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   Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:50 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

   A couple decades ago, Clay Shirky gave a talk which he then published as an essay, "The Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", about how over and over and over again people who develop online social spaces get surprised by things that happened on their online space – thing which had happened previously on OTHER parties' online social spaces, and which those social spaces' governance parties had attempted to warn others about.

   Now, I have a bunch of reservations about specific details in that essay, but he was sure right about how over and over and over again Bad Things happen to social platforms, and the governance parties who lived through them try to warn others, and they're pretty reliably ignored.

   Maybe we could not do that this time?

   🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:44 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     Like I said, I'm not party to Reddit's internal corporate thinking. But I think it's a pretty good educated guess to say: Reddit's decision was not based upon what would optimize Reddit's social functions. When Reddit made this decision, I'm feeling pretty confident it was not a *social engineering* decision. It was not made to make Reddit function better in some social sense. Nobody made this decision thinking, "Actually, reducing the capacity of moderators to do tasks that are part of moderation will actually improve the social reality of Reddit in this particular way."

     At very best, this decision was made to optimize something else in full awareness, "Yes, this will be detrimental to Reddit's social world, but it can't be helped, because of other considerations that outrank quality of social engineering right now."

     But of course, the social effect on Reddit might have been simply dismissed, or discounted.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:45 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     Or put another way, why should our societies tolerate the existence of *irresponsibly* designed and operated social media platforms, that increase violence and other antisocial behavior?

     So it turns out the failure of internet culture to actually have a discourse around what even moderators are supposed to be doing is a literally lethal mistake.

     And this example is merely one wrinkle in the much, much larger conversation about what moderation is, and the diversity of things that it can be, and maybe should be.

     A conversation that has to happen before you can have the conversation that goes, "Okay, of the things that moderation can be, which things do we think it needs to be on our platform, and what do we need to do, in the design of our platform, to bring it into existence and make it work the way we think it should?"

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:45 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     Consider what has unfolded recently with Reddit turning off its API, such that tools its moderators relied on are no longer available to them. Reddit's structure is that it allows anyone to start their own forum and gives them authority to moderate it however – to a first approximation – they see fit. But it doesn't provide the tools necessary – nor, any longer, allow third parties to provide those tools – such that many moderator functions can be performed, so there's a limit to what kinds of moderation can happen there, and how well it can be acquitted. This has literally changed what kinds of conversations and what kinds of forums can happen on Reddit.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:45 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     Now, I'm not party to what's happening inside Reddit. I don't know the logic of their decisions. But I do know a whole lot of very thoughtful Reddit users who have spaces they moderate on Reddit have explained in great detail and length ("Concision is not our brand." - a mod from r/AskHistorians explaining on Twitter about this very thing) what their needs are and why they were objecting to Reddit turning off the API.

     Reddit corporately decided that supporting those affordances was unimportant, or at least less important than something else that conflicted with them.

     Reddit made a design decision that changed the nature of what moderation *could* mean on Reddit. They reduced its scope. That, in turn, changed how moderators could interact with the users they moderated, and that in turn changed how users interacted with one another.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:46 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     • Erin Kissane

     This specific example is on my mind in part because of reading @kissane's article on Facebook's role in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. One of the things it mentions is that Facebook's internal apparatus for what we might call moderation was its "bullying-focused 'Compassion Team'". Like many social media platforms constructed by the sorts of people who construct social media platforms, Facebook construed the problem of moderation being one of preventing or discouraging interpersonal conflict on the platform.

     But the problem unfolding in the Burmese-language parts of Facebook was not people disagreeing with one another or expressing conflict with one another. It was their *agreeing* with one another.

     Agreeing to go kill their neighbors.

     This was not something that was even on Facebook's radar, apparently.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:46 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     This raises some very fundamental and quite interesting questions about what the role of moderation is on a social media platform. Is it the job of a social media platform to prevent people from using it to collaborate to commit crimes?

     Historically, a lot of people who have put together social media platforms have insisted it is absolutely not the job of the platform – or the people who run it – to do that.

     But if it's not the job of the platform to do that, whose job is it, when a platform, by its affordances, makes real world crimes – horrendous, very serious "real-world" crimes like actual genocide – not just more likely, but so much more likely they are effectively enabling a crime that wouldn't otherwise happen?

