OP here and not the subject. I would think that the whole idea of commissioning a review of a user's posting history in pursuit of grounds to ban them would be right up your alley. Is the problem just that it's AI?
In any event, this is just a thing that might prove to be an issue. And if it does, I'll just move off of the affected server(s) and keep using the unaffected ones. And if enough people share my sentiment and the admin cares enough, they might change their ways. Or they might not. It's not a big deal either way - it's just part of life on the fediverse, and IMO the benefits make it worth it.