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

  • @tr00st
    1•1 year ago

    Those are reasonable options - though I’m pessimistic enough to believe that trolls will get better than every automated system, so we’d probably want some manual options. I wouldn’t say it’s not possible - just would require quite a bit of work, and would likely be an ongoing battle to improve your auto-moderator.

    It feels like I’m moving the goalposts, so apologies, but your response got me thinking further. The other big advantages I can think of for central censorship is that it can actually prevent hosting of content - which has two benefits:

    • legal concerns - make countries will require the removal of some amount of content - extreme stuff of all the usual sorts. Some jurisdictions will also require minors being prevented from accessing certain content, at least to a reasonable degree - refusing to host that kind of content is an easy solution.
    • community unity and protection - is a lot more abstract, age debatable - but I’d contest that central moderation can give a certain “this content isn’t wanted in our community” that individual censorship won’t. Really difficult to define, though.