     Why should our societies – our larger, meat-world societies – tolerate the building and operating of social media platforms that destabilize them and are detrimental to them?

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:47 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     The social media world is filled with people just pulling ideas out of their asses and hoping it all works out.

     Folks who have been around the block a few times in a governance role have started amassing a body of lore. Case studies, observations they made in the trenches.

     At the very least, availing oneself of what they have to share is a good first step.

     But if we were to take this seriously as engineering, well, that suggests a few things, doesn't it?

     It suggests we get a little bit more sciency about this. It suggests we start imposing a little bit of rigor.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:47 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     Engineers tackle well-specified problems, and if the problems they are asked to tackle are not well-specified, they'll either nope out or they'll come up with their own spec.

     It would probably do us good to spec out problems we think we're solving more precisely.

     I cannot tell you how many conversations I have seen about the topic of "moderation" and how necessary it is in which nobody has ever bothered to set down what exactly it is that they think a moderator is supposed to accomplish.

     I mean, it's all of them. I've been on the internet since the 1980s, and I have never seen anyone stop and actually talk about what they thought moderators were trying to do or should try to do.

     That makes it a little tricky to evaluate whether or not moderators are given adequate tools to do their jobs. What with not actually having any agreement or understanding or even specification of what those jobs are.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:48 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     We need to be very conscious that the decisions that are made of how a platform works are decisions that affect how the people who use that platform will interact.

     There should be a kind of intentionality – which is something I think Mastodon is doing way better at than a lot of social media projects – around functionality decisions.

     But that intentionality has to go beyond merely meaning well. Good intentions poorly informed result in bad outcomes that were never intended but are, nevertheless, still bad.

     There is a lot to be said for realizing that decisions for how social media platforms *work* are deliberate attempts to shape – to *engineer* really – human social life on a huge scale. On a scale so huge in fact, that it is not wrong to describe it as trying to *engineer societies*.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:48 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     It's unfortunate that the term "social engineering" has a previous meaning as a slang term among computer programmers for a kind of attack on a system that leverages human frailty as opposed to faults in the software, because this – the design of social media platforms – is truly *social engineering*.

     From where I sit, with a foot in both the technological and the social sciences, it seems really clear to me that there is no general sense that there is such a field as the engineering of online society. Not their underlying technologies, but the use of technological deployment to instantiate social spaces, that bring about certain social realities.

     This is not a thing that is taken seriously. To the contrary, it's treated quite lightly.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:49 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     And I want to point out something else that's probably crucial to learning from past mistakes.

     When we build a social media platform – when we build anything to allow people to interact in the internet – we are doing something very like building a planned city. We are making decisions about the structures through which people will flow and move and rest and encounter one another and interact with one another.

     When architects are designing physical buildings and when urban planners are laying out physical cities, they make decisions about physical structures with the intention of those structures shaping human behavior. People who build amphitheaters are people who want there to be public addresses that many people here, whether political speech or entertaining theater. People who build temples are people who want there to be collective religious worship. People who build roads want there to be travel.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:49 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     Of course architects can choose to build buildings to meet other criteria, besides the effects on the people that interact with them. They can choose to make buildings that support the environment, or save the owners' money, or achieve some political end. They can also build buildings to have social effects not just through their affordances but through aesthetics, such as being beautiful to improve a neighborhood's appearance or to aggrandize an aristocracy.

     But primarily buildings are built to be used, and as such they are tools, and we judge them, as we do all tools, by how fit they are for their purpose, whatever that might be.

     And the purposes of buildings are to afford various ways of people interacting or avoiding interacting.

     So architects think a lot about that. It's a whole thing.

     Those who put together social media platforms need to think about the same sort of thing.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:50 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     [break over, resuming]

     Now, I certainly don't have a proposed one right answer to what a social media platform should be doing to solve all of these ensuing problems, and I certainly hope nobody thought I did.

     But what I do have to propose is a set of attitudes and approaches to building out a social media platform to try to avoid some of the bad outcomes that other platforms have experienced.

     My biggest point here is to simply not have a kind of foolish hubris of thinking that because something hasn't been a problem *so far*, that it's been solved.

     As with so many things, I think it helps enormously to look into the history of previous attempts to get advanced warning of the circumstances one may find oneself in. And, of course in the case of social media, by "may" I mean "almost certainly will".

     There are things that most definitely do not need to be surprises anymore.

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